Education: August 2023 Archives

Education: How to Destroy and Reconquer

Thought-provoking analysis of the problem by Arthur Milikh and Scott Yenor, but the proposed remedy doesn't seem right or realistic.

"The Right's defensive crouch is present in everything it does: While the Left writes and implements curriculum and educates the educators, the Right seeks educational choice. While the Left burrows into administrative roles and teacher colleges, the Right demands testing and accountability. While the Right is concerned about declines in literacy, numeracy, and citizenship, the Left sees these declines as part of closing the racial achievement gap. While the Left obtains vast funding for woke education, the Right begs for "opt-outs" from sex education programs and seeks to ban pornographic books from school libraries.

"In its current state, this Right can only fritter around the edges of the Left's institutional conquest. It more or less tacitly accepts the Left's moral goals of sexual and racial radicalism. The growing anger on the Right at the incompetence, expense, and moral corruption in our schools is not matched with a plan to take away the Left's institutions or to provide an alternative vision of education. The Right's solutions are so based in narrow policy-wonkery and so lacking in spiritedness, that even if all its policy fixes were instantly implemented not much would change. This is what political defeat looks like. The New Right must endorse government and private actions to harm, humiliate, and destroy our education establishment and rebuild a competitive, patriotic, moral educational model suitable for a great country."