GETTING THEM YOUNG

Teachers use totalitarian methods, particularly self-criticism sessions, to enforce ideological rigidity and reinforce social cohesion

When Donald Trump won the election last November, anarchy and partisan bullying paralyzed the high school. "I felt like the school was descending into mass hysteria," one student said of the day after the election. Another said Trump's victory was treated as "the end of the world as we know it." Students reported "[e]very teacher was crying in class, one even told the whole class 'Trump winning is worse than 9/11 and the Columbine shooting.'" The sheer volume of "liberal propaganda that was pushed every single day in class this year was worse than it's ever been–and you're bullied by the teachers and every student if you dare speak against it." "[T]he teachers can absolutely do whatever they want. The administration will do nothing about it!! The day of the election every single student was in the commons chanting 'F*** TRUMP' and the teachers never did anything. A LOT of people are starting to complain and my mom has some friends who are leaving the school district." Teachers in Edina use totalitarian methods, particularly self-criticism sessions, to enforce ideological rigidity and reinforce social cohesion. One mother complained of a humiliating Khmer Rouge-like denunciation process her son was forced to endure. In a 10th grade AP World History class, the teacher "called out any Trump supporters and asked them to assure the class that they weren't racist." In much of the United States, sending one's children to public schools is already tantamount to child abuse. Too often elementary and secondary schools, especially in the inner cities, fail to teach pupils even the basics of reading, writing, and thinking critically. Nowadays they focus on crusades for so-called social justice instead of doing their jobs. This includes pedagogical sermons excoriating President Trump for the crime of trying to "Make America Great Again."

Radical indoctrination has supplanted actual education

In Edina radical indoctrination has supplanted actual education that helps students prepare for the real world. Test scores in the community's once top-rated schools have been plummeting, writes Katherine Kersten, senior fellow at the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, in Thinking Minnesota magazine. "There's been a sea change in educational philosophy, and it comes from the top," she writes. In recent years teachers have been shoving so-called white privilege, along with Marxism, feminism, and post-colonialism, down their young charges' throats. It's no secret that public school teachers across America are largely driven by ideology, not a desire to educate. They teach students that America, a nation flawed in its conception by the original sin of slavery, has never truly experienced reforms. It is as if the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era never happened. Corporations and the rich oppress the citizenry daily as the U.S. unjustly pushes around less powerful countries, especially Muslim ones. America is so fundamentally corrupt and evil in their view that it can only be fixed by radical changes like those espoused by educational theorists like Paulo Freire and Bill Ayers. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argued that schools be used to inculcate radical, revolutionary values in students so they become agents of social change. Generations of teachers answered his call.

Teachers in Edina take the ideas of Freire, Lenin, and Ayers seriously

Freire was only expanding on the ideas of Vladimir Lenin who said, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." Teachers in publicly-funded elementary and secondary schools get a full eight years more than Lenin required to intellectually cripple students, perhaps for life. "If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon," Ayers said in 2012. "We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm." Teachers in Edina take the ideas of Freire, Lenin, and Ayers seriously. At Edina's Highlands Elementary, teachers indoctrinate five-year-olds in order to radicalize them and encourage them to become activists obsessed with race. The school district's "unrelenting focus on skin color is the leading edge of a larger ideological campaign to shape students' attitudes and beliefs on a range of controversial issues--most importantly, the familiar litany of 'race, class, gender,'" Kersten writes. While this is happening "ordinary students are too often falling through the cracks and gifted education is languishing." Edina embraces something called the All for All plan. Its "fundamental premise is that white racism--not socio-economic factors like family breakdown--is the primary cause of the achievement gap."

School staff meetings there are social justice pep rallies

School staff meetings there are social justice pep rallies. One teacher told Kersten that "equity was the only thing we talked about, not the nuts and bolts of teaching reading and math." Equity in this context doesn't refer to equal treatment for all, she notes. Here the word "signals an obsession with 'white privilege,' and an effort to blame any academic challenge that minority students may have on institutional racial bias." In other words, race-based identity politics rules. At the elementary school, teachers of K-2 students dwell endlessly on skin color and encourage white pupils to feel guilty about being white. "Equity" is identified as the key criterion used to evaluate the school district's K-5 math curricula. Children have to watch their language and self-censor for fear of incurring the wrath of teachers. "My kids have written things they don't believe just to survive," one mother told Kersten. "They know exactly what the teacher wants. They almost don't see anything incorrect in doing that anymore, because it's so engrained. They have endured enough public shaming to say they will not put themselves in that position again." Another parent "was absolutely sickened" by the officially sanctioned psychological torture to which her young son was subjected. He explained that he was "labeled a racist, sexist and rapist -- yes, a RAPIST -- because he is a white male." The parent added, "This was all in a Venn diagram on the white board. We have a photo." At the Edina high school's multicultural show in April this year, student performers used the event to call for "students, faculty, staff and administrators to act en masse to address racial injustice," according to the school's student newspaper. Student organizers tried to "ignite a conversation pertaining to white privilege and the Black Lives Matter movement."

Remaining silent is no way to win a culture war

A female student gave an explicit speech about the sexual fantasies she had about a classmate that sounded like a "Dear Penthouse Forum" letter. "I spent seventh-grade music classes imagining her legs intertwining with mine, her body constantly reminding me of a violin, and I was begging to be allowed to pluck one string." A male student revealing his sexual desires probably would have been kicked off the stage and accused of sexual harassment, Kersten writes. Getting students to hate and distrust law enforcement officers is also a priority. One teacher was so wrapped up in cop-hatred that she claimed just saying the word police "made her feel physically ill," according to a parent. Teachers in Edina and across the fruited plan saturate students with information about real and imagined instances of racial injustice in America in a nonstop barrage of historic facts and ahistorical nonsense. And in the culture at large, the media, politicians, and the entertainment industry can't stop talking about race. The last thing any young student in America needs is to be taught about is race. Race matters only to America-hating radicals. People in Edina are tired of all of this. They are angry about political agendas being pushed at the expense of education. At the same time they are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals, Kersten writes.

Though a growing number of parents, students and teachers are angry and frustrated about recent developments, they hesitate to protest publicly. Students and parents fear bullying and retaliation in terms of grades and classroom humiliation. Teachers who don't toe the orthodox line fear ostracism and a tainted career. The climate of intimidation is so intense that not one of those interviewed for this article would speak on the record.

Remaining silent is no way to win a culture war.