Teaching Teachers to be Leftists
by Lee Duigon“What health there is in kindergarten,” R. J. Rushdoony wrote in 1963, “has come, not from the educational philosophers, but from loving and healthy-minded teachers.”1
This was true in 1963, but today healthy-minded teachers in the public schools are becoming an endangered species—thanks to the educational philosophers, who create programs like the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative (TERI) at the University of Minnesota College of Education.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has threatened to sue the university if the TERI program is implemented next year. Meanwhile, on its website, FIRE displays a fourteen-page document, drawn up by the university’s “Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group,” describing the goals of TERI and the means by which those goals are to be achieved.2
The document’s headline is revealing in itself:
“DRAFT. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. For discussion uses within the College of Education and Human Development TERI project only.”
A Totalitarian Standard?
Reading the document from beginning to end, we find the Minnesota teacher training program to include features not likely to produce healthy-minded teachers:
*Setting impossible, self-defeating standards of “cultural competence” for all prospective teachers.
*Requiring teachers to adopt and promote a worldview stressing American “racism,” “oppression,” and perpetual victimhood for all “minority” students.
*Requiring a sense of racial guilt, constant self-criticism, and groveling—in context, that is not too strong a word for it—from all “Anglo” teachers.
*A mandatory allegiance to a left-wing worldview and political agenda.
*A rejection of any concept of an “American culture,” rejection of any kind of assimilation into a national culture, and teaching and preaching intended to lock “minority” children into racial or cultural identities.
*An overt hostility to Christian beliefs.
*A requirement to teach school children to be cynical and mistrustful of all things commonly labeled as “American.”
FIRE attorney Adam Kissel said the TERI requirements would make it “very difficult” for any orthodox Christian, Jew, or Muslim to get a license to teach public school in Minnesota. “This program lists very specific attitudes, values, and beliefs that you’re supposed to have, if you want to teach in Minnesota,” he told Chalcedon.
Kissel is waiting for the university’s general counsel to reply to his letter. By any “nontotalitarian” standard, Kissel wrote, the university’s plans are “severely unjust and impermissibly intrude into matters of individual conscience … As a public university bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the university is both legally and morally obligated to uphold this fundamental right [to freedom of conscience].”3
TERI Speaks
We tried to get university officials to comment on TERI, but neither our phone calls nor emails were returned. However, the TERI document speaks for itself. And remember—this is a production which the people of Minnesota are supposed to pay for, but not see.
For instance: “Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression” (TERI document, page 4).
Let’s pause to analyze this. “White privilege” denotes an assumption that white people are privileged in America—never mind the benefits of affirmative action, which are not open to white people—and thus enjoy advantages over non-whites: something to feel guilty about.
It’s worse if you’re a man, because then you enjoy “hegemonic masculinity” at the expense of women, who therefore constitute a victim class. As a man, you just can’t help being an oppressor—another thing to feel guilty about.
Then there’s “heteronormativity.” This is a term coined by fools to attack the “social construct” that heterosexuality is normative and on a higher, more privileged plane than homosexuality. Thus homosexuals become yet another victim category, and all non-homosexuals become guilty of oppression.
“Internal oppression” is what supposedly happens to these tens of millions of victims constantly beaten down by whites, males, and heterosexuals, they succumb to a kind of tacit mesmerism and wind up beating themselves down, internally.
We presume a non-white lesbian teacher wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.
“Future teachers will recognize and demonstrate understanding of white privilege,” proposes TERI, and must cultivate “the ability to be self-critical” (page 5). “Future teachers will recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism” (page 9). Apparently none of the authors of this tripe has contemplated the likely consequences of having a white teacher stand in front of a roomful of black students and teach them that all white authority figures are tainted by racism, and therefore illegitimate. But education theorists never worry about how their theories play out in real life.
What Are ‘White Values’?
TERI wants future teachers to be critical of the “history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values” (page 12). “Assimilation” is presumed to be bad, a form of oppression. Presumably there are “white values” and “non-white values,” but we are not told what those may be—only that it would be wrong to teach non-white children to adopt white values. Nor should children who are not of the middle class—which is undefined—be encouraged to adopt middle-class values, whatever those may be. Are they saying that if a child comes from a neighborhood where gangs, drugs, and promiscuity are the rule, the child must never aspire to anything better? And of course, under no circumstances are children to be led on to embrace “Christian meanings and values.”
“Every faculty member at our university that trains our teachers must comprehend and commit to the centrality of race, class, culture, and gender issues in teaching and learning, and consequently, hone their teaching and course foci accordingly,” TERI concludes (page 14). Note the use of the word “must.” Must implies no option. If you don’t think “race” or “gender” should be central to teaching little kids that two and two make four, you are not conforming to the program.
TERI asks itself, “How can we be sure that teaching supervisors are themselves developed and equipped in cultural competence outcomes in order to supervise beginning teachers around issues of race, class, culture, and gender?” And answers itself:
“Required training/workshop for all supervisors. Perhaps as part of an orientation/thank you/recognition ceremony/reception at the beginning of the year” (page 13)—with emphasis on “required.”
The original stylistic monstrosity, as reported by Katherine Kersten of StarTribune.com, read: “Require training/workshop for all supervisors. Perhaps a training session disguised as a thank you/recognition ceremony/reception at the beginning of the year?”4 The TERI authors dropped the word “disguised” after Kersten reported on it.
Guilt-Ridden Teachers
Here is the first paragraph of TERI’s “Introduction,” which features quotes from new teachers:
“As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard … How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?” (page 1)
Why should she be struggling? Why should she feel guilty about being an “Anglo” from a farm family? If she were from a family of illegal aliens living in some seedy section of Los Angeles, she would be expected to “celebrate” her heritage and never, never “assimilate” out of it!
Another teacher agonizes over her failure to know that Korean Buddhists “only write a person’s name in red at the time of death or at the anniversary of a death. Therefore, to see the names of their children in red terrified the Korean parents” (page 1).
Is anyone aware that America is not Korea? Why would anyone come here from Korea, if they expected America to be exactly like Korea? Can you imagine being a teacher, and having to walk on eggs among half a dozen exotic cultures represented in your classroom? What if someone else panics when he sees blue ink? But this is what happens when you insist that there be no assimilation into a broad American culture.
Writes a third teacher, fretting over racial “segregation” in schools as demonstrated by the amount of money spent on one school district compared to another, “Students are given a direct measure of their social worth and future chances by the amount of money they see being spent on education. When we look at the disparities in educational expenditures we have to acknowledge that most white students have tremendous educational advantages over students of color …” (page 1).
This is either monumental ignorance, and a mindless repetition of the teachers’ union mantra of “More money! More money,” or a brazen attempt to deceive the reader. In fact, fantastic amounts of money are spent on some of the least-white, poorest-performing school districts in America.
Case in point: the Newark, NJ, public school district, with a predominantly non-white student body, in school year 2008–09, budgeted for an annual per-pupil cost of almost $20,000—$19,182, to be exact.5 And no one would dare say the Newark schools deliver an education worth $20,000 a year to their students.
How much more money must taxpayers cough up before academics are satisfied that “social justice” has been served?
But Not in My State…
We could easily offer many more quotes from the TERI document, but we do not wish to weary the reader. Anyone with Internet access, and a strong stomach, can read the whole thing on the FIRE website.
The point is, are “healthy-minded teachers” likely to emerge from such a training program? Do you want your children taught by persons obsessed with racial grievances?
Chalcedon has for its entire history advocated Christian education, either at home or in a Christian school. Studying TERI has not made us change our minds. But if you’re still sending your children to a public school, reading TERI should surely give you second thoughts.
“Oh, but that’s in Minnesota! The teachers in my state don’t get trained like that …”
We are used to such objections. We think they are based on a powerful desire that the reader’s own local public school district really is different—not like all the rest of those wretched schools you read about. We regret to say we believe that’s wishful thinking.
But don’t take our word for it. Read your children’s textbooks. Ask to see the “sex education” textbook that they’re using: some school districts don’t allow those books to be taken home. Visit the teachers’ union websites—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are the two biggest unions—and see how committed they are to pushing and promoting every item on the socialist wish list, from “gay marriage” to Global Warming and socialized medicine. See for yourself what their elected officers have to say about Christians and Christian beliefs.
Why should your local public schools be any different from the others?6
1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1963] 1995), 283.
2. http://www.thefire.org/public/pdfs/9239ef598b87a328c3240fccbf21c942.pdf
3. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=117313
4. Katherine Kersten, StarTribune.com, Nov. 22, 2009
5. http://www.nps.k12.nj.us/District_Budget.htm
6. For a look at a privately-produced mis-education program, intended for distribution nationwide, see http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2009/12/11/hollywood_and_howard_zinns_marxist_education_project
