In recent days, there has been a great deal of talk about academic freedom and classroom indoctrination. Technician recently published a column by correspondent John-William White stating that though there are widespread “concerns about… certain material” such as critical race theory “being taught in classrooms across the state,” to claim that teachers are “indoctrinating” students is a stretch too far.
White’s allies would argue that scholars must be allowed to teach nearly any desired curriculum in the name of academic freedom, claiming that Ibram Kendi’s racialized worldview has the same validity as those of Thomas Aquinas or John Locke. While this allowance seems, at a glance, a happy medium between censorship and autonomy, in reality, it is an excuse to propagandize students with radical notions about the American nation based on a distorted vision of liberty.
It is well evidenced that left-wing indoctrination in education is quite widespread across our state. Perhaps the most glaring indicator of said indoctrination is a recent report from the office of the Lieutenant Governor detailing hundreds of aggressive, partisan professors working to demonize the American tradition through the lens of critical race theory.
Likewise, there are numerous horror stories across the country of educators driving students leftward, such as civics teacher and antifa activist Gabriel Gipe who said he has “180 days to turn [students] into revolutionaries.” Gipe gives students extra credit for attending left-wing protests and hangs an antifa flag in his classroom in place of an American flag. He tells student dissenters that the antifa flag “is made to make fascists feel uncomfortable… I don’t really know what to tell you.” Gipe also openly admits to teaching critical race theory, which proposes that America is founded on and inextricably tied to racism and prescribes the uprooting of American ideals and institutions as a solution.
Similarly, California teacher Kristin Pitzen encourages school children to pledge allegiance to her Pride flag in their English class. In a TikTok that she said is a joke and is now viral, she reveals she removed her classroom’s American flag during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, “[it] made me uncomfortable.” Instead, she chose to subvert American patriotism through her de-facto mandate that children swear fealty to leftism.
And so, we come to the question of liberty. What liberties should educators be granted in schooling our children? Presently, as Bill Buckley writes in ”God and Man at Yale,” we have a doctrine of “ne-plus-ultra relativism, [of] idiot nihilism.” The world is one where convictions of educators, no matter how wrongheaded, must be permitted in the name of academic freedom. Such a premise is deeply contradictory to America’s conception of liberty.
The hoax of academic freedom did not begin in the Christian Missions of Yale or Harvard but in 1575 in The University of Leiden, which, after mandating absolute curricular tolerance, reversed the decree to combat the Arminian heresy. 18th century German universities revived the policy, which Napoleon soon shuddered to prevent the ascent of secularism. This trend of limiting freedom is indicative of a simple truth.
Whenever some ideas are taught, others will be excluded. If you teach two plus two equals four, you cannot teach two plus two equals five. If Gabriel Gipe teaches that America is irredeemably racist, he cannot teach that America is worthy of allegiance. There is no liberty to teach wrong ideas in public education. Tolerating such behavior under the guise of academic freedom serves no purpose but the indoctrination of our children in radical left-wing dogma. There is no legitimate role of schools to teach critical race theory or encourage children to value Pride above the national symbol. The legitimate role of education is to turn students into virtuous, productive, employable citizens who treasure America’s foundational values.
The school house has never been a fair marketplace of ideas, where intellectual heavyweights duke it out for supremacy. Rather, it is a place where students are instructed what to think. The question is what instructors are teaching, and when teachers seek to upend the American tradition, they must be greeted with harsh discipline, otherwise we may risk the destruction of the American experiment at the hands of a generation raised to oppose her tradition.
