American Schools “Dominated by Radical Left-Wing Ideas”

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In The Spectator, Amy L. Wax warns that “Unless drastic action is taken, our universities will cease to serve us and our democracy.” She writes:

The American education system needs drastic reform from bottom to top. Our K-12 schools, both public and private, have come to be dominated by radical left-wing ideas. Schools not only indoctrinate students with a one-sided view of history and society, but they also increasingly fail in their core mission of imparting the basic skills needed to function in our advanced and complex society.

Likewise, our universities, professional schools and graduate schools are in the grip of a far-left ideology that has compromised their traditional missions of truth-seeking, knowledge creation and the preservation and transmission of western culture and the advanced skills essential to its vitality and prosperity. The analysis of what is amiss, and how to fix it, differs for each level of education. Here I will focus on higher education, and one important aspect of its debasement: the growing practice of censoring and punishing free expression. Why has this happened? The story is complex and intricate, but I believe it can be boiled down to three interrelated developments that lead inexorably to the suppression of dissent.

They are, in brief: the adoption of a so-called woke ideology, and especially its demand for equity in all things and its aura of moral certainty; the adoption of a therapeutic imperative to psychologize, subjectivize and thus overextend and abuse the ideas of mental harm and trauma, along with the weaponized deployment of the legal concepts of harassment and hostile environment; and the widespread feminization of higher education as well as other aspects of our democracy and society. How do these trends inexorably lead to censorship? The first culprit, the rise of woke ideology, divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, identifies western and American cultures and institutions as bigoted and racist and sees disadvantaged minorities and non-westerners as victims of first-world oppression.

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