The Epoch Times is serializing an adaptation from the Chinese of a new book, How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World, by the editorial team of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
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Table of Contents (continued)
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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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 a 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 Laskin 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.
Read Next: Chapter Thirteen
Updated June 9, 2020.
Read the series here: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
References
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