How ‘Systemic Liberalism’ Failed Public Education in America

Liberalism and its big government underpinnings have become systemic in American culture and institutions, with a profound impact on the nation.

In large part, an increasingly biased media, Hollywood, Big Tech, and academia have driven the left’s rise in prominence.

Freedom of thought, tolerance, and inclusion, once foundational principles of liberalism, have been replaced by social conditioning and disdain for, and suppression of, opposing views.

Public education is a prime example.

Impact of Unionization

In 1916, the American Federation of Teachers was established as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, widely known now as the AFL-CIO. The organization was founded to improve teachers’ wages, pensions, and “academic freedom.”

Similarly, the National Education Association was founded in 1857 as the National Teachers Association. Established primarily to protect teachers’ rights and ensure that members were treated fairly, it changed its name in 1870 after absorbing three smaller organizations.

The NEA also pushes to increase education funding and to discourage merit pay. From a legislative standpoint, the organization is active in reforming laws designed to limit the growth of charter schools and discourage school voucher programs.

The NEA’s stated mission is “to advocate for education professionals and to unite our members and the nation to fulfill the promise of public education to prepare every student to succeed in a diverse and interdependent world.” But critics fault the teachers union for putting the interests of teachers in front of the needs of the students they teach.

In recent years, the National Education Association came under criticism for what some perceive as protecting “bad” teachers and trying to change public perception and beliefs about homosexuality and about “white privilege” and “white fragility” in our communities.

This can be illustrated best by the NEA’s recent support for both The New York Times Magazine’s version of history, called the 1619 Project, and for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Coalitions to Maximize Impact

Over the past several years, systemic liberalism has metastasized throughout the public education system.

By partnering with The New York Times and radical advocacy groups such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the NEA and its liberal positions are indoctrinating our youth.

NEA-endorsed curriculum developed to “inform” and to “challenge students to reframe U.S. history” will condition students to accept and normalize liberal social constructs such as white privilege and institutional racism, as well as slanted and distorted views of American history.

The NEA says it teamed with the Times to distribute copies of the 1619 Project to educators and activists around the country, saying it would “help give us a deeper understanding of ‘systemic racism’ and its impact.”

The 1619 Project—which contends that American history began with the introduction of slavery—was rolled out early this year in school districts in Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and Buffalo, New York.

Local school administrators decided to update K-12 history curricula to include the material, which argues, Reason reported, that “the institution of slavery was so embedded in America’s DNA that the country’s true founding could be said to have occurred in 1619, rather than in 1776.”

However, many historians and other critics question the 1619 Project’s accuracy and the closed process behind it. Others have taken issue with its ideological slant and argued that the content would be better suited for sociology classes than American history.

In recent days, following months of criticism, the Times has deleted some parts of the 1619 Project, including the statement that America’s “true founding” occurred in 1619.

In any case, reinterpreting history to fit a new political and social mantra is destructive to understanding the roots and progress of America, its successes and failures, and the reasoning during the respective time periods that led to specific actions and results.

Otherwise, as we all know, history has a way of repeating itself.

Black Lives Matter Movement

Further illustrating the influence of systemic liberalism in the classroom is integration of the “Black Lives Matter at School” curriculum, including the 1619 Project, into school districts across the United States.

Encouraging young minds to identify and condemn racism, social injustice, and oppression is a noble and righteous pursuit. However, that’s not what’s happening.

At least two of the three Black Lives Matter co-founders are self-proclaimed trained Marxists. Patrisse Cullors, arguably the most visible co-founder, is a vocal anti-Israel and LBGT activist.

Alicia Garza, another BLM co-founder, has praised convicted cop-killer and wanted domestic terrorist Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur. Both Cullors and Garza have spoken unabashedly about how Shakur was a major inspiration for their work.

When one examines Black Lives Matter as an organization, one discovers that it advocates principles that go far beyond simply raising awareness of racism, social injustice, and oppression.

As published on the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s website–until it and related groups made deletions in recent days—the organization’s core beliefs and principles include “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” “ending State-sanctioned violence” against blacks, “liberating” blacks from “systematic targeting,” and “eradicating ‘white supremacy’ forever.”

The BLM organization’s founding ideology and beliefs, particularly its position on disrupting the nuclear family, run contrary to traditional societal norms in America and represent a distorted and slanted view of what’s happening in our country.

By integrating Black Lives Matter’s lesson plans, educational resources, and political activism projects into their curricula, liberal educators lend credibility to one of the most radically divisive movements in our country’s history.

Worse, this approach convinces the easily influenced minds of our children that America is inherently “racist and evil,” with a sordid history of inhumanity. It inspires our youth to rebel against the very ideals that made America an exceptional republic and the most successful and compassionate country in the history of humanity.

Liberal Advocacy, Poor Test Results

Major financial supporters of black-led organizations, such as the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, have invested hundreds of millions to influence public perception and policy related to social and racial inequality in America today and throughout our country’s history.

Through their participation in liberal, ideologically-based movements, teachers in some public school systems indoctrinate our children with Marxist beliefs and distorted views of American history and culture.

While liberal coalitions wage their indoctrination and social-conditioning campaigns on our children, the academic performance of U.S. students continues to decline.

For example, the global test results of the 2019 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA—which evaluates 15-year-olds’ academic performance in reading, math, and science—showed American students lag behind their peers in Europe and East Asia.

The exam results, comparing 600,000 students across 79 countries, placed the U.S. about average in reading (eighth overall) and science (11th), but below average (30th) in math.

The nations that outperformed the United States included China, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland, and Ireland. The U.S. performed about the same as the U.K., Japan, and Australia.

It may be a stretch to say these results represent the culmination of over a half-century of systemic liberalism in our public education system. However, liberal indoctrination certainly isn’t helping to improve reading and math scores, and maybe schools should focus on the facts before trying to reframe history.

Although trillions of taxpayer dollars have been invested in improving the quality of K-12 education in America dating back to the early 1960s, it appears politics has trumped the academic needs of our children. Money is not the solution.

From teachers unions and school administrators to the liberal media, Big Tech, political advocacy groups, and the billionaires who support them, is it possible that indoctrination of our children with radical leftist views of racism in America has taken precedence over their academic needs?

U.S. educators would do better to provide our children with math, science, and reading skills necessary to compete in a global economy, and stick to the facts when it comes to teaching American history, civics, and culture.

Recent protests of police brutality, which attracted America’s youth, have led to anarchy, violence, arson, and death.

Putting the academic needs of students ahead of the ideological and political interests of those we pay to teach them seems likely to reverse what has become a disturbing, destructive trend.

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Teaching Racism in Schools

Critical Race Theory is being taught in schools, beginning at the elementary level.

What could be worse than teaching American students to hate their own country? Teaching them to hate each other.

At the 1:36 mark of this 1991 video, Harvard student Barack Obama is shown speaking at a university protest on behalf of Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell. “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama urged.

Bell, who died in 2011, is credited with pioneering the concept known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). It maintains that the legal system of the United States is inherently biased against blacks and other minorities because it was built on an ingrained white point of view. Bell believed this “institutional racism” conferred upon oppressed minorities both the right and the duty to decide for themselves what laws are valid and worth observing.

Today, institutional racism has become “systemic” racism — and CRT is being taught in American schools, beginning at the elementary level.

Exhibit A is the indoctrination disseminated in Buffalo Public Schools (BPS), using the Black Lives Matter movement as CRT’s vehicle. “The first lesson plan for BPS’s ‘First Days of School’ sequence for second-, third-, and fourth-graders asks the ‘essential question’: ‘What is the Black Lives Matter Movement and what is our role in it?’” reveals Max Eden, education policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “The second lesson, titled ‘Do Black Lives Matter in America?’ states as its objective that ‘students will be able to understand the need for the Black Lives Matter Movement.’”

Understanding the BLM movement has just become more difficult because the Marxist organization has scrubbed one of the more “problematic” parts of its agenda from its website. Under the heading “What We Believe,” BLM had stated, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

One might think a black American community already ravaged by an out-of-wedlock birthrate pegged at 69% — a reality that precipitates increased levels of poverty, substance abuse, suicides, and juvenile detention rates — might be appalled. One might also think school officials pushing the BLM agenda would be aware that children who grow up in fatherless households represent 71% of all high school dropouts.

One would be wrong. Buffalo Public Schools referred to the elimination of the nuclear family as a “guiding principle” of the movement.

Eden explained the genesis of the effort in Buffalo, noting that it came directly from the school’s “department of culturally responsive education.” He added that New York State education officials have embraced a similar agenda, “the architect of which was an education professor who has literally said that it is white supremacism to expect black students to read and speak American standard English.”

New York is not alone. The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) announced its intent to imbue students with a curriculum “that is diverse and culturally sensitive,” aimed at “dismantling system racism and discrimination.”

In Chicago, such efforts consist of a “Say Their Names” toolkit. It contains a quote by Angela Davis, the former communist and criminal fugitive whose guns were used in the armed takeover of the Marin Courthouse in 1970, where four people were killed. “In a racist society, it is not enough to not be non-racist,” said Davis. “We must be anti-racist.”

Education Week’s “Classroom Q&A” blog takes it one step further, asserting, “Educators must realize that there is no neutral position on issues of racial justice. … There is only racist and anti-racist. Your silence favors the status quo and the violently oppressive harm it does to black and brown folk everywhere.”

In other words, as the BLM crowd warns, “silence is violence,” and you’re either with them or you’re the equivalent of a KKK member. And if that sounds like a demand for total submission, that’s because it is.

It gets worse. The National Committee on Social Studies’s Early Childhood/Elementary Community insists that stopping “the systemic pattern of dehumanization” requires “flood[ing] our children with counter messages … until there is no racial inequality in economic opportunity, no racial inequality in education, no racial inequality in incarceration rates, and no brutality from police and others.”

The Virginia Association of Independent Schools provides a resource guide for teachers composed of 40 approved books with an attached warning that reads, “White Fragiles Beware!” The guide further states that it is “time to talk about dismantling white supremacy culture and bringing folks of color (the global majority) to the center.”

In Wake County, North Carolina, a website has been launched to provide public school teachers with BLM lesson plans.

In California, State Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond declared educators in that state are “going to build a training module to allow school districts to engage in training on implicit bias.” He also announced a partnership with the National Equity Project (NEP). Its executive director, LaShawn Routé Chatmon, insists that because of “evidence of racial terror being waged against Black bodies, followed by maligned indifference to demands for justice,” we are faced with a choice whereby we “take conscious action to learn about and dismantle injustice and the winding tentacles of white supremacy in our lives, families, workplaces and communities; or stay asleep, seek comfort, look away and in doing so — perpetuate racism and the racist systems that produce the inequity and injustices we face.”

What America really faces is the further debasement of public education — in service to the ultimate dissolution of our constitutional republic. And like much of the current rioting, it is also based on a series of demonstrable falsehoods that include a glaringly slanted 1619 Project presented as history, despite author Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own assertion that it is rather a “work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative.”

For progressives, history itself is a narrative, and parents who countenance its orchestrated distortion in service to a race-baiting agenda do so at their extreme peril. Already the first 50-state survey on the Holocaust knowledge of American Millennials and Gen Z reveals that nearly one in five believe the Jews caused the Holocaust. Another 34% believe the number of Jewish deaths was “greatly exaggerated.” Moreover, among those same two generations, more than 63% of Millennials, and more than 50% of Gen Z, believe America is a racist nation.

Current students? The National Council of Teachers of English asserts there is “no apolitical classroom.” Thus, they intend to indoctrinate America’s children with racist, America-hating propaganda — parents be damned.

It’s time for pushback. A class-action lawsuit stating that Critical Race Theory violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be a great place to start. Moreover, Trump should present schools with a “Dear Colleague Letter,” warning them that teaching CRT will cost them federal funding.

Everything is downstream from education. The debasement of politics, popular culture, and society itself can all be traced back to America’s classrooms. Those classrooms were taken over by progressives.

It’s time to take them back.

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UQ physics student works out ‘paradox-free’ time travel

A young University of Queensland student says he has found a way to “square the numbers” and prove that “paradox-free” time travel is theoretically possible in our universe.

From Back To The Future to Terminator to 12 Monkeys, stories dealing with time travel invariably have had to grapple with an age-old head-scratcher.

The so-called “grandfather paradox” – that a time traveller could kill their grandparent, preventing their own birth – broadly describes the logical inconsistency that arises from any action that would change the past.

But Germain Tobar, a fourth-year Bachelor of Advanced Science student, believes he has solved the riddle.

“Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system,” he said in a statement.

“This has a wide range of applications, from allowing us to send rockets to other planets and modelling how fluids flow. For example, if I know the current position and velocity of an object falling under the force of gravity, I can calculate where it will be at any time.”

Einstein’s theory of general relativity, however, predicts the existence of time loops or time travel, “where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head”.

Mr Tobar said a unified theory that could reconcile both traditional dynamics and Einstein’s theory of relativity was the holy grail of physics. “But the current science says both theories cannot both be true,” he said.

“As physicists, we want to understand the universe’s most basic, underlying laws and for years I’ve puzzled on how the science of dynamics can square with Einstein’s predictions. I wondered, ‘Is time travel mathematically possible?’”

Mr Tobar and his supervisor, UQ physicist Dr Fabio Costa, say they have found a way to “square the numbers” – and that the findings have fascinating consequences for science. “The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” Dr Costa said.

Dr Costa gives the example of travelling in time in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s “patient zero” being exposed to the virus.

As the grandfather paradox shows, if you stopped that individual getting infected, “that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place”.

“This is a paradox – an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe,” he said.

“Some physicists say it is possible, but logically it’s hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action. It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur.”

But the researchers, whose findings appear in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, say their mathematical modelling shows that neither of these conditions have to be the case.

Instead, they show it is possible for events to adjust themselves to be logically consistent with any action that the time traveller makes.

“In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” Mr Tobar said.

“No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you. This would mean that – no matter your actions – the pandemic would occur, giving your younger self the motivation to go back and stop it.”

He added, “Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency. The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”

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Australia: “One Nation” party gets academic freedom change in return for vote

A legal definition of academic freedom that some universities say will make it harder for them to discipline racist or sexist academics will be included in the Morrison government’s proposed university funding laws in exchange for One Nation’s support for the bill.

The measure is one of several commitments One Nation say they have extracted from the government, which will need three crossbench votes to get its reforms through the Senate as early as next week.

Senator Pauline Hanson said One Nation’s two Senate votes were also contingent upon the government reinstating a 10 per cent discount for students who pay their fees upfront, and reinstating a seven-year limit for full-time students to receive HECS-HELP before they have to pay full fees.

One Nation has fostered a close relationship with academic Peter Ridd, who was sacked by James Cook University in 2018 following his public criticism of colleagues’ research on the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.

“[Education] Minister [Dan] Tehan has shown a strong willingness to listen to the recommendations of [Senator] Malcolm Roberts and myself, and he’s proving to have the courage to take a tough stand with the inclusion of our amendments,” Senator Hanson said.

One Nation wants the definition of academic freedom inserted into the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to be in line with the wording recommended by former High Court Chief Justice Robert French in his government-commissioned review of free speech at Australian universities.

There has been an ongoing debate about free speech at universities, and the review was ordered following concerns among coalition MPs about the influence of left wing activists on campus after protesters targeted author Bettina Arndt at Sydney University.

In his 2019 report, Mr French proposed inserting a lengthy definition into the Act that included “the freedom of academic staff to teach, discuss, and research and to disseminate and publish the results of their research” and to “make lawful public comment on any issue in their personal capacities”.

Mr Tehan declined to comment on the specifics of his negotiations with One Nation, but said he would continue to work with the crossbench to secure passage of the legislation.

“The Job-Ready Graduates legislation will provide more university places for Australian students, make it cheaper to study in areas of expected job growth and provide more funding and support to regional students and universities,” Mr Tehan said.

The government was already examining whether it should proceed with legislating the French definition of academic freedom, and called for public submissions in January, but ultimately did not include the measure as part of its current reforms.

In its submission to the government, the Innovative Research Universities, a grouping of seven institutions including La Trobe University, Western Sydney University and James Cook University, opposed the move. It said legislating the freedom for academics to provide public commentary in a personal capacity had the “potential to create highly undesirable employment disputes.”

“As the wording stands, for example, it would seem that a university academic would be within her or his rights to publicly declare they hold a racial, sexuality or gender prejudice against one or more of the students they are teaching,” the submission said.

“If challenged about holding such a view, they would seem to be able to defend themselves by claiming to have spoken in a personal capacity, not an academic one.”

Senator Hanson said her motivation was to address concerns among university lecturers who were worried about “pressures they faced over ‘how’ and ‘what’ they could teach.

“My interest is in putting a stop to this Marxist, left-leaning approach to teaching in our universities and instead, protect educators who teach using methods based on science and facts rather than ideology,” Senator Hanson said.

In his review, Mr French, chancellor of the University of Western Australia, concluded that “claims of a freedom of speech crisis on Australian campuses are not substantiated”, but outlined a model code for protecting free speech and academic freedom, which all universities agreed to adopt by the end of 2020.

In September, Dr Ridd accompanied Senator Roberts on week-long tour along the Queensland coast, holding press conferences to question the scientific consensus on the poor health of Great Barrier Reef’s and threat posed by farmers. Dr Ridd said he was meeting with National Senator Matt Canavan and local LNP candidate Ron Harding to discuss the same issues on Tuesday.

Dr Ridd is now seeking leave to appeal his wrongful dismissal claim in the High Court, after his initial victory was overturned by the Federal Court in July. The university has maintained that he was not dismissed for his views, but for “serious misconduct” and breaches of the university’s code in how he expressed them.

The government’s bill proposes a major restructuring of university funding by hiking fees for some courses, including by 113 per cent for humanities, in order to pay for cuts to STEM, nursing and teaching courses.

The government says the reforms will fund an extra 100,000 university places for domestic students by 2030, but universities have complained that total funding per student will decrease by six per cent on average.

In addition to securing One Nation’s two votes, the government will need to secure the support of either Tasmania Senator Jacqui Lambie or Centre Alliance Senator Stirling Griff, who are yet to public reveal how they intend to vote.

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