Table of Contents (continued)
2. Communism in Western Universitiesa. 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 China2. 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 can rarely articulate their demands clearly. They lack basic common sense and reason.During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the mainstream media’s tireless 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 help students relieve their stress and anxiety, some prominent universities organized various “therapeutic” activities, such as coloring, blowing bubbles, and playing with Play-Doh or building blocks. Some even provided cats and dogs for petting in order to console students. A number of universities organized support groups, provided psychological counseling, or created “safe spaces” where students could seek help with “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.
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 members at American universities lean 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]
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 [would] resurrect in the universities.” [66] In fact, the New Left has not only survived, but its long march 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]
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]The ideas of Gramsci, Freire, and Fanon are deceptive narratives that entice people to view 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.
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.
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 as a work of art or vessel for transmitting knowledge, 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.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.
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.
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 said 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 refers to ideology extensively 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.
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.
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 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.
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 well-known feminist professor at the University of California–Santa Cruz grew up in a famous communist family. From the time she began teaching women’s studies in the 1980s, she sought to further revolutionary goals by making the curriculum overtly political, and she proudly displayed her credentials as a communist and a lesbian activist, regarding 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 “revolutionary duty” 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 was “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 Laksin studied more than two hundred and fifty 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]
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 Cornell University, the University of California–Santa Barbara, and what was then San Francisco State College 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, an African-American researcher specializing in race relations, voiced his opposition to affirmative action and the establishment of black research departments at universities just for the sake of pleasing radicals. 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. They exist not to explore the truth, but to promote an ideological narrative.
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 one hundred and fifty 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 the 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 (UIC), is a 1960s-era radical and co-founder of the Weather Underground, which was a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1969, when SDS collapsed, the Weather Underground stepped in, dedicating its efforts to organizing radical students, who took part in terrorist activities designed to inflame racial conflict. The radical group, which came to be designated as a domestic terrorist organization, perpetrated bombings at the US Capitol, the New York City Police headquarters, the Pentagon, and offices of the National Guard. A well-known quote from Ayers goes: “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.” A web of left-wing progressives successfully prevented the FBI from arresting Ayers. He reemerged in 1980 and became a faculty member at UIC, where he researched early childhood education. His political views were unchanged, and he has shown no remorse for his terrorist acts. His academic publications were consistent with his resumé. Over the years, Ayers rose through the academic ranks, eventually reaching the standing of distinguished professor. He also received the title of senior university scholar, the institution’s highest honor. [90]
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. Though ignorant of these basic facts about their country’s politics and history, these same students were well-acquainted with details about 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 33 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 a process of understanding how the nation was established, but also one of understanding the values the nation was built upon 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.
f. Opposing the Classics of Western Civilization
In 1988, radical students and teachers at Stanford University protested 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 the course with Cultures, Ideas, & Values. While the new class kept some of the Western cultural classics such as works by Homer, Plato, St. Augustine, Dante Alighieri, and Shakespeare, it also required 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 not to be left behind. In a few short years, liberal arts education in American universities had undergone a great transformation.
1. Low-quality writing with shallow content that contains revolutionary narratives or that passes as “victim literature” has displaced classic works and their everlasting profundity.
2. These average works have been placed on the same level as the classics, trivializing and relativizing them.
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 classic works such as Shakespeare’s plays, distorting and insulting them.
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 were nearly all written by white European men, leftists take up the banners of multiculturalism and feminism, insisting 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.”
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.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.
The extent to which communist thought has penetrated the social sciences becomes apparent when one browses the papers given at meetings of the major US academic bodies. The Modern Language Association is the largest of such societies, boasting twenty-five thousand members comprising professors and scholars in the fields of modern language research and education. Thousands attend 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, deconstructionism, 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 degrees.
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 forums for spreading 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. 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. Students who dare to challenge a professor’s views often receive lower grades. [100]
College students wish to be respected as adults, but both their knowledge and practical experience are 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 fees for their children to master the knowledge and skills they need as they find their place in society. How could they imagine that their children are actually being robbed of their invaluable years as they are transformed into followers of radical ideologies that will affect them for the rest of their lives?
h. University ‘Re-education’: Brainwashing and Moral Corruption
With the growth of Marxist ideology in 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 certain language 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 the 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 verbal or 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). Incoming college freshmen must now complete sensitivity training in which they 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 a microaggression that 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.
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” (akin to white males under the sensitivity training paradigm) 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” (learn to discern “class” in the Marxist sense), “recognize their own positionality in systems of inequality” (recognize their “class component”), and “engage in self-reflection on power and privilege” (put 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, the program’s 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, when they discovered their “sexual identity” and which races and genders they would date. When one female student responded to the former 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.
Many students growing up under this kind of atmosphere have egos that are easily hurt, and they try their utmost to avoid situations in which they might feel 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.
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 CCP’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 of national crisis, convincing many that China’s only hope for survival was to break with “old culture” using the most radical of methods. They 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 CCP; and Lu Xun, who was later praised by Mao 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 Dazhao, 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, and later served as the ideological inspiration for the Cultural Revolution.
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 AD–1911 AD) could still read and understand classics from the Song and Tang dynasties, or even those from the age prior to the Qin Dynasty (221 BC–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 deviated 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.
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 and force them to forsake traditional moral principles. The Confucian teaching to first improve oneself before extending one’s efforts to benefit one’s family, country, and the world was done away with, as the CCP stressed 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 their own subconscious “counter-revolutionary thoughts,” 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 threats 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 of education reform 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:
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.
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.
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 been all but 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 Tzu 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, have inherited 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 that is 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, can 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.
References
58. Robby Soave, “Elite Campuses Offer Students Coloring Books, Puppies to Get Over Trump,” Daily Beast, last updated April 13, 2017, accessed on April 20, 2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/elite-campuses-offer-students-coloring-books-puppies-to-get-over-trump.63. Jaschik, “Professors and Politics.”
