How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World (Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education)

(Minghui.org) [Editor's Note] This series is a reprint of The Epoch Times' English translation of the book How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World by the editorial team of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.

Table of Contents of the Book

Preface: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

Introduction: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

Chapter One: The Specter’s Strategies for Destroying Humanity

Chapter Two: Communism’s European Beginnings

Chapter Three: Tyranny in the East

Chapter Four: Exporting Revolution

Chapter Five: Infiltrating the West

Chapter Six: The Revolt Against God

Chapter Seven: The Destruction of the Family

Chapter Eight: How Communism Sows Chaos in Politics

Chapter Nine: The Communist Economic Trap

Chapter Ten: Corrupting the Legal System

Chapter Eleven: Desecrating the Arts

Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education

Chapter Thirteen: The Media – The Specter’s Mouthpiece

Chapter Fourteen: Popular Culture – A Decadent Indulgence

Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism

Chapter Sixteen: The Communism Behind Environmentalism

Chapter Seventeen: Globalization and Communism

Chapter Eighteen: The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Ambitions

Conclusion: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

What is Included in This Part?

Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education

Introduction

1. Communist Elements in Primary and Secondary Education

a. Dumbing Down Students

b. The Destructive Nature of Progressive Education

c. Ruining Students’ Moral Character

d. Psychological Manipulation

e. The Infiltration of Education

2. Communism in Western Universities

a. The Leftist Slant of University Faculties

b. Reshaping Traditional Academics With Communist Ideology

c. Using New Academic Fields for Ideological Infiltration

d. Promoting Leftist Radicalism

e. Denying America’s Great Traditions

f. Opposing the Classics of Western Civilization

g. Monopolizing Textbooks and Liberal Arts

h. University ‘Re-education’: Brainwashing and Moral Corruption

3. How Communism Destroyed Education in China

4. Returning to Traditional Education

References

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CHAPTER TWELVE: SABOTAGING EDUCATION

Introduction

Education plays an important role in fostering individual well-being and self-fulfillment, maintaining social stability, and securing the future of a nation. No great civilization in the history of humanity has taken education lightly.

The object of education is to maintain humanity’s moral standards and preserve its divinely bestowed culture. It is the means by which knowledge and craftsmanship are imparted and people socialized. Traditionally, the well-educated respect heaven, believe in the divine, and seek to follow the virtue of benevolence. They possess extensive knowledge of traditional culture as well as mastery over one or more trades. Dedicated to their vocations, they believe in treating others with kindness. They serve as the pillars of society, the national elites, and the guardians of civilization. Their extraordinary character and behavior earn divine favor and blessings.

Thus, ruining traditional education is an indispensable step in the communist specter’s plan to sever the connection between man and the divine, thereby destroying humanity. To this end, communism has adopted various strategies to attack and undermine education in both the East and the West.

In Eastern countries that are home to deep-seated cultural traditions, deception alone is insufficient to brainwash the populace. Communist parties have systematically slaughtered the well-educated elites to stop these bearers of culture from imparting the nation’s traditional heritage to the next generation. Simultaneously, they bombarded the rest of the population with incessant propaganda.

In the West, the history and roots of cultures are not as deep, comparatively, giving communism fertile ground for covertly contaminating society by subverting and sabotaging education.

The complete breakdown of American education is one of the most distressing things to have happened to the country in the past few decades. It signals the success of communism’s mission to infiltrate and corrupt Western society.

This chapter focuses mainly on the United States as an example of how education in free societies has been sabotaged by communism. From this example, readers may infer how education is being undermined in other countries along similar lines.

The communist infiltration of American education manifests in at least five areas:

Promoting Communist Ideology Among the Young. Communist ideology gradually took over Western academia by infiltrating important traditional fields of study, as well as fabricating new sciences beholden to its ideological influence. Literature, history, philosophy, social science, anthropology, the study of law, media, and other concentrations have become inundated with various derivatives of Marxist theory. “Political correctness” became the guideline for censoring free thought on campuses.

Reducing the Young Generation’s Exposure to Traditional Culture. Orthodox thought, genuine history, and classical literature have been slandered and marginalized in many different ways. Common justifications for this include arguments that the classics are no longer relevant to modern students, or that school curricula need to make room for more “diversity” of thought.

Lowering Academic Standards Starting in Primary School. Because instruction has been progressively dumbed down, students of the new generation are becoming less literate and mathematically capable. They possess less knowledge, and their ability to think critically is stunted. It is hard for these students to handle key questions concerning life and society in a logical and forthright manner, and even harder for them to see through communism’s deceptions.

Indoctrinating Young Students With Deviated Notions. As these children grow older, the concepts instilled in them become so strong that it is nearly impossible to identify and correct them.

Feeding Students’ Selfishness, Greed, and Indulgence. This includes conditioning them to oppose authority and tradition, inflating their egos and sense of entitlement, reducing their ability to understand and tolerate different opinions, and neglecting their psychological growth.

Communism has achieved its objectives in nearly all of these five areas.

1. Communist Elements in Primary and Secondary Education

Although communism is most obvious at the university level, it has deeply influenced primary and secondary school education. Its influence has undermined children’s intellectual development and maturity, making them more susceptible to leftist influences in college. It has caused generations of students to have less knowledge and a diminished ability to reason and engage in critical thinking. The progressive education movement led by John Dewey initiated the trend more than a century ago. Subsequent education reforms have generally followed in the same direction.

In addition to instilling atheism, the theory of evolution, and communist ideology in students, primary and secondary education in the United States employ psychological manipulation that destroys students’ traditional beliefs and morals. It instills moral relativism and modern concepts that convey a corrupt attitude toward life. This occurs across all sectors of education. The sophisticated measures used make it almost impossible for students and the public to guard against the trend.

KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, introduced in Chapter Five, described in 1985 how communist ideological infiltration in America was nearing completion: “Even if you start right now, here this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of Americans, it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.” [1]

A third of a century has passed since Bezmenov gave his interview. During this period, even as we witnessed the downfall of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, communism’s infiltration and subversion in the West didn’t stop. Communist elements in the West set their sights on education as a primary target. They took over all tiers of the institution, promoting their own twisted theories on education, pedagogy, and parenting.

a. Dumbing Down Students

The United States is a constitutional republic. Presidents, lawmakers, town mayors, and school-district committee members are all elected by the voting public. Whether such a political framework can be pursued in a manner that is truly beneficial to all depends not only on the moral level of the people, but also on the level of their knowledge and discernment. If voters are not well-versed in history, political and economic systems, and social issues, they will have difficulty electing officials whose platforms are based on the long-term and fundamental interests of the country and society. This puts the country in a dangerous situation.

In 1983, a group of experts commissioned by the US Department of Education wrote the report A Nation at Risk after eighteen months of research. The report stated:

For our country to function, citizens must be able to reach some common understandings on complex issues, often on short notice and on the basis of conflicting or incomplete evidence. Education helps form these common understandings, a point Thomas Jefferson made long ago in his justly famous dictum: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Individuals with little knowledge and poor critical thinking abilities are unable to recognize lies and deception. Education plays an enormous role. Thus, when communist elements penetrate all levels of the education system, students become foolish and ignorant and thus vulnerable to manipulation.

The report makes these additional points:

The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. … If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. [2]

The report quoted analyst Paul Copperman as saying, “For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

The report cites some shocking findings: In addition to US students’ grades often being at the bottom compared to those of students in other nations, 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate — that is, only possessing the most basic everyday reading, writing, and comprehension skills. The rate of functional illiteracy is 13 percent among 17-year-olds and may reach as high as 40 percent among minority youth.

From 1963 to 1980, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) declined dramatically, with the average verbal score dropping by more than 50 points, and the average math score dropping by nearly 40 points. “Many 17-year-olds do not possess the ‘higher order’ intellectual skills we should expect of them. Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.” [3]

In the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein compiled data on the knowledge gaps of American students in the subjects of history, civics, math, science, technology, fine arts, and more. He gave the example of the history exam in the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, on which 57 percent of students scored “below basic” and only 1 percent achieved an “advanced” score. Surprisingly, on a multiple-choice question on which country had been a US ally in World War II, 52 percent chose Germany, Japan, or Italy instead of the Soviet Union. Results in other areas were equally disappointing. [4]

The decline in the quality of education in the United States is obvious. Since the 1990s, the term “dumbing down” has appeared in many books on education and has become a concept American educators cannot avoid. John Taylor Gatto, a senior teacher and educational researcher in New York City, wrote, “Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level.” [5]

To avoid making the American education system look bad, in 1994 the College Board redefined the scores of the SAT, the university entrance examination. When the modern form of the SAT began to be adopted in 1941, the average score of the language exam was 500 points (top marks are 800 points). By the 1990s, the average score had dropped to 424 points; the College Board then redefined 424 as 500 points. [6]

The decline in the quality of education is not just reflected in the decline in students’ literacy. Due to a lack of basic knowledge, the critical thinking faculties of American students have fallen sharply. American scholar Thomas Sowell observed: “It is not merely that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.” [7]

The reason for the decline of grades is not that students today are not as intelligent as before, but because communism is quietly carrying out a war against the next generation, using the education system as its weapon. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former senior policy adviser to the US Department of Education, wrote in 1999, “The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret — in the schools of our nation, targeting our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of the war are using very sophisticated and effective tools.” [8]

b. The Destructive Nature of Progressive Education

The backlash against tradition in American primary and secondary schools began with the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century. The following generations of progressive educators concocted a series of sham theories and discourses that served to alter curricula, water down teaching materials, and lower academic standards. This wrought enormous damage to traditional education.

From Rousseau to Dewey

Dewey, the father of American progressive education, was greatly influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth-century Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau believed that people are good by nature and that social ills are responsible for moral decline. He said all men were free and equal at birth and that given a natural environment, everyone would enjoy their innate rights. Inequality, privilege, exploitation, and the loss of man’s innate kindness were all products of society. For children, Rousseau advocated a model of “negative education” that would leave them to their own discovery. This education was to be absent of religious, moral, or cultural teaching.

In fact, humanity is endowed with both benevolence and wickedness. Without nurturing benevolence, the wicked aspects of human nature will dominate to the point where people consider no method too base and no sin too evil. With his elegant rhetoric, Rousseau attracted many misguided followers. The deleterious influence his pedagogical theory has had on Western education is hard to overestimate.

About a century later, Dewey picked up where Rousseau had left off and furthered the destructive work. According to Dewey, who was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, children should be weaned from the traditional tutelage of parents, religion, and culture and given free rein to adapt to their environments. Dewey was a pragmatist and moral relativist. He believed that there was no unchanging morality and that people were free to act and behave as they saw fit. The concept of moral relativism is a critical first step in leading humanity away from the moral rules set by the divine.

Dewey was one of thirty-four people who signed their names to the original Humanist Manifesto, penned in 1933. Unlike the humanists of the Renaissance, twentieth-century humanism is, at its core, rooted in atheism. Based on modern concepts such as materialism and the theory of evolution, it regards the universe as self-existing rather than created and holds that human beings are the product of a continuous biochemical process.

In this calculus, the object of education is to mold and guide students according to the educator’s wishes — something not fundamentally different from Karl Marx’s “new man.” Dewey himself was a democratic socialist.

American philosopher Sidney Hook said, “Dewey had supplied Marxism with the epistemology and social philosophy that Marx had half seen for himself and had half sketched out in his early works but had never adequately spelled out.” [9]

In 1921, as civil war raged across Russia, the Soviets took the time to produce a sixty-two-page pamphlet featuring excerpts from Dewey’s Democracy and Education. In 1929, the rector of the Second State University of Moscow, Albert P. Pinkevich, wrote, “Dewey comes infinitely closer to Marx and the Russian Communists.” [10] Biographer Alan Ryan wrote that Dewey “supplied the intellectual weapons for a decently social democratic, non-totalitarian Marxism.” [11]

Progressive educators make no pretense about their goal to transform students’ attitudes toward life. To achieve this aim, they have overturned all aspects of learning, including class structure, teaching materials and methods, and the relationship between teachers and students. Personal experience is considered superior to knowledge learned from books. Lectures have taken a backseat to projects and activities.

The conservative American website Human Events listed Dewey’s Democracy and Education as number five on its list of the ten most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It pointedly observed that Dewey “disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking ‘skills’ instead.” [12]

Astute critics have taken to task the progressive bent in education from the very beginning. Mortimer Smith’s 1949 book And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education provides a concise and comprehensive rebuttal to the principal tenets of progressive education. [13] Progressive educators have dismissed such critics as “reactionaries” and used various means to suppress or ignore them.

Dewey spent 25 years as a tenured professor at Columbia University. During the period in which he taught the philosophy of education at the Teachers College, at least one-fifth of all primary and secondary school teachers received instruction or advanced degrees at Columbia. [14] In contrast to figures like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, Dewey appears to have had no aspiration to become a revolutionary guru or take over the world, but the system of education he created became one of communism’s most potent tools.

Indulging Students

According to Rousseau’s theory of education, humans are born good and free, but are made bad by society. Therefore, the best method of education is to give children free rein and yield to the child’s own whimsical development. Under the influence of Rousseauean thought, progressive educationists since Dewey have often echoed these ideas: One should not force the values of parents or teachers upon students; children should be allowed to make their own judgments and decisions while growing up.

English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once elegantly gave the following retort to this sort of view: “[British radical John] Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. ‘How so?’ said he, ‘it is covered with weeds.’ — ’Oh,’ I replied, ‘that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries.’” [15]

The quick-witted poet used the analogy to convey to his friend a principle: Ethics and wisdom are painstakingly cultivated. Not overseeing a garden will cause an overgrowth of weeds. Abandoning children is akin to giving them over to ever-present forces for ill. It amounts to extreme negligence and irresponsibility.

Good and evil are simultaneously present in human nature. Though children are by comparison simpler and purer than adults, they also are susceptible to laziness, jealousy, combativeness, selfishness, and other negative traits. Society is a big dye vat. If children are not properly raised, then by the time they have come to their “age of discretion and choice,” they will have long been contaminated by bad thoughts and bad habits. Attempts to educate them at that point will be too late.

This indulgence of students reached its peak in the pedagogical literary work Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, published in 1960. The book’s author, A. S. Neill, established in 1921 an English boarding school, Summerhill, whose students at the time ranged in age from five to sixteen. The school gave children complete autonomy. Children were allowed to decide whether they wanted to go to one class but not another, or no class at all. Neill’s views on education were heavily influenced by Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School philosopher and vigorous proponent of sexual freedom, and the two often corresponded.

Besides academics, the school was extremely lax on ethics, discipline, and male–female relations; it followed all anti-traditional values. According to a former student who attended in the 1960s, male and female students were allowed to have mock weddings and sleep together. Neill allowed staff and students to swim naked together in an outdoor swimming pool, and some staff members were permitted to date students. His thirty-five-year-old stepson, who taught ceramic art, would often bring upper-grade girls back to his room. [16]

In his book, Neill says, “Every older pupil at Summerhill knows from my conversation and my books that I approve of a full sex life for all who wish one, whatever their age.” He has even hinted that, if not prohibited by law, he would have openly permitted boys and girls to sleep together. [17] When Summerhill was published, it quickly became a bestseller. In the 1960s alone, it sold more than three million copies and became required reading at teachers’ colleges.

An ancient Chinese saying says, “A strict teacher produces outstanding students.” Studies in the West have found that strict teachers get better results in the classroom. They also have a more positive influence on their students’ conduct. [18] Sadly, in the United States and other Western countries, under the influence of progressivism and educational autonomy, laws have been enacted that limit the scope of parents and teachers in managing students. This has caused teachers to become afraid to discipline students. Students’ bad habits are not corrected in a timely manner, or at all, thus leading to a precipitous decline in their sense of morality as well as their academic performance.

Student-Centered Education

The most important function of education is to maintain and pass on the traditional culture of human civilization. Perhaps nowhere was this more the case than in ancient China, where educators and scholars were held in the highest regard. “A teacher is to pass on the Dao, teach the learnings, and clear up confusion,” as a Chinese saying goes. Dewey’s progressive educational thought removes the authority of teachers and downgrades their importance. His stance is anti-intellectual and against common sense — in essence, against education itself.

Advocates of progressive education claim that students must be placed at the center and allowed to explore on their own, to reach their own answers. The real intention of progressive education is to cut students off from their bond with traditional culture. Traditional curricula contain knowledge accumulated over thousands of years of human civilization. A negation of teachers’ authority in the process of education is a negation of their role in carrying forward the knowledge of civilization. This is the ulterior motive of communism.

Daisy Christodoulou’s 2014 book Seven Myths About Education analyzes and refutes seven widely spread misconceptions about modern education, including claims that “facts prevent understanding,” “teacher-led instruction is passive,” “projects and activities are the best way to learn,” and “teaching knowledge is indoctrination.” [19] Most of these myths stem from progressive education and have been passed down for several generations, becoming a plague on educational culture. For instance, take the first misconception, that fact-learning prevents true understanding. Modern American education has degraded traditional methods of attention to memorization, reading aloud, and practice, characterizing them as “mechanical memorization,” “rote learning,” and “drill to kill.” Rousseau attacked memorization and verbal lessons in his 1792 novel Emile, or On Education, and Dewey’s progressive educators furthered such theories.

In 1956, American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and collaborators published a framework for categorizing educational goals, widely known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. It divided human cognition into six levels, from low to high. In 2001, the levels were revised to be “remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.” The latter three are regarded as higher-order thinking because they involve comprehensive analysis. We are not analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bloom classification itself, but merely pointing out that since the framework was proposed, progressive educators have used the pretext of cultivating “higher-order thinking” to weaken the teaching of knowledge in schools.

Anyone with common sense knows that having certain basic knowledge is the foundation of any intellectual task. Without a reserve of knowledge, the so-called higher-order thinking, critical thinking, and creative thinking can only serve to deceive oneself and others. Bloom’s classification system provides a seemingly scientific excuse for the inexplicable approach of progressive educators.

One of the planks of the theory of student-centered instruction is that students should choose what they learn, according to their own interests. The theory also states that teachers should educate students only in what the students are interested in.

To have students learn in an enjoyable way is what every teacher wants, but children have shallow knowledge and limited vision, and they’re unable to discern what is important to learn and what isn’t. Teachers must take responsibility for guiding students so that they can transcend their superficial interests and broaden their vision and understanding. Simply catering to the superficial interests of students will only lead to their permanent infantilization. By espousing student-centered instruction, educators are deceiving students and parents, which is ultimately irresponsible to society.

Studies have found that there is a tendency in American society for adults to remain in a state of adolescence longer than in other populations. The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2002 defined adolescence as a period from twelve to thirty years of age. Research supported by the MacArthur Foundation went even further and said, based on traditional markers of adulthood, a person nowadays may not be considered an adult until age thirty-five. [20] The education system and media bear the responsibility for this extended period of adolescence that many adults have found themselves in.

One of the excuses given by progressive educators for lowering teaching requirements is that with higher enrolments in secondary and post-secondary schools and with students coming from across society, the average level of attainment cannot be as high as it was in the past. This understanding is wrong. In a democratic society, the object of public schooling is to allow those who otherwise wouldn’t have the means to receive an education the opportunity to do so — not to lower academic standards, which causes everyone’s learning to suffer. Progressivism claims to replace “useless” classical courses such as Greek and Latin with more contemporary courses, but in the end, most schools don’t end up introducing high-quality courses useful for modern life, such as in-depth courses in mathematics, economics, and modern history. The curriculum and teaching-method reforms advocated by progressive educators deceive students who are not yet well-informed, as well as parents who defer to schools, teachers, and so-called experts.

Some teaching methods proposed by progressive education are useful when applied to some subjects and areas of learning. However, when we look at the progressive education movement and its specific background and outcomes, it becomes clear that progressive education sets itself up in opposition to traditional education, thereby mutating education and ultimately ruining students.

c. Ruining Students’ Moral Character

On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado murdered twelve students and one teacher and injured at least twenty more in a carefully planned massacre. The tragedy shocked the nation. People wondered why the two students would carry out such a cold-blooded attack, murdering their classmates and a teacher they’d known for years.

By comparing social phenomena in different historical periods, educators noticed that up to the 1960s, common problem behaviors among US students were minor, like tardiness, talking in class without permission, or chewing gum. After the 1980s, there were worse problems, like excessive drinking, drug abuse, premarital sex, pregnancy, suicide, gang activity, and even indiscriminate shootings, which have only increased in frequency since Columbine. These downward trends are a concern to millions in the United States and other countries, but few understand the real roots of these developments, and no one is able to prescribe an appropriate treatment for the disorder.

The distortion and downward spiral of the moral standards of American youth are no accident.

Atheism and Evolution

Fred Schwarz, a pioneer of anti-communist activism, observed, “The three basic tenets of Communism are atheism, evolution, and economic determinism.” [21] All three key elements of communist ideology have been adopted in American public schools.

The divine created humankind and laid down the moral standards that should regulate human life. Belief in the divine lays the foundation of morality for society and underpins the existence of the human world. Communism forcibly spread atheism and the theory of evolution in schools as a means of destroying morality. This is to be expected in communist states like China and the former Soviet Union, but in the United States, it was carried out covertly.

Under the pretext of separation of church and state, leftists oppose the teaching of creationism in American public schools, while on the other hand promoting the theory of evolution. This education inevitably leads the number of religious believers to decline, as children are indoctrinated with the idea that the theory of evolution is scientific truth and not to be questioned.

Since the 1960s, courts around the United States have shut down Bible study in public schools, again under the pretext of separation of church and state. An appeals court ruled in 1981 that students enjoyed freedom of speech, unless the speech was a prayer, at which point it became unconstitutional. [22]

In 1987, students in Alaskan public schools were told not to use the word “Christmas” since it contained the word “Christ.” They were also told they couldn’t exchange traditional Christmas cards or presents. In 1987, a federal court in Virginia ruled that homosexual newspapers could be distributed on a high school campus, but religious newspapers were banned. In 1993, an elementary school music teacher in Colorado Springs was prevented from teaching Christmas carols because of alleged violations of the separation of church and state. [23]

Teaching and test materials in the United States have undergone extensive revision due to the anti-theist orientation of the education system, in combination with decades of political correctness. In 1997, Diane Ravitch, an education historian, was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administered federal tests in schools. She noticed that passages in reading tests had been scrubbed by editors to remove white males as heroes or any references to Christianity. The maxim that “God helps those who help themselves” was changed to “People should try to work things out for themselves whenever possible.” [24]

On the one hand, the American public education system ejected belief in God from schools under the pretext of upholding the separation of church and state. On the other hand, evolution, with its unresolved gaps, was held to be a self-evident truth to be instilled in children who had no mental preparation or defense. Children tend to believe in the authority of their teachers.

Parents with religious beliefs teach their kids to respect others, but children who are instilled with the theory of evolution are likely to challenge the religious education given by their parents. At the very least, they will no longer take their parents’ religious instruction as seriously. The result is that education pulls children away from parents with religious beliefs. This is the most challenging problem that families with religious beliefs face when it comes to their children’s education, and it’s the evilest aspect of the anti-theistic education system.

Communist Ideology

Chapter Five of this book illustrates the nature of political correctness: It works like the thought police of communism, using a set of distorted political standards to replace authentic moral standards. Since the 1930s, political correctness has played a dominant role in the American education system. When put into practice, it comes in different forms, some of which are extremely deceptive.

E. Merrill Root, author of Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks, published in 1958, conducted research into eleven sets of history teaching materials used in Illinois between 1950 and 1952 and found that they characterized American history as a power struggle between rich and poor, between the privileged few and the underprivileged. This is the essence of Marxian economic determinism. [25]

In 2013, a school district in Minnesota adopted a project named All for All, which shifts the focus of teaching toward racial and income inequalities. This ideology blames the poor performance of students on systemic racial or income discrimination. The project demanded that all teaching activities be based on advancing racial and income equality and that only teachers and administrators who were deeply aware of the issues associated with these inequalities be employed.

The project was designed for students from Pre-K through Grade 12. Tenth-grade English classes focus on the themes of colonization and immigration, as well as “social constructions” of race, class, and gender. The eleventh-grade framework claimed, “By the end of the year, you will have … learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical … lenses to literature.” [26]

In July 2016, California adopted a new social science framework for public elementary and high schools. The original left-leaning framework was made to look even more like left-wing ideological propaganda. Content that should be emphasized in history and social science courses — like the founding spirit of America, and military, political, and diplomatic history — was watered down or ignored. In contrast, the values of the 1960s counterculture were passionately highlighted and made to seem like the nation’s founding principles. The curriculum also articulated a clearly anti-traditional framework of sex and family.

Take the eleventh-grade courses, for example. The new framework claimed its focus was on the rights movements of minority races, tribes, and religions, as well as women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans. In reality, religion was seldom mentioned, but much was written about sexual minorities. LGBT groups were included first and were given a significant share of the eleventh-grade history courses. The LGBT portions were written in a tone clearly supportive of “sexual liberation.” For example, in a discussion on AIDS, it was suggested that people’s fear of AIDS weakened the civil rights and sexual liberation movements. [27]

Sexual content occupied many chapters, squeezing out other content far more worthy of attention for young people. For example, in the course on World War I, students hardly learn about the critical role played by the US Army, but are taught that American soldiers found European sexual customs satisfying. [28] This left-leaning framework is full of distortion and bias, guiding students to hate their own country. Though the framework was adopted only in the state of California, its approach had a national impact.

d. Psychological Manipulation

Another method through which students have been extensively morally corrupted is psychological conditioning, used to inject them with moral relativism.

In 1978, hundreds of parents and teachers attended hearings for the Protection of Pupils’ Rights Amendment, a federal law that affords certain rights to parents of minor students with regard to surveys that ask questions of a personal nature. The hearing testimonies totaled more than thirteen hundred pages. In her 1984 book Child Abuse in the Classroom, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly summed up the issues described in the testimonies, including the use of “education as therapy.” Unlike traditional education, which aims to impart knowledge, education as therapy focuses on changing students’ emotions and attitudes. This kind of education uses teaching to play psychological games on students. It has them fill out surveys on personal issues and asks them to make adult decisions, weighing in on issues like suicide and murder, marriage and divorce, and abortion and adoption. [29]

Such courses weren’t set up for the students’ psychological health — they were intended to change the values of students through psychological conditioning.

Psychology and Education

Modern education is heavily based on philosophy and psychology. In addition to Dewey’s progressive education, other theories that have had a significant impact on the US education system include Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, Carl Rogers’s humanistic psychology, and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, which combines theories from Marx and Freud. Herbert Marcuse, a theorist of the Frankfurt School, called for the removal of all inhibitions so that young people could let loose their natural instincts and indulge their personal whims. [30] It was this thinking that helped accelerate the birth of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Deeply influenced by the above-mentioned schools of thought on psychology, the first director general of the World Health Organization, Canadian psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, proposed a shocking theory: In order to release the individual from psychological pain, morality and the concept of right and wrong must be neutralized. He said in a 1946 lecture:

What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? It must be a force which discourages the ability to see and acknowledge patent facts … which produces inferiority, guilt, and fear. … The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong. …

We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to recognise the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin, under which we have almost all laboured and which produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in the world. …

If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. [31]

Chisholm waged war on morality. Seemingly influenced by Chisholm, humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers came up with “values clarification” classes, which served the purpose of eradicating traditional values and the concepts of right and wrong.

Eventually, Dewey’s moral relativism, the Frankfurt School’s rejection of inhibitions, and Chisholm’s psychological theories worked together to attack and undermine traditional values. They destroyed the moral fortifications of public schools in the United States.

Moral Relativism

Americans who attended schools in the late 1970s may remember an imagined scenario many teachers brought up in class, which went like this: As a ship sinks, the captain, several children, a pregnant woman, and a gay man get in a lifeboat. The lifeboat is overloaded and one person must be let go. The teachers would ask the students to discuss and decide who must get off the lifeboat, giving up his or her life. The teacher would not comment on or judge the students’ comments.

This story was often used in the values-clarification classes that emerged in the 1970s. Besides being used for values-clarification, the classes were used for decision-making, affective education, the Lions Quest drug-prevention program, and sex education.

William Kilpatrick, author of the 1993 book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong: And What We Can Do About It, described such classes as having “turned classroom discussions into ‘bull sessions’ where opinions go back and forth but conclusions are never reached.” Kilpatrick wrote:

It has resulted in classrooms where teachers act like talk show hosts, and where the merits of wife swapping, cannibalism, and teaching children to masturbate are recommended topics for debate. … For students, it has meant wholesale confusion about moral values: learning to question values they have scarcely acquired, unlearning values taught at home, and concluding that questions of right and wrong are always merely subjective. … It has created a generation of moral illiterates: students who know their own feelings but don’t know their culture. [32]

Sowell understood that these sessions utilized the same techniques developed in totalitarian countries to brainwash people:

1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

4. Stripping the individual of normal defenses, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs—a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form [33]

Sowell notes that the sessions encourage students to rebel from the traditional moral values taught by their parents and society. Classes are conducted in a neutral or a “nonjudgmental” way, in which the teacher does not distinguish between right and wrong, but rather searches for what feels good for an individual. “This general approach has been called ‘values clarification.’ Its focus is on the feelings of the individual, rather than on the requirements of a functioning society or the requirements of intellectual analysis.” [34]

Death and Drug-Prevention Education

In September 1990, the US television channel ABC aired a program that concerned many viewers. In it, a school takes students to a morgue as a part of its “death education” and students view and touch corpses. [35]

Common activities of death education classes include asking the students to draw their own tombstones, select their own coffins, arrange their own funerals, and write their own obituaries.

Students were to be asked the following questions:

“How will you die?”

“When will you die?”

“Have you ever known anyone who died violently?”

“When was the last time you mourned? Was it expressed in tears or silent pain? Did you mourn alone or with someone else?”

“Do you believe in an after-life?” [36]

Obviously, these questions have nothing to do with studying. They are designed to probe the students’ outlook on life, their religious beliefs, and their personalities. Some of the questions are aimed to elicit particular reactions and can have a negative impact on teens.

It is said that death education can help students establish the right attitude in the face of death. However, some students who attended these classes have committed suicide. For the same 1990 program, ABC interviewed one student at Columbine High School who said her suicide plans were directly related to the death education she received there. She said the classes made death seem glamorous, “very exciting, [and] very appealing.” [37] Although a causal relationship has not been established scientifically, it is certainly reasonable for parents to suspect and fear that by exposing psychologically immature students to confronting information on death and suicide, some students may be more likely to develop depression and hopelessness, which may contribute to reasons for committing suicide.

Drug-prevention education has also become very popular in schools. However, in 1976, Dr. Richard Blum of Stanford University published the results of a four-year study on a drug-prevention education course called Decide. The study found that students who took the course picked up drug use earlier and used drugs more extensively than a control group that did not take the course.

In both 1978 and 1985, professor Stephen Jurs conducted a research project comparing the rate of smoking and substance abuse among students who had taken a self-esteem course called Quest and those who had not. The course was designed to help students make wise and healthy decisions, but the results showed the opposite—participation was followed by an increase in drug experimentation. Those who didn’t take the course maintained a steady or lowered rate of smoking and substance abuse. [38]

Neither death education nor drug-prevention education has generated the expected outcome, so what was the real purpose? To pollute children.

Children are very curious but have an immature moral foundation. New and strange content stimulates their curiosity and can lead them down a dark path. In the meantime, such education tends to desensitize students, making them view violence, pornography, terror, and moral decadence as simply normal parts of life. Their tolerance of evil increases in turn. The entire exercise is part of an evil use of art, violence, and pornography to bring about moral decline.

Pornographic Sex Education

Traditionally in both the East and the West, sex has been a taboo topic in public. According to both traditions, the divine established that sexual conduct must take place only within marriage. All other forms of sexual conduct are considered promiscuous and sinful, violating the divine standards of morality. This makes sex and marriage inseparable, and sex can’t be a matter of public discussion in a properly functioning society. In traditional society, the youth received education in physiology, and there was no need for today’s version of sex education.

The modern concept of sex education was first introduced by Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, founder of the Frankfurt School of social theory and philosophy. His purpose was to completely overturn traditional Western values. In 1919, Lukács was appointed minister of culture in the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik regime. He developed a radical sex-education program that taught students about free love, and that marriage was outdated.

In the United States, Alfred Kinsey, financed by the Rockefeller foundations, published his best-selling Kinsey Reports — two books titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In his since-debunked research, he used pedophiles to conduct sexual experiments on infants and children. Kinsey’s idea that children are “sexual beings” from birth and must be explicitly educated in every manner of sexual activity is the foundation of modern sex education. [39]

The sexual revolution of the 1960s annihilated the remaining traditional Western values. Rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy began to rise rapidly. Those who wanted to solve such social problems promoted sex education. But in the education system that had already deviated from traditional moral teachings, sex education treated intercourse as disconnected from marriage and instead emphasized safety (preventing disease and pregnancy) — thus following the Lukács model of sex education by ignoring all moral aspects of sexual activity.

This form of education then became a tool for destroying youth. Students have also been exposed to the extramarital, promiscuous conduct of homosexuality, thus normalizing such behavior. The result of all this has been that the younger generation indulges in what they think is freedom, while in reality, it is a path that turns away from divinely ordained standards. This sort of sex education from elementary school onward has already destroyed the traditional values of family, individual responsibility, love, chastity, honor, self-control, loyalty, and more.

Dewey’s “learning by doing” form of progressive education is a convenient tool for Marxists.

The sex-education program Focus on Kids, widely promoted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recommends an activity in which teachers organize students to compete in a “condom race.” Each student must put a condom on an adult sex toy and then remove it. Whoever finishes fastest wins. [40] In another Focus on Kids exercise, the teacher instructs students to brainstorm ways to be intimate. Be Proud! Be Responsible! is another program endorsed by the CDC and promoted by Planned Parenthood and other organizations. The program requires students to role play — for example, pretending to be two female students discussing having safer sex together. [41] To the majority of people who still have traditional values in their hearts, it is difficult to distinguish these supposedly educational activities from child pornography.

The main proponent of the program, Planned Parenthood, is the biggest provider of sex education in the United States and has a presence in many countries around the world. It also promotes abortion rights. The organization was founded in 1921 as the American Birth Control League. Its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a progressive socialist who traveled to Stalin’s Russia, where she solidified her belief in eugenics. “We should breed out the feebleminded families who have done and still are doing much social and racial damage,” she said in a draft article. Sanger was also a strong proponent of the sexual liberation movement. She is on record as saying that an extramarital affair she had “really set me free.” [42] She even gave her sixteen-year-old granddaughter the advice to engage frequently in sexual intercourse, saying that “three times a day was about right.” [43]

Sex education textbook It’s Perfectly Normal has been translated into twenty-one languages and has sold more than one million copies worldwide. The book uses almost one hundred nude cartoons to depict various normal and abnormal movements, feelings, and physical sensations of masturbation between opposite sexes and homosexuals, as well as birth control methods and abortion. The author claims that children have the right to know all such information. [44] The main theme of the book is that a variety of sexual behaviors are all “perfectly normal” and that none should be subject to moral judgment.

In a widely used high school sex-education textbook, the author teaches children that some religions believe that sex outside of marriage is sinful, then writes, “You will have to decide for yourself how important these messages are for you.” [45] To summarize, this worldview holds that all values are relative, and that right and wrong are for children to decide for themselves.

Today, US public schools have two basic types of sex-education classes. One type that’s strongly promoted by educational organizations was described earlier: the complete sex-education curriculum, which includes instruction on sexual behavior, birth control, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, and the like. The other type teaches young people to control their sexual desire, does not discuss birth control, and encourages abstinence from sex until after marriage.

It is undeniable that social morality, especially the general attitude toward sex, has deviated far from traditional, faith-based morality. The media and the internet are flooded with pornographic content, all of which drags children toward the edge of the abyss. In today’s educational field controlled by atheism, most public schools that follow “value neutrality” don’t want to, or don’t dare to, teach children that sex outside of marriage is immoral, nor do they teach children right from wrong based on traditional moral principles.

Sex education remains a controversial topic in society today. There are numerous arguments in different sectors around the issue of safety in sexual activity, focusing on the rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, the fact that schools are publicly teaching teenagers about sexual behavior will obviously increase sex outside of marriage, which violates traditional sexual morality. Even if there were no teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases, would that mean promiscuity among teenagers would be acceptable? With a decadent attitude toward sexual conduct in ascendance, communism is working to achieve its goal of destroying human morality.

Self-Esteem and Egocentrism

Since the 1960s, a new dogma heavily promoted in schools is responsible for a major downward slide in educational quality: the cult of “self-esteem.” On its surface, self-esteem should refer to a feeling of confidence and self-respect that arises from one’s own abilities and accomplishments. However, the self-esteem promoted in US schools is something entirely different.

In her book The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America’s Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, education researcher Maureen Stout writes about a common phenomenon in American schools: Students care about their grades, but don’t care about what they learned or how much effort they put in. To satisfy the students’ demands for better grades, teachers are forced to reduce the difficulty of exams and assignments. But this only results in even less effort on the part of underperforming students.

Stout asserts that teachers seem accustomed to the phenomenon and are even of the belief that school should be like the womb — isolated from the outside world so students can gain emotional comfort but not intellectual development or resilience. The focus is on students’ feelings, rather than their overall growth. [46]

As many commentators have pointed out, the dogma of self-esteem confuses cause and effect. Self-esteem is the outcome of effort, not a precondition for success. In other words, feeling good does not lead to success, but one feels good after a success.

This misconception of self-esteem is the by-product of the psychotherapeutic style of education ascendant since the 1960s. Psychotherapeutic education ended up indoctrinating a large number of young people with a sense of entitlement and victimhood. Stout delineates the common mindset as “I want to do what I want, how I want and when I want, and nothing and no one is going to stop me.” [47]

American education exaggerates the ideas of freedom and self-centeredness in the name of sentimental self-esteem. This style of education produces generations of young people who don’t value morality and don’t assume responsibility. They care only about their own feelings and not other people’s feelings. They pursue enjoyment but try to avoid effort, sacrifice, and suffering. This has wreaked havoc on the morality of American society.

e. The Infiltration of Education

Control Over US Elementary and Secondary Education

For a long while after the founding of the United States, the federal government was not involved in education; those decisions were the responsibility of state governments. In 1979, the federal government established the Department of Education and its jurisdiction has been enlarged ever since. Currently, its power over education strategies and the allocation of education budgets far surpasses what it previously had. Parents, school districts, and state governments, which used to have a greater say in education, are increasingly compelled to take orders from federal government officials. Parents and school districts have gradually lost their power to decide what gets taught and how it’s taught.

Power itself is neutral — those who wield it can do either good or bad. The centralization of power in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather a matter of how the person or institution uses its power and to what end. Centralization in American education has become a major issue due to Marxist infiltration at all levels, especially the central bureaucracy. Under such circumstances, once a wrong decision is made, the impact is extensive and the few clear-headed individuals who remain cannot simply reverse it.

As explained by writer and former teacher Beverly K. Eakman, one of the results from the centralization of power in American education is that the officials in charge can’t, over a short time span, see how their educational strategies develop historically and how large of an impact they have over time. Although some strategies may raise doubts, most people do not have the time, energy, resources, or courage to investigate for themselves. Even if their suspicions are aroused in some cases, without other pieces of the puzzle, they can do little more than obey what they’re told by their supervisors. Everyone thus becomes part of a gigantic machine. It is difficult for them to see the consequences of their decisions on students and society, and as a result, their moral accountability is attenuated. [48] Communism can take advantage of the weaknesses in this system and break down society’s defenses layer by layer.

Moreover, teachers’ colleges, publishing houses, educational accreditation organizations, and teacher-accreditation institutions have decisive impacts on education, and therefore have all become targets of infiltration.

The Role of Teachers’ Unions

Chapter Nine of this book discussed how communism manipulates and utilizes unions. Teachers’ unions have become one of the key reasons behind the failure of American education. These unions do not care about raising the quality of education, instead becoming professional organizations that reward failure, protect incompetence, and sacrifice conscientious teachers who aspire to make a contribution in their career and who truly dedicate themselves to teaching students.

In the article “How Teachers’ Unions Handcuff Schools,” City Journal editor and writer Sol Stern gives the example of Tracey Bailey, a former high school science teacher who won the National Teacher of the Year Award in 1993. At the time, the chief of the American Federation of Teachers called Bailey to say how he was pleased that a union member had won the honor. Bailey later dropped his membership and now believes that big teachers’ unions are a primary reason for the failure of American public education. He holds that unions are simply special interest groups protecting the status quo and pillars of “a system that too often rewards mediocrity and incompetence.” [49]

Major American teachers’ unions are well funded and have immense influence; they are ranked among the most powerful political lobby groups in the country, and they have become the primary obstacle that hinders positive reform within the education system. For example, the California Teachers Association, under the American Federation of Teachers, uses its huge war chest collected from members to push for legislation and make political donations.

In 1991, California sought to add Proposition 174 to its state constitution, allowing families to use school vouchers provided by the state government to choose the best schools for their children. However, the California Teachers Association blocked the proposition and even threatened schools into revoking their contracts with a hamburger franchise that had donated $25,000 to support the proposition. [50]

The Exclusion of Family From Children’s Education

Another key goal of communism is the removal of the child from his or her parents as soon as he or she is born, having the community or nation raise the child instead. This is not an easy feat, but things have been quietly moving in this direction.

In communist countries, students from the “bourgeoisie” class are encouraged to sever their relationships with their parents. In addition, exam-centric education extends the time that students must spend in school, thus reducing the impact parents can have on their children.

In Western countries, different approaches are used to exclude the influence of the family from children’s education. These include maximizing students’ school time, reducing the age requirement for children to attend school, preventing students from taking textbooks and study materials home, and discouraging students from sharing controversial topics they learned in class with their parents.

Courses such as “values clarification education” attempt to separate students from their parents. A parent of a student taking the Quest class commented: “It seemed as if the parents were always put in a bad light. The story would be about a father and his son, say; and the father was always overbearing, always too strict, always unfair.” Oftentimes, the subtext of such courses is “your parents don’t understand you, but we do.” [51]

Sometimes, due to legal requirements, students must first obtain parental consent before they can participate in certain activities. On such occasions, teachers or administrative staff may use misleading and ambiguous words to make it very difficult for parents to know the details of what they’re agreeing to. If parents complain, school authorities or the school district have methods of dealing with the complaint: procrastinating, shirking responsibility, or taking a superior stance. For example, they might say that parents do not have the professional knowledge of educators, that other school districts are doing the same thing, that only your family is complaining, and so on.

Most parents don’t have the time or resources to engage in a prolonged argument with the school or school district. Moreover, in a few years, the student will graduate. Parents will generally choose to keep quiet. In the meantime, the child is almost held hostage by the school, and parents don’t dare to offend the school authorities. When parents do protest against school practices, school authorities may label them as extremists, troublemakers, religious bigots, fanatics, fascists, and the like. By doing so, school authorities deter other parents from voicing an objection. [52]

Misleading and Obscure Education Jargon

In the preface to her book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, Iserbyt points out that America is engaged in a secret war, in which the wagers use sophisticated tools such as “Hegelian dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise),” “gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward),” and “semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding).” [53]

Schlafly also wrote about this phenomenon. In the foreword to her book Child Abuse in the Classroom, she said that psychotherapy classes use a set of special terms to prevent parents from understanding the true purpose and method of such courses. These terms include behavior modification, higher-order critical thinking, moral reasoning, and so on. [54]

For decades, American educators have created a dazzling array of terms such as constructivism, cooperative learning, experiential learning, deep understanding, problem-solving, inquiry-based and outcome-based education, personalized learning, conceptual understanding, procedural skills, lifelong learning, student–teacher interactive instruction, and so on. There are too many to list. Some concepts appear reasonable, but investigation into the context of the terms and where they lead to reveals that their purpose is to discredit traditional education and advance the dumbing down of education. [55]

Large-Scale Changes to Subjects and Textbooks

None Dare Call It Treason, published in 1964, analyzes the textbook reform program of the 1930s. This reform combined content from different disciplines, such as history, geography, sociology, economics, and political science, into a set of textbooks that abandoned the content, value system, and way of codifying found in traditional textbooks. “So pronounced was the anti-religious bias” and “so open was the propaganda for socialistic control of men’s lives” that the textbooks downgraded American heroes and the US Constitution, author John A. Stormer writes. [56]

The set of textbooks was extensive and did not fall within the scope of any traditional discipline; therefore, experts in various disciplines did not pay much attention to it. Many years later, when the public realized the problem and began to oppose the materials, five million students had already been educated with them. By then, it was impossible to change the textbooks back to their traditional form.

If changes to textbooks had been implemented in a transparent way, they would have been questioned and met with resistance from experts and parents. The newly edited textbooks, which mixed several subjects together, didn’t belong to any clear subject taxonomy, so experts had difficulty judging the content that went outside their professional knowledge. This made it relatively easy for the books to pass reviews and be accepted by a school district and society.

Similar changes to school curricula and teaching materials continued to take place throughout the century. While a minority of people may recognize and oppose these moves, their voices are ignored and have little chance of stopping the planned changes amid the presence of progressive lobbying. After several rounds of reforms, the new generation of students is then separated even further from tradition, making it almost impossible to go back.

American textbooks are constantly undergoing updates and revisions. Some say it’s because knowledge has grown at an accelerating rate. However, the basic knowledge to be gained in primary and secondary school does not change much. So why have there been so many different textbooks published and continuously reprinted? The surface reason is that publishers compete with each other. Superficially, in order to pursue profits, they don’t want students to repeatedly use the same set of textbooks for many years. But at a deeper level, just like the reorganization of textbook content, the process has been used to distort the teaching materials for the next generation.

Education Reform: A Dialectic Struggle

Since the 1950s and 1960s, American education has seen a series of reforms, but none brought the expected improvements. In 1981, American students’ SAT scores reached a record low, triggering the publication of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk and the ensuing “back to basics” movement. In order to change the embarrassing condition of education in the United States, several administrations since the 1990s have successively launched large-scale reforms, to little effect. Not only did they not help, but they also brought problems that were more difficult to solve. [57]

Most people involved in education reform sincerely want to do good for students and society, but due to the influence of various communist ideas, their intentions often backfire. The results of many of these reforms end up promoting communist ideas. Just as in other fields, the infiltration through education reform doesn’t need to win everything in one battle.

The success of a reform is not its true goal. In fact, every reform is designed to first fail in order to provide an excuse for the next reform. Every reform is a deeper deviation than the last, each further alienating people from tradition. This is the dialectic of struggle — one step back, then two steps forward. In this way, people will not only not regret the collapse of tradition — they won’t even know what it is.

2. Communism in Western Universities

Four years of intensive indoctrination leave today’s college graduates with a predisposition for liberalism and progressivism. They are more likely to accept atheism, the theory of evolution, and materialism without a second thought. Many become narrow-minded “snowflakes” who lack common sense and pursue hedonistic lifestyles without taking responsibility for their actions. They lack knowledge, have a narrow worldview, know very little or nothing about the history of America or the world, and have become the main target for communist deception.

Unlike the rebellious but eloquent student leaders of the 1960s, today’s young protesters who are interviewed by television news reporters rarely articulate their demands clearly. They lack basic common sense and reason.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the mainstream media’s longstanding vilification of conservative candidates, coupled with misleading polls, meant that many were left in shock — particularly young college students — when the results were announced. Following Donald Trump’s victory, a ridiculous phenomenon appeared at universities around the United States. Some students felt such fear, exhaustion, or emotional trauma from the election that they demanded that classes be canceled and exams be rescheduled. In order to relieve students of their stress and anxiety, some prominent schools organized various “therapeutic” activities.

These included playing with Play-Doh or building blocks, coloring, and blowing bubbles. Some even provided cats and dogs for petting in order to console students. A number of universities provided students with psychological counseling, organized support groups, or created “safe spaces” where students could seek help “recovering” from and processing the election results. [58] The absurdity of how a normal democratic process became more terrifying than a natural disaster or terrorist attack demonstrates the utter failure of the American education system. College students, who should be mature and rational, became intolerant and infantile when confronted with change and supposed adversity.

In the eyes of the world, the United States is still a leader in education. For over a century, the United States has been a political, economic, and military superpower. Its education spending far exceeds that of most countries. After World War II, American democracy and affluence attracted talented people from around the world. Its science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate programs and professional schools are second to none.

However, a crisis is unfolding within. The proportion of foreign students in graduate STEM programs far exceeds that of American students, and the gap is increasing each year. [59] This reflects the erosion of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education across the United States. Students are purposefully being dumbed down and ruined.

It should be emphasized that nearly all people in the world, especially those who attended college after the 1960s, have been exposed to communist influences. The humanities and social sciences are the most affected. Only a few individuals set out to intentionally promote communist ideology, but the majority of people in these fields have been unknowingly indoctrinated. Here we expose communism’s aims so that people can identify and distance themselves from them.

a. The Leftist Slant of University Faculties

One of the most important causes of students’ embrace of socialist or communist ideology, and their acceptance of radical ideologies such as feminism and that of the environmental movement (see Chapter 16), is that a large proportion of staff at American universities leans to the left. Scholars with different ideas have been either marginalized in their teaching positions or barred from voicing their views.

In a 2007 study titled “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” among the 1,417 full-time college faculty members surveyed, 44.1 percent considered themselves liberal, 46.1 percent moderate, and only 9.2 percent conservative. At liberal arts colleges, 61 percent of faculty were liberal, while conservatives made up just 3.9 percent. [60]

Studies after 2007 also confirm the leftist trend among professors at four-year universities in the United States. A study published in Econ Journal Watch in 2016 surveyed the voter registration status of professors in the departments of history and social sciences at 40 leading US universities. Among 7,243 professors surveyed, there were 3,623 Democrats and 314 Republicans, or a ratio of 11.5 to 1. Among the five departments surveyed, the department of history was the most uneven, with a 35-to-1 ratio. Contrast this with a similar study published in 1968 that found that among history professors, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 2.7 to 1. [61]

Another study of four-year college and university faculties in 2016 found that the political inclination of professors was particularly uneven in New England. Based on 2014 data, the study found that the ratio of liberal to conservative professors at colleges and universities nationwide was 6 to 1. In New England, this ratio was 28 to 1. A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center found that among those who had studied in graduate schools, 31 percent held consistently liberal views, 23 percent tended to be mostly liberal, 10 percent held consistently conservative views, and 17 percent tended to be mostly conservative. The study found that since 1994, the number of those who had received graduate-level education and who held consistently liberal views had increased significantly. [62] Panelists at an American Enterprise Institute seminar in 2016 said that about 18 percent of social scientists in the United States considered themselves Marxists, while only 5 percent considered themselves conservative. [63]

Sen. Ted Cruz once commented, about the law school of a prestigious university he attended: “There were more self-declared communists [in the faculty] than there were Republicans. … If you asked [them] to vote on whether this nation should become a socialist nation, 80 percent of the faculty would vote yes and 10 percent would think that was too conservative.” [64]

Communism began its penetration of American education with the universities at the beginning of the twentieth century, when many American intellectuals began accepting communist ideas or its Fabian socialist variant. [65]

The 1960s counterculture movement produced a large number of young anti-traditional students. In these people’s formative years, they were influenced greatly by cultural Marxism and Frankfurt School theory. In 1973, after President Richard Nixon withdrew American troops from Vietnam, student groups associated with the anti-war movement began to fade into obscurity, as the main reason for protest was gone. But the radicalism brewed by these large-scale student movements did not disappear.

Radical students went on to pursue graduate studies in the social and cultural fields — in journalism, literature, philosophy, sociology, education, cultural studies, and the like. After receiving their degrees, they began careers in the institutions with the most influence over society and culture, such as universities, news media, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. What guided them at that time was mainly the theory of “the long march through the institutions” proposed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. This “long march” aimed to alter the most important traditions of Western civilization.

Marcuse was regarded as a “spiritual godfather” by rebellious Western students. In 1974, he asserted that the New Left did not die, “and it will resurrect in the universities.” [66] In fact, the New Left has not only survived, but its long march through the institutions has been wildly successful.

As one radical professor wrote: “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while — to the unobservant — that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.” [67]

The term “tenured radicals” was coined by Roger Kimball in his 1989 book of the same name, and referred to the radical students who had been active in the anti-war, civil rights, or feminist movements of the 1960s, later entered universities to teach, and obtained tenure in the 1980s. From there, they inculcated students with their system of political values and created a new generation of radicals. Some of these 1960s radicals became department heads and deans. The purpose of their scholarly work was not to explore the truth, but to use academia as a tool for undermining Western civilization and traditions. They aimed to subvert mainstream society and the political system by producing more revolutionaries like themselves.

Once tenured, professors can participate in various committees and have considerable say in recruiting new faculty members, setting academic standards, selecting topics for graduate theses, and determining the direction of research. They have ample means to use their power to exclude candidates who do not conform to their ideology. For this reason, more traditionally minded individuals who teach and do research according to traditional concepts are being steadily marginalized. As older professors retire, those who replace them are mostly leftist scholars who have been indoctrinated with communist ideas.

Gramsci divided intellectuals into two camps: “traditional” intellectuals and “organic” intellectuals. The former are the backbone of maintaining traditional culture and social order, while the latter belong to newly emerging classes or groups and play a creative role in the process of fighting for hegemony in their classes or groups. [68] In this view, the proletariat uses organic intellectuals on its path to seizing cultural and eventually political power. Many tenured radicals would define themselves as organic intellectuals who oppose the current system. Like Gramsci, they follow the Marxian axiom that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” [69]

In this way, education for the Left is not about imparting the essence of knowledge and human civilization, but for priming students for radical politics, social activism, and “social justice.” After graduation and upon joining society, they vent their dissatisfaction with the current system by rebelling against traditional culture and calling for destructive revolution.

b. Reshaping Traditional Academics With Communist Ideology

While Marxism-Leninism is the guiding ideology for every subject in communist countries, academic freedom is a core focus in the West. Aside from ubiquitous moral standards and academic norms, there shouldn’t be any bias in favor of particular intellectual trends. But since the 1930s, socialism, communism, Marxism, and the theories of the Frankfurt School have entered American colleges in force, severely altering the humanities and social sciences.

Revolutionary Discourse Dominates the Humanities in America

Author Bruce Bawer once asked Alan Charles Kors, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, about which three books he thought had had the deepest influence on the humanities in the United States. With hardly a pause, Kors named Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. [70]

Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, needs no further introduction as his work has been described in previous chapters. Freire, a Brazilian educational theorist, adored Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968 and reprinted in English two years later, has become mandatory reading at many academic institutions in the United States.

Freire’s Pedagogy doesn’t concern itself with any specific educational problems, but is rather “a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies,” as described by City Journal’s Stern. [71] Freire’s work does no more than repeat the Marxist view that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed should, then, reject their education, be awakened to their miserable circumstances, and be spurred to rebellion.

Fanon was born on Martinique Island in the Caribbean and joined the Algerian war against French colonial rule. His The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 with a preface by French existentialist and communist Jean-Paul Sartre, who summarized Fanon’s theory as thus: Western colonizers are the embodiment of evil, whereas non-Westerners are inherently noble by virtue of their being colonized and exploited.

Fanon called on people in the colonies to engage in violent revolt against the colonial ruling class. He said: “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” [72]

Embracing Fanon’s ideas, Sartre wrote in the preface: “For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.” [73]

The ideas of Gramsci, Freire, and Fanon are deceptive narratives that entice people to regard history and society through the lens of class struggle. Once the spark of class hatred enters their hearts, students learn to resent and oppose the normal structure and workings of society, for which the inevitable solution is rebellion and revolution.

Which particular theorist or school of thought has had the greatest influence on humanities and social sciences in American colleges is a matter of debate. What’s clear, however, is that Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Freudian theory, and postmodernism (which worked alongside communism in destroying culture and morality) have come to dominate the field.

Communist Theory Permeates Academia

Since the 1960s, the discipline of literary research in the United States has experienced a fundamental paradigm shift across its various subfields. Traditionally, literary critics appreciated the moral and aesthetic values of classic works, considering literature an important resource for broadening readers’ horizons, developing their moral character, and cultivating their intellectual taste. As a matter of principle, academic literary theory is secondary to the literature itself, serving as an aid to its comprehension and interpretation.

Following the popular trends in philosophy, psychology, and culture, various new literary theories emerged in the academic community during the height of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. The relationship between theory and literature was thrown in reverse as the actual works were reduced to material for validating modern interpretative approaches. [74]

What is the substance of these theories? Taken together, they make a mess of traditional academic disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis, in their slanted depiction of society and culture. As literary theorist Jonathan Culler put it, “Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as ‘common sense’ is, in fact, a historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don’t even see it as a theory.” [75]

In other words, modern academic theories belittle, reverse, and destroy the understandings of right and wrong, good and evil, and beauty and ugliness that come from a traditional family upbringing, religious faith, and ethics, while replacing them with a sinister system devoid of positive values.

Peeling off their labyrinthine academic packaging, these so-called theories are no more than a jumbling of classical and neo-Marxism, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Together they form an axis that aims to destroy the foundations of human civilization and serves as a camouflage for communism to burrow into Western academia. Since the 1960s, communism has made rapid breakthroughs in areas such as literature, history, and philosophy, establishing its dominance in the humanities and social sciences.

“Theory,” as has been discussed, is more or less the same thing as “critical theory.” Its permutations include the newly emerged critical studies of law, race, gender, society, science, medicine, and the like. Its pervasiveness is the result of communism’s successful expansion into the academic and educational fields, corrupting youth with deviated thought and laying a path for the eventual destruction of humankind.

The Politicization of Literary Research

From the perspective of a Marxist literary critic, the significance of a literary text lies not in its intrinsic value, but rather in how it reflects the ideology of the ruling class, or its stance on issues emphasized by the Left, such as gender and race. From this perspective, the classics are said to have no intrinsic value at all. A prominent American Marxist literary theorist outright declared that the political interpretation of literature constitutes “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.” [76] That is to say, all literary works should be treated as political allegories, and only when the deeper meanings of class, race, gender, or sexual oppression are uncovered can one’s understanding be considered profound or qualified.

People from communist countries are familiar with this kind of dogmatic literary criticism. Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong summed up Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the four great Chinese classics, as “four families, fierce class struggle, and a few dozen human lives.”

In communist countries, literary discourse is not always confined to civilized and sophisticated debates of the ivory tower. It can sometimes become the impetus for bloody struggle. The decadelong brutality of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s was sparked by the official rebuke of a literary work.

In 1959, in response to Mao’s call to learn from the honest and upright Ming Dynasty official Hai Rui, leading historian Wu Han was advised by a top propaganda official that he should begin studying the historic figure and write about him. In 1961, Wu finished penning the stage drama Hai Rui Dismissed From Office, depicting the life of the official who dared to criticize the emperor and was imprisoned for it. Several years later, on November 10, 1965, Shanghai’s Wenhui News published a critical review of the play. The review had been jointly planned by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and radical theorist Zhang Chunqiao. It claimed that the play was an allusion to Peng Dehuai, a People’s Liberation Army general who was purged for his opposition to the Communist Party’s Three Red Flags — the General Line for Socialist Construction, the Great Leap Forward, and the People’s Communes. In the 1950s, these policies led to the Great Famine, which starved tens of millions of people, and in the early 1960s weakened Mao’s position in the regime. At a time when Mao and his supporters were looking for ways to restore his prestige, the criticism of Hai Rui Dismissed From Office became the fuse for the political decisions that led to the Cultural Revolution.

The Chinese communists’ crude approach to interpreting all literary works in terms of class struggle can be contrasted with the much subtler literary criticism found in Western colleges over the last few decades.

Western neo-Marxist literary criticism is like a virus that becomes stronger and deadlier through endless mutation. It adapts other theories to become its weapons, dragging the great works of human culture — from the classics of Greece and Rome to Dante, Shakespeare, and Victorian novels — onto the literary operating table to be dismembered and reconfigured.

Though this type of commentary makes use of arcane jargon to create the veneer of sophistication, the main arguments typically boil down to accusations of prejudice against disenfranchised classes, women, or ethnic minorities.

Modern critiques label these works as belonging to the superstructure of the ruling class, and describe them as having the effect of numbing the masses to their oppressive conditions and preventing them from achieving revolutionary class consciousness. As English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton said, “The methods of the new literary theorist are really weapons of subversion: an attempt to destroy humane education from within, to rupture the chain of sympathy that binds us to our culture.” [77]

The Marxist Theory of Ideology

“Ideology” is a core concept in the Marxist-influenced humanities. Marx viewed morality, religion, and metaphysics collectively as ideology. He believed that the dominant ideology in a class-based society was the ideology of the ruling class, and that its values did not reflect reality, but rather its inverse. [78]

Twentieth-century neo-Marxism has made the destruction of culture a necessary stage of revolution and makes extensive reference to ideology in its literature. Lukács defined ideology as the “false consciousness” as opposed to the real “class consciousness.” French Marxist Louis Althusser proposed the concept of the “ideological state apparatuses,” which include religion, education, family, law, politics, trade unions, communication, and culture, that would work in conjunction with a brutal state apparatus.

The Marxist concept of ideology is a work of cunning sophistry. Every society or system has its shortcomings that should be articulated and corrected. However, Althusser and other Marxists do not concern themselves with specific problems. Instead, they reject the system in its entirety on the grounds that it is a structure set up and maintained by the ruling class to safeguard its own interests.

Poisoning the well is an important aspect of the Marxist fixation on ideology, and can be seen in Althusser’s convoluted ideological critique. Instead of examining the factual merits of an argument, the ideological approach relies on accusing opponents of harboring ulterior motives or of being from the wrong background. Just as no one wants to drink from a poisoned well, subjecting a person to rumors or other forms of character assassination makes his opinion unacceptable to the public — no matter how reasonable or logical he may be. Althusser’s concept of “ideological state apparatuses” reflects communism’s extreme contempt for human society — nothing is acceptable short of complete rejection and destruction. This is a manifestation of communism’s aim to eradicate human culture.

The Marxist concept of ideology rests on abstract, generalized, and false propositions that aim to purge traditional moral values. While masking their real intentions by expressing ostensible moral indignation, Marxists have deceived and influenced vast numbers of people.

Postmodern Marxism

In the wake of the 1960s, a group of French philosophers created what soon became the most powerful ideological weapon for Marxism and communism in the American academic community: deconstruction. These philosophers included Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In 2007, Foucault was the most-cited author in the humanities, with 2,521 citations. Derrida ranked third, having been cited 1,874 times. [79] There are deep connections between postmodernism and Marxism, so we find it apt to refer to it broadly as postmodern Marxism. [80]

The fact that language possesses ambiguous and multifaceted layers of meaning, and that a text may have different interpretations, has been common knowledge since at least the time of the ancient Greeks and pre-imperial China. However, Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, an elaborate deception that combines atheism and relativism, works by exaggerating the ambiguity of language to break down texts even where the meaning is clear and well-defined.

Unlike conventional atheists, Derrida expressed his views in the language of philosophers. As a result, his viewpoints are not only destructive to the idea of God, but also to the concepts of rationality, authority, and meaning as associated with traditional beliefs, as theorists aligned with Derrida carry out their deconstruction of these terms. Having deceived many people with its veneer of intellectual depth, deconstructionist theory ran rampant throughout the humanities and took its place as one of communism’s most potent tools for destroying faith, tradition, and culture.

The essence of Foucault’s theory revolves around the notion that there is no truth, only power. Since power monopolizes the right to interpret truth, anything that purports truth is hypocritical and untrustworthy. In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault, who once joined the French Communist Party, asked the question, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” [81] In equating indispensable institutions of society with prisons and calling on people to overthrow these “prisons,” Foucault lays bare the antisocial nature of his theory.

Armed with the weapons of deconstruction, Foucault’s theory, and other critical theories, scholars have stigmatized tradition and morality by relativizing everything. They thrive on axioms like “all interpretation is misinterpretation,” “there is no truth, only interpretations,” or “there are no facts, only interpretations.” They have relativized the understanding of basic concepts such as truth, kindness, beauty, justice, and so on, and then discarded them as trash.

Young students taking liberal arts courses dare not question the authority of their instructors. Staying clear-minded under the sustained ideological bombardment that follows is harder still. Once geared to the study of postmodern Marxist theory, it is difficult to get them to think in any other way. This is a major means by which communist ideology has been able to run amuck in the humanities and social sciences.

c. Using New Academic Fields for Ideological Infiltration

In a normal society, women’s studies, research on racial minorities, and the study of foreign cultures reflect the prosperity and diversity of the academic community. Following the 1960s counterculture movement, however, some radicals made use of these new disciplines to spread their left-leaning ideas in universities and research institutes. In recent decades, academic disciplines such as feminist studies, queer studies, and various departments dedicated to non-white minorities became ubiquitous throughout American universities.

The basic premise of women’s studies is that sex differences are not the result of biological differences, but rather are social constructs. Alleging that women have long been suppressed by men and patriarchy, the field of women’s studies sets out to trigger feminist social consciousness and bring about social change and revolution.

One feminist professor at the University of California–Santa Cruz grew up in a famous communist family. She proudly displayed her credentials as a communist and a lesbian activist. Since the 1980s, she had been teaching feminism and regarded her sexual orientation as a way to arouse political consciousness. Her inspiration for becoming a professor was a fellow communist, who had told her it was her mission to do so. In a public statement, she said that “teaching became a form of political activism for me.” [82] In one of her syllabi, she wrote that female homosexuality is “the highest state of feminism.” [83]

The University of Missouri has designed its courses to prime students to see the issues of feminism, literature, gender, and peace from the position of the Left. For example, a course called Outlaw Gender saw the sexes as “artificial categories produced by a particular culture,” rather than being naturally produced. Only one viewpoint was instilled in students — the narrative of gender-based oppression and discrimination against multiple-gender identities. [84]

As discussed in Chapter Five, the anti-war movement in the Western world following World War II was heavily influenced by communists. In recent decades, a new subject, Peace Studies, has emerged at American universities. Scholars David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin studied more than 250 organizations that had some connection to the new academic field. They concluded that these organizations were political, not academic, in nature, and their aim was to recruit students to the anti-war Left. [85]

Citing the popular textbook Peace and Conflict Studies, Horowitz and Laksin laid out the ideological motivations of the field. The textbook uses Marxist arguments to explain the problems of poverty and starvation. The author condemned landowners and agricultural merchants, claiming that their greed led to the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. Though the point is ostensibly against violence, there is one form of violence that the author does not oppose, and in fact praises: violence committed in the course of proletarian revolution.

A passage from Peace and Conflict Studies says the following: “While Cuba is far from an earthly paradise, and certain individual rights and civil liberties are not yet widely practiced, the case of Cuba indicates that violent revolutions can sometimes result in generally improved living conditions for many people.” The book makes no mention of Castro’s dictatorship or the catastrophic results of the Cuban Revolution.

Written after 9/11, Peace and Conflict Studies also touched on terrorism. Surprisingly, its authors seem to have so much sympathy for the terrorists that the term “terrorist” is in quotation marks. They defend their stance by saying: “Placing ‘terrorist’ in quotation marks may be jarring for some readers, who consider the designation self-evident. We do so, however, not to minimize the horror of such acts but to emphasize the value of qualifying righteous indignation by the recognition that often one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another’s ‘freedom fighter.’” [86]

The Civil Rights Movement is rightfully noted for its supporters’ peaceful advocacy of greater representation for African-Americans. However, not all activism at the time was carried out in good faith. In US colleges, the establishment of departments dedicated to African-American studies was in some cases the result of intimidation and political blackmail. In the late 1960s, student strikes and intimidation on the campuses of San Francisco State College, University of California–Santa Barbara, and Cornell University led to the establishment of the country’s first black studies departments. At Cornell, faculty caved after more than one hundred black students showed up to demand the establishment of a black research department staffed solely by black people. Some of the protesters brandished shotguns and waved packs of ammunition. [87]

Shelby Steele, who became a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, voiced his opposition to affirmative action and the establishment of black research departments at universities. He said that university leaders had such a strong sense of “white guilt” that they would agree to any request from the representatives of black student unions. [88]

Academia should be objective and avoid harboring political agendas. However, these new academic fields have adopted an ideological stand: Professors of women’s studies must embrace feminism, while professors involved in black studies must believe that the political, economic, and cultural hardships of African-Americans result from discrimination by whites. Their existence is not to explore the truth, but to promote an ideological narrative.

These new subjects are byproducts of the American cultural revolution. Having been established in universities, these new fields of study have expanded by demanding higher budgets and recruiting more students, who further strengthen them. These new fields, which are already deeply ingrained in academia, were created by people acting under the influence of communist ideology. Their aim is to foment and expand conflict among different groups and to incite hatred in preparation for violent revolution. They have little relation to the people (African-Americans, women, or others) they claim to stand for.

d. Promoting Leftist Radicalism

In their book One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, Horowitz and Laksin listed about 150 leftist courses offered at twelve universities. These courses masked their political intent with scholarly language, but some of them neglected even basic academic principles, making them closely resemble political courses that are mandatory in communist countries. For example, the Community Studies Department at the University of California–Santa Cruz previously offered a seminar with a course description that read: “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.” [89]

Bill Ayers, previously a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago, is a 1960s-era radical and co-founder of Weather Underground, originally called Weatherman, which was a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1969, when SDS collapsed, Weather Underground stepped in, dedicating its efforts to organizing radical students, who took part in terrorist activities designed to inflame racial conflict. Weather Underground, which came to be designated as a domestic terrorist organization, perpetrated bombings at the Capitol, the New York City Police headquarters, the Pentagon, and offices of the National Guard. A well-known quote from Ayers says: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” Ayers’s academic publications are consistent with his resumé.

A web of left-wing progressives successfully prevented the FBI from arresting Ayers. He reemerged in 1980 and became a faculty member at the University of Illinois–Chicago, where he researched early childhood education. His political views were unchanged, and he has shown no remorse for his terrorist attacks. Ayers successively became associate professor, professor, and eventually reached the standing of distinguished professor. He also received the title of senior university scholar, the institution’s highest honor. [90]

Each title Ayers received was the result of a joint decision of his colleagues in the department. This itself reflects the university’s tacit acknowledgment and support for his terrorist past.

e. Denying America’s Great Traditions

A group of politically engaged students on the campus of Texas Tech University conducted a survey in 2014 asking three questions: who won the Civil War; who is our vice president; and who did we gain our independence from? Many students had no idea of the answers. While ignorant of these basic facts about their country’s politics and history, students were well-acquainted with the details of movie stars and their love affairs. [91]

In 2008, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted a random survey of 2,508 Americans and found that only half could name all three branches of government. [92] Answering thirty-three straightforward civics questions, 71 percent of the respondents received an average score of 49 percent, a failing mark. [93]

Learning American history is not just the process of understanding how the nation was established, but it is also a process of understanding the values upon which the nation was built and what it takes to preserve those traditions. Only in this way will its people cherish what they have today, protect their national legacy, and pass it to the next generation. Forgetting history is the same as destroying tradition. When people don’t know their civic duties, it’s possible for a totalitarian government to form.

One can’t help but wonder what happened to American history and civics education. The answers lie in the textbooks today’s students use and in their teachers. The Marxist Howard Zinn is the author of a popular history book titled A People’s History of the United States. This book revolves around the premise that all the heroic deeds and inspiring episodes recounted as part of American history are shameless lies, and that the true history of the United States is a dark journey of suppression, deprivation, and genocide.

An economics professor at a university in Boston claimed that the terrorists who are enemies of the United States were the real freedom fighters against evil, that is, the United States. In an article published in 2004, he equated the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks with the American rebels who, in 1775, fired the first shots in Lexington and started the American Revolutionary War. [94]

f. Opposing the Classics of Western Civilization

In 1988, radical students and teachers at Stanford University protested against a course called Western Civilization. They chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western Civ has got to go!” Stanford conceded to the protesters’ demands and replaced Western Civilization with a course called Cultures, Ideas, & Values (CIV). While the new class kept some of the Western cultural classics such as Homer, Plato, St. Augustine, Dante Alighieri, and Shakespeare, it did require that the course include works from several women, minority groups, and other groups of people deemed to have been subjected to oppression.

Then-US Secretary of Education William Bennett condemned the change as “an unfortunate capitulation to a campaign of pressure politics and intimidation.” Despite the criticism, many prominent universities did the same, and lesser colleges followed suit so as to not be left behind. In a few years, liberal arts education in American universities had experienced a great transformation.

The “politically correct” drive to expel the classics from American universities has led to various deleterious results, including the following:

1. Low-quality writing with shallow content that contains revolutionary narratives or that passes as “victim literature” displaces classic works and their everlasting profundity.

2. Placing these average works on the same level as the classics trivializes and relativizes the classics.

3. The guiding themes behind the classics are now interpreted using critical theory, cultural studies, identity politics, and political correctness. Scholars enthusiastically research the “hidden racism and sexism” in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, distorting and insulting classic works.

4. Students inculcated with this kind of mental attitude find the noble characters, great accomplishments, and moral lessons depicted in the classics hard to believe, and develop an instinct to instead see them in a negative and cynical light.

In traditional literary education, the main themes conveyed in the classics were universal love, justice, loyalty, courage, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and other moral values. Historical education revolved around major events concerning the establishment and development of the nation and its fundamental values.

Because the classics of Western literature are nearly all written by white European men, leftists take up the banners of multiculturalism and feminism to insist that people read literature by women, people of color, and so on. As for the teaching of history, modern education favors describing a country’s historical path as entirely dark, filled with slavery and exploitation of women and other minority groups. The object is no longer to recall the traditional legacy, but to instill a feeling of guilt toward groups designated as the “oppressed.”

Classic works embody the important experiences and lessons of the past, and studying them is essential for students to learn about their culture. When schools focus on politically correct or modern works and de-emphasize the classics, students receive less exposure to the wisdom contained in the latter, or learn to view them in a superficial, critical light. As a result of this kind of education, entire generations are alienated from the origins of their civilization and its unique system of faith and values.

g. Monopolizing Textbooks and Liberal Arts

Economist Paul Samuelson pointed to the power of textbooks when he said, “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treaties — if I can write its economics textbooks.” [95] Those textbooks that have a large circulation and carry an authoritative voice exert tremendous influence on students. Whoever writes the textbooks has the power to shape the impressionable minds of the young.

After radical scholars and professors received tenure and reputation, they gained control over university publication offices and committees. They used their authority to load teaching materials with their own ideologies and force-feed them to students. In some academic fields, the textbooks and required reading chosen by professors contain more works of Marxism than any other school of thought. A People’s History of the United States is required reading for many history, economics, literature, and women’s studies majors.

Once leftists enjoy strength in numbers, they can use the peer-review mechanism in the US academic community to suppress scholars with different opinions. A paper that challenges left-wing ideologies is bound to be rejected by leftists and their colleagues.

Many journals in the humanities are guided by critical theory and filled with obscure technical jargon, while the main theme is to reject the divine, reject traditional culture, and incite revolutions to overturn the current social, political, and economic order. One category of scholarship aims to prove that all traditional morals and standards, including even the scientific process, are social constructs whose purpose is to safeguard the power of the ruling class by forcing their norms on the whole society.

In 1996, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal had a paper published in Social Text, Duke University’s cultural studies journal, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Citing 109 footnotes and referencing 219 sources, the paper argued that “quantum gravity” is constructed by society and language. [96] Soon after, Sokal published a declaration in another magazine, Lingua Franca, stating that his original paper was a prank. [97]

During an interview on National Public Radio, Sokal said he found inspiration in the 1994 book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. The book’s author said that some publications in the humanities will publish anything so long as it contains “the proper leftist thought” and quotes well-known leftist thinkers. Sokal tested this by filling his paper with leftist ideologies, pointless citations, and complete nonsense. [98] He later wrote: “The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that ‘the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.’ They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.” [99] Sokal’s satirical approach highlighted the dearth of academic principle or credibility in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies.

The extent to which communist thought has penetrated the social sciences becomes apparent when one takes a look at the titles of papers given at the annual meetings of major US academic bodies. The Modern Language Association is the largest of such societies, boasting twenty-five thousand members who consist mainly of professors and scholars in the fields of modern language research and education. Thousands join the association’s annual conference.

A large portion of the papers listed on the association’s website utilize the ideological framework of Marxism, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and other deviant theories. Others use feminism, gay research, identity politics, and other radical trends. Similar organizations, including the American Sociological Association, reflect much the same slant, though to varying extents.

The American tradition of liberal arts education requires that students take a number of humanities courses, regardless of the students’ majors. Today, these required courses are usually taught by leftist professors from the disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, and social sciences. American scholar Sowell has noted that required courses leave students with no alternative but to listen to these professors, who often use their classrooms as opportunities to spread their leftist ideologies, even using grades as an incentive to have students accept their views. At the University of Michigan, for example, students in an introductory biology course were required to watch films about politics. Students who dare to challenge a professor’s views are often punished with lower grades. [100] The Marxist views of these humanities and social science professors not only corrupt students in their academic fields, but affect almost the entire student body.

College students wish to be respected as adults, but both their knowledge and practical experience is limited. In the relatively closed environment of the university, few of them suspect that their respected professors would take advantage of their innocence and trust to instill in them a set of damaging ideologies and values. Parents pay high tuition costs for their children to master the knowledge and skills they will use as a basis for finding their place in society. How could they imagine that their children are actually being robbed of their invaluable years, and instead being transformed into followers of radical ideologies that will affect them for the rest of their lives?

Generation after generation of youth has entered this education system that has been heavily infiltrated by communist ideologies. They study textbooks penned by leftists and internalize their deviated theories, hastening the decline of culture, morals, and humanity.

h. University ‘Re-education’: Brainwashing and Moral Corruption

With the growth of Marxist ideology throughout universities, campus policy since the 1980s has increasingly focused on preventing “offensive” remarks, especially when it comes to offending women or ethnic minorities. According to American scholar Donald Alexander Downs, from 1987 to 1992, about three hundred US universities implemented policies for the regulation of speech, creating a paralegal system that forbids language deemed offensive regarding sensitive groups and topics. [101]

Those who support these prohibitions may mean well, but their actions lead to a ridiculous outcome, as ever greater numbers of people claim the right not to be offended for any reason. In fact, no such right exists according to law, but the prominence of cultural Marxism has allowed anyone to claim an association with oppressed groups, citing reasons such as culture, ancestry, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Administrative staff at universities have consistently afforded privileged treatment to those who claim victimhood.

According to Marxist logic, the oppressed are morally correct in all circumstances, and many people do not dare to question the authenticity of their claims. This absurd logic is based on twisting the criteria for judging what is moral. As group identities and sentiments intensify (in Leninism and Stalinism, this is called a high level of class consciousness), people unconsciously abandon the traditional standards of good and evil, replacing them with groupthink. This has most markedly manifested in totalitarian communist states, where the “oppressed” proletariat was given a justification for killing the landowning and capitalist “oppressors.”

The trend of making arbitrary claims regarding offensive or discriminatory language was started by cultural Marxist scholars who fabricated a series of new concepts for expanding the definition of discrimination. Among these are ideas like “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and so on. University administrators introduced corresponding policies and mandatory education, such as sensitivity training and diversity training.

Microaggression refers to an implicit nonverbal offense that one encounters in daily life, with the supposed offenders perhaps being completely unaware of its implications. This kind of unintentional offense or ignorance is labeled “insensitive” (Leninism or Stalinism would deem this to be low social consciousness). Sensitivity training has become a major aspect of acclimating incoming college freshmen. Students are told what can’t be said and what clothes can’t be worn, lest they commit a microaggression in violation of university regulations.

On some campuses, the phrase “welcome to America” cannot be said because it may constitute discrimination and is considered a microaggression: It could offend ethnic groups, such as Native Americans, Africans, Japanese, and Chinese, that have historically suffered unjust treatment in the United States.

The following are among a long list of statements deemed to be microaggressions by the University of California: “America is a melting pot” (racial discrimination), “America is the land of opportunity” and “Men and women have equal opportunities for achievement” (denying gender or ethnic inequality). [102] Microaggressions are cause for administrative discipline, and they promote the establishment of “safe spaces.”

In one incident of alleged microaggression on the Indianapolis campus of Indiana University–Purdue University, a white student who worked as a janitor for the school was told by the campus affirmative action office that he had violated a racial harassment ordinance by reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan in a campus breakroom. Two of his student colleagues had felt offended that the cover of the book featured a photo of a KKK gathering and had filed complaints that his choice to read the book in the breakroom constituted racial harassment. After pressure from groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the university conceded that the student was not guilty and expunged any record of the incident from his file. [103]

Sensitivity training and diversity training are comparable in nature to the re-education programs in the former Soviet Union and in China. The purpose of re-education is to strengthen class concepts: The “bourgeoisie” and “landlord class” must recognize their original sin as members of the oppressive class, and the supposedly oppressed groups must have the “correct” understanding about bourgeois culture. Pressure is put on them to clear away their “internalized oppression” so that they can come to recognize their oppressive conditions. This is similar to how feminist education teaches women to see traditional femininity as a construct of the patriarchy.

According to the Marxist analysis of class, the personal is political. It is considered wrong to understand a problem from the standpoint of the designated oppressor. Therefore, to reform people’s worldview and ensure they completely follow the Marxist program, any words and actions that deny class oppression or class struggle are punished severely. Sensitivity training is held to fully reveal “social injustice” and to reorient people to the standpoint of “oppressed” groups.

For example, in 2013, Northwestern University required all students to complete a course on diversity before graduating. According to the school’s instructions, after the completion of the course, students would be able to “expand their ability to think critically” (learning to classify “class,” in the Marxist sense), “recognize their own positionality in systems of inequality” (recognizing their “class component”), and “engage in self-reflection on power and privilege” (putting themselves in the shoes of the “oppressed” class). [104]

The University of Delaware began to implement a mandatory ideological re-education program in 2007 for seven thousand of its residential students. Referred to as “treatment” for incorrect attitudes and beliefs, its stated aim was to make students accept set perspectives concerning issues such as politics, race, gender, and environmentalism. Resident assistants at the university were required to personally conduct one-on-one interviews with the students, asking them questions about, for example, which races and genders they would date and when they discovered their “sexual identity.” When a female student responded to the latter question by saying that it was none of the resident assistant’s business, the assistant reported her to the university administration. [105] The program was disbanded after sustained backlash.

This mass political indoctrination not only mixes up the standards for discerning moral values, but also greatly strengthens egoism and individualism. What students learn is that they can use the highly politicized feelings of a group (identity politics) to pursue their own individual desires. Simply by claiming that one belongs to a group supposedly suffering from oppression, one can accuse and threaten others or use this identity for personal benefit.

Whether one is offended or not is a subjective feeling, but today, even feelings pass for objective evidence. It has gotten to the point where university professors must constantly beat around the bush. Recently, students at many universities demanded that before teaching certain content, professors must first issue trigger warnings, as some discussion topics or reading material might cause negative emotional reactions. In the last few years, even works such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and ancient Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses ended up on the list of literature that requires trigger warnings. Some universities even recommend that works deemed to trigger some students’ emotions be avoided as much as possible. [106]

Many students growing up under this kind of atmosphere have egos that are easily hurt and try their utmost to avoid feeling offended. Group identity, promoted on campuses, is another version of the “class consciousness” preached by communism, and it leaves students ignorant of independent thought and personal responsibility. Like the radical students of the 1960s who are now their professors, these students are against tradition. They indulge in confused sexual promiscuity, alcohol addiction, and drug abuse. Yet beneath their contempt for worldly conventions are fragile hearts and souls, unable to bear the slightest blow or setback, let alone take on real responsibility.

Traditional education fosters self-restraint, independent thinking, a sense of responsibility, and understanding of others. The specter of communism wants nothing less than to have the next generation completely abandon its moral bearings and become its minions for its rule over the world.

3. How Communism Destroyed Education in China

When it comes to any goal, like that of corrupting education in the West, communism can take hundreds of years and gradually work over several generations, if necessary, to achieve its aims.

In China, the communists seized upon the country’s instability from long periods of war to take power and impose their ideological program on the people. But even prior to the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover in 1949, leftist Chinese scholars and activists were already attacking China’s profound cultural heritage — starting with the traditional system of education.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Dewey’s progressive education began to corrode the United States, his ethnic Chinese followers returned to China and became pioneers of modern Chinese education. The Opium Wars against the British had weakened the Chinese people’s resolve, and the intellectuals were eager to find a way to strengthen the nation. The communists exploited these conditions to set off a so-called New Culture Movement that repudiated China’s traditions and provided fertile ground for the development of the communist movement.

Starting in 1915 and lasting into the next decade, the New Culture Movement had three main representatives: Hu Shi, a disciple of Dewey; Chen Duxiu, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); and Lu Xun, who was later praised by Mao Zedong as “the chief commander of China’s Cultural Revolution.” Li Dazhao, another CCP co-founder, also adopted an important role in the cultural movement of the later period.

Representatives of the New Culture Movement attributed China’s national weakness over the past hundred years to traditional Confucian thought and advocated the abolition of this “old culture.” Meanwhile, the movement saw all Western culture as advanced “new culture.” The New Culture Movement used the words “science” and “democracy” as its chief slogans in criticizing “old” Chinese culture and beliefs.

Running concurrent to the New Culture Movement was the 1919 May Fourth student movement in Beijing. Sparked by patriotic outrage against Japanese imperialism, the movement was taken over by Li Dazhao and other communists, who used it to promote the New Culture Movement and amplify the rejection of the traditional Chinese worldview. In 1921, Li, Chen Duxiu, and a handful of others gathered in Shanghai and founded the CCP.

The New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement were instrumental in helping the CCP spread its ideas and organization throughout China. At a time of national crisis, the Party convinced many that China’s only hope for survival was to break with “old culture” using the most radical methods. These early movements against traditional Chinese culture and civilization later served as the ideological inspiration for the Cultural Revolution.

Among the greatest harm wrought by the New Culture Movement was the campaign to promote the vernacularization of written Chinese. As advocated by Hu Shi, primary schools changed their teaching of the Chinese language to simplify written Chinese, while changing meanings and omitting many words. As a result, after one generation, the majority of Chinese people were hardly able to read and understand classical Chinese. This meant that The Book of Changes, the Spring and Autumn Annals, Tao Te Ching, Huangdi Neijing(Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic), and other traditional books were now inaccessible to the ordinary student. Instead, they were treated as esoteric content for scholarly research. China’s five thousand years of glorious civilization became mere decoration.

In the development of the divinely arranged Chinese culture, the written classical language was purposely separated from the spoken language. In China, over the course of history, there have been many large-scale assimilations of different ethnic groups and multiple relocations of China’s cultural center of gravity; thus, the spoken language was constantly changing. But, due to the separation between the spoken language and classical Chinese used in writing, classical Chinese remained largely unchanged. Students in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) could still read and understand classics from the Song and Tang dynasties, or even those from the age prior to the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). This allowed traditional Chinese culture and literature to be transmitted unbroken over thousands of years.

However, communism caused the Chinese people to sever their cultural roots through the language. At the same time, by combining the written language with the spoken language, it became easier to mix in deviant words and phrases, thus pushing the Chinese people further from tradition.

The literacy campaigns and popularization of culture in elementary education undertaken by the CCP before and after its establishment subjected its captive audience to direct and explicit brainwashing. For instance, the first few phrases learned by students in literacy classes and the first year of primary school were propaganda like “long live Chairman Mao,” “the evil old society,” and “evil American imperialism” — phrases that fully exemplify the hate-based class struggle ethos the Party demanded.

Compared with deviant ideas that Western progressive education mixes into children’s books (like Heather Has Two Mommies), the CCP’s movements are also a potent form of ideological indoctrination imposed on the young. Chinese children who are educated in this way grow up to become fanatical defenders of the CCP’s tyranny, vilifying and scorning those who dare talk about human rights or universal values. Meanwhile, in the progressive environment of the West, children grow up to be part of the angry student mobs that prevent speakers from talking about traditional values and accuse them of discrimination.

Not long after the CCP took power, it began its thought-reform campaign against intellectuals, focusing on university campuses and high schools. Its main objectives were to reform intellectuals’ perspectives on life, force them to forsake traditional moral principles and give up the philosophy of first improving oneself before extending that to one’s family, state, and the world. It used a Marxist class-based view of the world and life, from the perspective of the “proletariat” class.

Professors of the older generation, in particular, had to repeatedly criticize themselves, confess to wrongdoings, and acquiesce to being informed on, monitored, and criticized by their colleagues and students. They were even made to acknowledge and eliminate “counter-revolutionary thoughts” in their own subconscious minds, which were called “aggressions against the proletariat class.” Of course, this was much more intense than the “sensitivity training” in the West today. Some were unable to take the humiliation and stress, and committed suicide. [107]

Subsequently, the CCP began adjusting faculties and departments in universities. It greatly diminished, merged, or eliminated departments like philosophy, sociology, and those related to the humanities, leaving many comprehensive universities with only Soviet-style science and engineering faculties. This was because the CCP was unable to tolerate the threat to its tyrannical rule from any independent ideological perspectives on politics and social issues. These were associated with the humanities-related faculties, which had enjoyed academic freedom in the days of the Republic of China.

The CCP also made the study of Marxist politics and philosophy mandatory for all students. The entire process was completed within two to three years. In the West, communism took an entire generation to establish new disciplines with the aim of ideological indoctrination and the injection of Marxist thought into universities. Although the speed differed between the two, they achieved similar results.

In 1958, the CCP started its education revolution, which had the following notable features:

Firstly, education was emphasized as a tool that should be used in service of the proletariat. Students, under the leadership of the Party Committee, were organized to prepare the curricula and teaching materials. At Peking University, sixty students in the Chinese language department wrote a 700,000-character treatise called the History of Chinese Literature in only thirty days. [108] This incident fully exemplified the core belief of progressive education that teaching methods should be “student-centric,” focused on “exploratory learning” and “cooperative learning” — that is, what to learn and how to learn it were to be discussed and decided by the students themselves. The objective was clear: eliminating “superstitious beliefs” in authority figures (which was meant to instill an attitude opposed to tradition), magnifying students’ self-centeredness, and laying the foundation for rebellion during the Cultural Revolution to come.

Secondly, education and productive labor were to be joined together. Every school had its own factory, and during the height of the Great Leap Forward, teachers and students smelted steel and tilled the land. Even Renmin University of China, which had previously focused on social disciplines, operated 108 factories. Supposedly, this was to have students “learn by doing.”

In the subsequent Cultural Revolution, students were mobilized to destroy all forms of cultural heritage associated with traditional culture, including tangible artifacts and religious beliefs (see Chapter Six). This again echoes the counterculture movement that took place in the West.

After the Cultural Revolution began, Mao felt that “bourgeois intellectuals” should not run the schools. On June 13, 1966, the CCP issued a notice to reform university admissions and started the “corrective action campaign.” University entrance exams were abolished and large numbers of “worker-peasant-soldier” students were enrolled.

The 1975 film Breaking With Old Ideas, produced during the Cultural Revolution, reflected the ideological spirit of this campaign: “A youth who grew up on a poor farm is not sufficiently literate, but the calluses on his hands from hard farm work qualify him for enrollment.” A school principal said: “Can you blame us for their low level of literacy? No! This debt should be settled with the Nationalists, the landowners, and the capitalist class [the oppressors]!”

In the West, a professor published a paper claiming that standards in mathematics led to racial discrimination (because students of certain ethnic minority groups have lower math scores compared to white students). [109] Another professor published a paper that said math standards based on the higher scores achieved by male students led to gender discrimination against females when they were held to the same standard. [110] Qualifying students for university based on the calluses they have or attributing lower math scores to racial and gender discrimination are methods that communism uses to dumb down students and stunt their intellectual growth.

After the Cultural Revolution, China resumed its university entrance examinations. From then on, preparing for this exam was the ultimate objective of primary and high school education. Under this utilitarian education system, many students became like machines that learned only how to pass exams, without the ability to think independently or to distinguish right from wrong. At the same time, Marxist philosophy, politics, and economics have remained mandatory exam subjects.

In the minds of students who are cut off from tradition, the standards of right and wrong, and good and evil, are all evaluated according to communist standards. Thus after the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, many Chinese students cheered. Primary school students declare that they want to become corrupt officials when they grow up. University students prostitute themselves and become surrogate mothers for cash.

4. Returning to Traditional Education

The education system shoulders the future of a country, a nation, and human civilization itself. It is a long-term endeavor whose impact extends through centuries or even millennia.

Looking back at the past one hundred years, the American education system has all but been broken by the infiltration and influence of communist ideology. Parents and teachers have had their hands tied and cannot easily give students a good education. Schools, which should have cultivated students’ talent, have instead indulged them and led them astray.

Much of society is deeply worried about students’ lack of morality, low skill level, fragile psyches, and bad habits, as well as the chaotic, anti-traditional, and anti-social trends they’re caught up in.

Nine of the forty-five goals of communism listed in the 1958 classic The Naked Communist, relate to education, including “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.” [111]

This has not only been achieved, but the situation has become worse. Due to the political and economic strength of the United States, American culture is the object of admiration and emulation by countries around the world. Many countries use the United States as a model for education reform and are influenced by American teaching concepts, teaching materials, teaching methods, and school-management practices. So, to a certain extent, changing American education is tantamount to changing education around the world.

Enlightened sages or saints appear both at the creation of human culture and in times when civilization has fallen into moral corruption. These sages and saints take the role of “teacher.” For example, Socrates, the founder of the ancient Greek civilization, was an educator. In the Gospels, Jesus also called himself a teacher. Sakyamuni Buddha has ten names, one of which is “the teacher of heaven and man.” Confucius was an educator, and Lao Zi was his teacher. They taught people how to be human, how to respect the divine, how to get along with others, and how to improve morality.

These enlightened beings and saints are the greatest educators of mankind. Their words have shaped major civilizations and become fundamental classics. The values they teach, and the ways they go about improving morality, allow each individual to achieve spiritual transcendence and health. Individuals with healthy minds are essential to social health. It is no wonder that these greatest educators have come to a similar conclusion: The purpose of education is the cultivation of good character.

Eastern and Western classical education, which have been practiced for thousands of years, inherit the culture that the divine has given to people and retain precious experiences and resources. According to the spirit of classical education, both talent and integrity are important criteria for judging the success of education. In the process of reviving the tradition of human education, the treasure of classical education is worthy of preservation, exploration, and learning.

People with high moral values are capable of self-governing. This is the social norm that the American Founding Fathers hoped for. Those who are morally noble will receive divine blessings, and through diligence and wisdom, will obtain material abundance and spiritual satisfaction. More importantly, people with high moral standards allow society to flourish and last for generations. These are the teachings of enlightened beings and saints, the greatest educators of humankind.

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3. Ibid.

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84. Horowitz and Laksin, One Party Classroom, 212.

85. David Horowitz, Indoctrination U.: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom (New York: Encounter Books, 2009).

86. David P. Barash and Charles P. Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies (New York: SAGE Publications Inc., 2008), as quoted in Ibid.

87. Horowitz and Laksin, One Party Classroom, 51–52.

88. Bawer, The Victims’ Revolution, 121–180.

89. Horowitz and Laksin, One Party Classroom, 1–2.

90. Dinitia Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen,” The New York Times, September 11, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/no-regrets-for-love-explosives-memoir-sorts-war-protester-talks-life-with.html.

91. Linton Weeks, “Who Won the Civil War? Tough Question,” National Public Radio, November 18, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/theprotojournalist/2014/11/18/364675234/who-won-the-civil-war-tough-question.

92. ISI Archive, “Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions,” Intercollegiate Studies Institute, November 19, 2008, https://isi.org/lectures/press-conference-our-fading-heritage-americans-fail-a-basic-test-on-their-history-and-institutions/.

93. “Study: Americans Don’t Know Much About History,” NBC News, November 20, 2008, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Study-Americans-Dont-Know-About-Much-About-History.html.

94. Horowitz, The Professors, 74.

95. Paul Samuelson, as quoted in foreword to Phillips Saunders and William B. Walstad, eds., The Principles of Economics Course (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1989).

96. Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text, no. 46/47 (Spring–Summer 1996): 217–52. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html.

97. Alan D. Sokal, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca, June 5, 1996, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html.

98. Alan D. Sokal, “Parody,” National Public Radio, May 15, 1996, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1043441.

99. Alan D. Sokal, “Revelation: A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” in Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, ed. Editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2000), 52. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html.

100. Sowell, Inside, 212–213.

101. Donald Alexander Downs, Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2004), 51.

102. Eugene Volokh, “UC Teaching Faculty Members Not to Criticize Race-Based Affirmative Action, Call America ‘Melting Pot,’ and More,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/06/16/uc-teaching-faculty-members-not-to-criticize-race-based-affirmative-action-call-america-melting-pot-and-more/?utm_term=.c9a452fdb00f.

103. “Victory at IUPUI: Student-Employee Found Guilty of Racial Harassment for Reading a Book Now Cleared of All Charges,” Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, May 1, 2008, https://www.thefire.org/victory-at-iupui-student-employee-found-guilty-of-racial-harassment-for-reading-a-book-now-cleared-of-all-charges/.

104. “Colleges Become Re-Education Camps n Age of Diversity,” Investor’s Business Daily, April 22, 2013, https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/students-indoctrinated-in-leftist-politics/.

105. “University of Delaware: Students Required to Undergo Ideological Reeducation,” Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2007, https://www.thefire.org/cases/university-of-delaware-students-required-to-undergo-ideological-reeducation/.

106. Alison Flood, “US Students Request ‘Trigger Warnings’ on Literature,” The Guardian, May 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/us-students-request-trigger-warnings-in-literature.

107. Zhou Jingwen 周鲸文, Fengbao shinian: Zhongguo hongse zhengquan de zhen mianmao 風暴十年：中國紅色政權的真面貌 [Ten Years of Storm: The True Face of China’s Red Regime], (Hong Kong: Shidai piping she, 1962), https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/zjw1959/06.htm#2. [In Chinese]

108. Luo Pinghan 罗平汉, “1958 nian de jiaoyu geming” 1958年的教育革命 [“The Educational Revolution of 1958”], in Dangshi xijie 党史细节 [Details in the History of the Communist Party], vol. 34. [In Chinese]

109. Robert Gearty, “White Privilege Bolstered by Teaching Math, University Professor Says,” Fox News, October 24, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/24/white-privilege-bolstered-by-teaching-math-university-professor-says.html.

110. Toni Airaksinen, “Prof Complains About ‘Masculinization of Mathematics,’” Campus Reform, August 24, 2017, https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9544.

111. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: The Ensign Publishing Co., 1962), chap. 12.