Truth in Education

We are at the peak of a public education crisis that can no longer be called accidental. Less than half of children in the U.S. are proficiently literate. And the state with the lowest literacy rate is not Mississippi, Louisiana, or Kentucky. It is California, the wealthiest state in the Union by GDP.

California is also home to the California Teachers’ Association, the Oakland Education Association, and United Teachers Los Angeles. All condemned Israel when, after October 7, she declared her intention to end Hamas in Gaza and set out to do precisely that. A number of these condemnations were issued at professional gatherings that were devoted more to the “decolonization of public education” and to Red-Green politics in general than they were to subjects that relate directly to education.

All of these organizations decried California Assembly Bill 715, which defines outright opposition to the Jewish right to self-determination in the Jewish homeland as a manifestation of anti-Semitism. The authors of the bill argue that “anti-Zionism,” which reframes a will to genocide as a justice-oriented belief in the rightness of “restoring” all of “historical Palestine” to “Palestinians,” be treated as racial hatred and not be tolerated within the confines of schools and other public institutions.

Among all of California’s teacher’s organizations and unions, United Teachers of Los Angeles was loudest in its opposition to AB 715—due no doubt to its belonging to the “BDS Movement,” the aim of which is the elimination of Israel and the dispossession of Jews whom “pro-Palestinian activists” deem too Western and European to stay on in a future “Palestinian” state. Putting that aside, imagine how much better California would be if its educators were obsessed not with Jews but with teaching children how to read and write at grade level so that they might become fully literate adults.

But a good education is about more than teaching hard skills. In order for an education to be good, the person delivering it must be able to distinguish between education and indoctrination, and take care never to impose a non-universalist and partisan belief system upon an impressionable mind. Just as importantly, students receiving a good education will be taught that truth is not subjective, relative, or strictly personal, but wholly objective. In other words, it exists independent of the mind. And because truth, in its ultimate form, is pre-existent and waiting to be discovered, it transcends the political, which is almost always composed of partial and/or manmade “truths.”

For that reason, a society based on ultimate or objective truth will be invulnerable to the level of political and cultural polarization that is as toxic to conservatism as it is to liberalism—in their true and complimentary forms, that is. Just as importantly, such a society will be capable of transcending anything and everything that must be subordinated to the truth, which has, dare I say, a supernatural way of pointing us toward what is in our best interest. Not just individually, but at the societal level. Conversely, when a society indulges in too much untruth in the course of maintaining the power of the few by distracting, numbing, and deranging the many, an unraveling and rivening will follow. Up to a point, it will be possible for a society to reconcile itself to the truth, provided there are those who are willing and able to destigmatize it and suffer the abuse of those who would call degeneration progress. 

Before I go any further, I will state an ugly truth. America’s public school system was not designed to produce an independently-minded, interrogative citizenry. By working through bodies like the General Education Board and funding education directly at a time when tax dollars were not normally used to fund education, John D. Rockefeller sought to stunt the intellects of Americans while acculturating them to life in the American factory so that they might better serve the interest of capital. Still, Rockefeller was less about pushing a particular narrative and more about molding children into passive albeit productive workers. Per Rockefeller’s model, the children who emerged from America’s new schools were to be educated, but not too educated. Communists who rebranded themselves as “anti-capitalists” and entered the American political mainstream after capturing the Democratic Party have taken a page from Rockefeller’s book. But, where Rockefeller was careful to maintain the appearance of agenda-free philanthropic generosity, many of today’s administrators and educators say out loud that their reason for working in education is to produce the next generation of left-wing political activists. And because the American left has been taken over almost completely by the democratic socialist movement, that means that American children are being taught self-hatred and legal positivism; or the theory that Western morality and the values and laws that proceed from it are socially constructed (man-made) and should be deconstructed as part of a larger effort to dismantle capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc. By keeping the revolutionary focused on these terms and what they represent (grievances), collectivist puppeteers have long prevented the polyeznyiy (useful) idiot from predicting what shape the post-revolutionary order will take.

Many among us might be surprised to learn that we have been here before. Communists have been working for decades to capture the American school system. In fact, the political divide between rural and urban America is due largely to the infiltration of urban school systems by activists who view the world purely in terms of class struggle and reject aspirationalism. For proof of this, one need only look to the following story: throughout the 1930s, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) sought to control the New York City Teachers’ Union and thus how the city’s poorest children were educated by infiltrating one local after another. CPUSA became a victim of its own success when the American Federation of Teachers expelled New York City’s Local 5 for its radicalism, which it dressed in civil rights activism.

CPUSA’s end goal was to turn public schools into places of communist indoctrination and their graduates into American Trotskys and Lenins. Mind you, this was before the Cold War, but during the first “red scare,” which, in truth, did not weigh heavy on the mind of the average American. The concern then, which should be the concern now, was that radicals were working through public institutions to accomplish goals that were fundamentally opposed to the mission of those institutions, which should be taken as an effort to undermine the will of the people, whose tax dollars fund those institutions. Almost a century later, the enemy is once again at the inner-gate and certain that their victory over the Judeo-Christian tradition (a tradition that values truth and reason above all) is imminent.

But that victory depends entirely upon what you and I do now. Will we not only say that 2 + 2 = 5, but come to believe it, or will we listen to the voice that comes as much from the heart as it does the head? Will we put down Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates and pick up Henry David Thoreau and reacquaint ourselves with an individualist philosophy that is, to those who truly understand it, as rugged as it is soft?

We must all realize that collectivism has no warmth at all, and that its most enduring symbols will always be the Siberian Gulag and the freezing barracks of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But should some of us continue to believe that freedom, the sacred individual, and personal responsibility (all of which can only exist in a reality that contains concrete truth and untruth) are social constructs that should be forgotten so that all goods can be transformed into collective goods, then there must come a time in the not too distant future when our level of tolerance for that worldview reaches zero.

And it is only at that level of zero tolerance for untruth can absolute truth reawaken and rearm the American spirit.