American public schools are not producing students who can think. How can we expect to maintain our liberty when our citizens lack the ability to reach independent conclusions on issues of the day?
Students learn to think by hearing both sides of an issue, weighing the evidence, applying reason, and forming independent conclusions. However, American public schools are not presenting students with opposing views. Instead, students are only hearing issues from the perspective of the political left.
It does not matter which perspective is correct. If students only heard issues from the perspective of the political right, they still would not be learning to think.
Students should be taught to gather relevant facts from both perspectives and then form their own opinions. After all, teachers will not always be around to tell them what to think. And some students may find they don’t always agree with their teachers.
Educational propaganda is not new. During World War II, it contributed to the loss of liberty in France.
During World War I, the French fought four long years to protect their liberty. They were patriots. After the war, however, they became pacifists when French primary schoolteachers promoted pacifism over patriotism in the classroom.
This moral disarmament prevented the French from stopping Hitler when his forces were still weaker than theirs. Hitler was able to build up his forces and invade France during World War II. This time the French did not fight four long years to protect their liberty. They surrendered in just six weeks.
In America, patriotism is not promoted in public schools. Instead, American values and principles are attacked. Students are hearing only one side of the story. They need to hear the good and the bad to get the real story and to learn to think.
While history classes could be contributing to social cohesion by teaching students about America’s achievements, they are instead contributing to social exclusion by focusing on blame, grievances, and victimhood—both real and imagined. Somehow it has become trendy to disparage America. Producing an educated electorate requires a balanced presentation of history.
In order to teach history from an impartial perspective, teachers need to focus on facts—not feelings and rhetoric.
However, a new survey of high school social studies teachers by the American Enterprise Institute found that: “Teaching facts is the lowest priority for social studies teachers when it comes to instruction in citizenship. Of the five priorities high schools may have around the teaching of citizenship, only 20 percent of teachers put teaching key facts, dates, and major events at the top of their list. Furthermore, it is the last of twelve items rated by teachers as absolutely essential to teach high school students: only 36 percent say it is absolutely essential to teach students ‘to know facts (e.g., location of the fifty states) and dates (e.g., Pearl Harbor).’”
Part of the problem, according to journalist Tucker Carlson, is “the hard-edged propaganda that now suffuses history textbooks. A thorough cover-to-cover reading of almost any high school history text leaves you with the impression that the United States is at best embarrassing, and at worst a menace to world peace. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two gets almost us much emphasis as the American liberation of Europe.”
History textbooks are rewriting history with a heavy emphasis on America’s shortcomings. This emphasis is not balanced with a discussion of the shortcomings of other nations and cultures—and they all have shortcomings. Instead, these nations and cultures receive every benefit of doubt.
The Texas State Board of Education recently approved a resolution arguing that numerous history textbooks favor Islam and demonize Christianity. Specifically, the resolution states that the board: “will look to reject future prejudicial social studies submissions that continue to offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world’s major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage spacewise and/or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over others.”
In these textbooks, Islam receives every benefit of doubt. Shortcomings are not mentioned. America and Christianity, however, are not afforded the same treatment.
Students are not hearing both sides and are not learning to think for themselves.
Part of the problem stems from the liberal indoctrination teachers themselves receive from professors in college, which then trickles down to their students. A study by political science professors Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Neil Nevitte found that 72 percent of American professors are liberal and 15 percent are conservative.
In that atmosphere, what are the chances that teachers are learning to think by hearing both sides of an issue, weighing the evidence, applying reason, and forming independent conclusions? If they themselves are not learning to think, how are they going to teach others?
Has American public education become a propaganda organ for the political left? If so, America’s future is bleak.
Without the ability to reach independent conclusions on issues of the day, generations of Americans will be ill-equipped to govern themselves and maintain their liberty.
Bill,
Great article on how our public schools have raised automatons, unable to think critically. Reason for this: the destructive legacy of John Dewey.
Tom Colwell
Bill,
I found this article in the Seoul Times and found the examples about the second world war quite funny. You are right, the education in the USA is quite a disaster but it is not really something new. USA carries this problem at least since the WW2 if not further back. USA has always taught half of the truth just to increase “patriotism”, and everyone knows that half a truth is a lie. There is a reason that makes people in countries like Vietnam, South Korea, Afghanistan or even in Europe have certain feeling of repulsion towards USA and its citizens. If you really want to use facts to tell about the great history of the USA, you wont find more than the strict military, everything else, (social, and moral mainly) was catastrophic. I don’t know if you have had time some computer or console games, but it would probably be surprising to you to realise that games can be more educational than many lessons if we take games like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty for example. “Only the winners write history”. If you really think this statement through, you will know the problem of the society in the USA and its education. What else would the teacher tell students if not “we are the good ones”? French teachers realised after the Treaty of Versailles that this treaty was going to bring the WWII sooner or later, thats why they became “pacifist”. Pacifism and patriotism can be the same and it should be the same. Germany was left alone under the weight of that treaty. Germany was robbed of everything it had, even its pride. What i want to say is that the WW2 was predictable eventhough no one knew Hitler at that time. So you really want to blame Hitler? Hitler was not even racist, something that americans dont seem to understand. Read a bit about the way germans treated Black skinned athletes in the Olympics of Berlin in 1936 and you will find that the athletes found themself more welcome in the Nazi Germany than in the Land of Freedom, USA. You will probably think, “but they killed 6 million Jews” and the truth is, yes they did, but that doesnt make them racist. Jews were bad seen due to Historical reasons. They have been kicked out of Israel, out of europe all along the history and even out of arab countries. So there is no point in blaming Hitler and nazi for something that everyone else also did. I want to clarify that i dont support what Nazi did with jews, but i dont blame them for what they did.
The “american victory” in europe, was it actually a victory? It obviously depends on your definition of victory. Hitler did the same mistake as Napoleon, both of them defeated by the russian winter. Something curious was that both winters (winter of 1812 and winter of 1941) were the coldest winters in decades. With this loss, Hitler started to have nervous and psychological disorders which became stronger with time and which affected seriously to his leading ability. This is why i wouldn’t call it american Victory, because it was an Internal collapse. I could go on and on about ideas that american learn wrong about all the history without holding the real facts, the facts the winner wants to pick out to create its own truth, but it is not my purpose.
The way you said, “Students learn to think by hearing both sides of an issue, weighing the evidence, applying reason, and forming independent conclusions.” that’s what should be, everywhere, not only in the USA. But there is no way to change the education system if the government still treats its citizens like fools, making them believe what the government wants.
Andreas M. González Friedrich
I just came across your writings and find them very interesting – perhaps because I agree with so much of what you’ve said so far! We found ourselves in a fight with our local superintendent over critical thinking skills. Our position was that AP and Pre-AP classes in high school and middle school should teach critical thinking skills – not rote tasks after the basics were learned. The particular complaint we had was that the teacher was doing “show and tell”, having kids present power-points several days a week during a significant portion of class time on various geographic areas but never challenged the accuracy of their presentation and coloring maps and memorizing questionable details like the tributaries of the Amazon river or the number of pounds of food that was airlifted over Germany. We thought better topics would have been why particular areas were developed, what resources kept the development advancing, why some areas declined, etc. Not memorizing, coloring and show and tell! The Superintenden’ts response was “Well, they are doing okay in high school history classes.” Of course “okay” is relative to the testing that requires minimal knowledge and ability to pass!