So, now, compare the situation in Nazi Germany (the textbooks are full of this stuff, all aligned with a single political perspective, and teachers do it all the time) with the situation in the present-day US (the textbooks don’t do it, and when one (ex-)teacher proposes it it produces a little blizzard of shocked responses).
The major difference is diversity—US schools are locally controlled and the outcomes… vary. It’s not hard to find schools where political correctness dominates and social justice is explicitly taught (with no tolerance for dissent, of course). But it’s also not hard to find other schools which are conservative and basically Christian.
Brainwashing is one of major school goals, anyway.
That’s certainly a major difference. It is not the only major difference. Go and buy a dozen randomly chosen elementary mathematics textbooks in the US, or choose them at random from the ones actually used in public schools. I bet you will not find them filled with the sort of politically-loaded stuff that was common in Nazi Germany. (Though if you go looking, I’m sure you can find some that are.)
where political correctness dominates and social justice is explicitly taught
“Political correctness” and “social justice” are … extremely flexible terms. Would you like to say more explicitly what these schools do, and roughly what fraction of US public schools do it?
(The US is big and varied, and I bet there’s a wide variety of bad things we could find some US public schools doing. What we should expect to see if Eugine’s position is correct is, at least, that the majority of US public schools make vigorous attempts to make their pupils accept political positions agreeable to the governments that fund them.)
Brainwashing is one of major school goals, anyway.
I wonder what you mean by “brainwashing”.
There are quite a lot of schoolteachers in my family and nothing I have ever heard from them suggests that they see, or saw, their role as anything I would recognize as brainwashing. (This is in the UK, not the US. Things may be different in different countries.)
I expect that if pushed you could get many of them to admit that they try to encourage their pupils to be decent people—meaning e.g. not going out of their way to make one another’s lives unpleasant. You could call that brainwashing, if you insist. It seems to me quite different from trying to encourage pupils to hate the Jews, or want to die gloriously in battle. Anything beyond that, though? Nope. I’ve seen no sign that any of them have tried to push pupils in the direction of sharing their religion (or lack thereof) or politics (or lack thereof) or economic theories or anything of the kind.
My own recollection of the education I got is that some schools did systematically push a religious agenda (but only in specifically religious contexts, not by putting religion in the arithmetic questions), that at least one history teacher did admit to thinking that Nazism and Soviet communism were on the whole bad things, and … not much beyond that, actually. Now, that might just indicate how subtle the whole thing was and how completely they got to me, but given that plenty of other people who came through a similar education process have ended up with political and religious and other views quite different from mine, I doubt it.
“Political correctness” and “social justice” are … extremely flexible terms. Would you like to say more explicitly what these schools do, and roughly what fraction of US public schools do it?
No idea about the fraction and, obviously, there is a full spectrum from, let’s say, committed creationists to bona fide Marxists, so the fraction will depend on where you (arbitrarily) draw the line.
What I specifically mean is topics like “women scientists” in science classes, “black history month”, etc. I expect you’re familiar with the current epidemic of identity politics, microaggressions, triggers, etc. on college campuses in the US. You don’t think students acquire these… propensities solely on their way from high school to college? See e.g. Haidt’s experience.
I wonder what you mean by “brainwashing”.
It’s a loaded term, of course. Expressed neutrally it is the forming of overall frameworks involved in perceiving the world (especially socially and politically), shaping of values, and internalizing of the social acceptabilities and unacceptabilities. If you want it as a positive expression, it’s “preparing students to enter the society”.
I expect that if pushed you could get many of them to admit that they try to encourage their pupils to be decent people
“Decent people” is a… relative term. Teachers in, say, 1930s Germany or 1950s Russia also probably wanted their students to become “decent people”. It’s just that I think their idea of decency doesn’t quite match yours.
The major difference is diversity—US schools are locally controlled and the outcomes… vary. It’s not hard to find schools where political correctness dominates and social justice is explicitly taught (with no tolerance for dissent, of course). But it’s also not hard to find other schools which are conservative and basically Christian.
Brainwashing is one of major school goals, anyway.
That’s certainly a major difference. It is not the only major difference. Go and buy a dozen randomly chosen elementary mathematics textbooks in the US, or choose them at random from the ones actually used in public schools. I bet you will not find them filled with the sort of politically-loaded stuff that was common in Nazi Germany. (Though if you go looking, I’m sure you can find some that are.)
“Political correctness” and “social justice” are … extremely flexible terms. Would you like to say more explicitly what these schools do, and roughly what fraction of US public schools do it?
(The US is big and varied, and I bet there’s a wide variety of bad things we could find some US public schools doing. What we should expect to see if Eugine’s position is correct is, at least, that the majority of US public schools make vigorous attempts to make their pupils accept political positions agreeable to the governments that fund them.)
I wonder what you mean by “brainwashing”.
There are quite a lot of schoolteachers in my family and nothing I have ever heard from them suggests that they see, or saw, their role as anything I would recognize as brainwashing. (This is in the UK, not the US. Things may be different in different countries.)
I expect that if pushed you could get many of them to admit that they try to encourage their pupils to be decent people—meaning e.g. not going out of their way to make one another’s lives unpleasant. You could call that brainwashing, if you insist. It seems to me quite different from trying to encourage pupils to hate the Jews, or want to die gloriously in battle. Anything beyond that, though? Nope. I’ve seen no sign that any of them have tried to push pupils in the direction of sharing their religion (or lack thereof) or politics (or lack thereof) or economic theories or anything of the kind.
My own recollection of the education I got is that some schools did systematically push a religious agenda (but only in specifically religious contexts, not by putting religion in the arithmetic questions), that at least one history teacher did admit to thinking that Nazism and Soviet communism were on the whole bad things, and … not much beyond that, actually. Now, that might just indicate how subtle the whole thing was and how completely they got to me, but given that plenty of other people who came through a similar education process have ended up with political and religious and other views quite different from mine, I doubt it.
No idea about the fraction and, obviously, there is a full spectrum from, let’s say, committed creationists to bona fide Marxists, so the fraction will depend on where you (arbitrarily) draw the line.
What I specifically mean is topics like “women scientists” in science classes, “black history month”, etc. I expect you’re familiar with the current epidemic of identity politics, microaggressions, triggers, etc. on college campuses in the US. You don’t think students acquire these… propensities solely on their way from high school to college? See e.g. Haidt’s experience.
It’s a loaded term, of course. Expressed neutrally it is the forming of overall frameworks involved in perceiving the world (especially socially and politically), shaping of values, and internalizing of the social acceptabilities and unacceptabilities. If you want it as a positive expression, it’s “preparing students to enter the society”.
“Decent people” is a… relative term. Teachers in, say, 1930s Germany or 1950s Russia also probably wanted their students to become “decent people”. It’s just that I think their idea of decency doesn’t quite match yours.