Some may wonder if oft-heard criticism of the education establishment, and its tendency to almost universally lean left-wing liberal, is new. I’ve explained to my radio audience that it is well known that our nation’s Marxist-communists purposefully targeted the education system in the 1920’s and 30’s for a long, slow takeover.
A good friend, whose mother is lifelong public school teacher, sent me this tidbit which demonstrates that our country’s intellectual giants were well aware, long ago, of what soft targets schools were for intellectual manipulation.
The quote is from James Conant, former president of Harvard and member of the Interim Committee that made recommendations to Harry S Truman about how to use the nuclear bomb in WWII:
“He [Conant] feared that questions about the use of the bomb would influence teachers and students in the future in ways that distorted history. ‘You may be inclined to dismiss all this talk [criticizing the use of the bomb] as representing only a small minority of the population, which I think it does,’ Conant told a friend in September 1946. ‘However, this type of sentimentalism, for so I regard it, is bound to have a great deal of influence on the next generation. The type of person who goes into teaching, particularly school teaching, will be influenced a great deal by this type of argument.'” [Emphasis added.]
My experience has taught me that Conant was right in his assessment. For example, among the first large institutions to buy into poorly supported doomsday global warming theory were public schools. In 4th grade, in my rural public school of the 1970’s, “social studies” kits focused on the starving in Africa and implied, directly enough for my 4th grade mind to understand, that somehow America was the cause of such suffering. (And it will surprise few that I stood up and argued the point strongly as a 4th grader, being the son of a farmer well aware of the over abundance of American agricultural production.) Even, Conant’s once proudly American and exceptional Harvard is now a sewer of elitist left wing indoctrination.
It has become imperative that citizens no longer turn their children over to educators without paying a great deal of attention to just what it is that they are being taught. That schools are a hotbed of leftism and anti-American criticism is not new, that they are somewhat unapologetic about it, is.
If we are smart, we’ll use that openness to begin exposing the indoctrination to citizens who, while maybe not politically interested or erudite, can see obvious bias when on display. We need a systematic method of using the Left’s own words and actions against them, down to a classroom by classroom level. Any ideas?
Robert Pratt is host of the top rated Pratt on Texas radio program which can be heard at www.PrattonTexas.com
Citation: Source is J. Samuel Walker, Prompt & Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, revised edition, 2004, pp. 101-2
