The breakdown in relations between the US’s top teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), and the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group focused on tackling anti-Semitism, reflects a deeper and dangerous takeover of education by determined activists. Besides the usual financial demands, education is increasingly seen as a means to achieve progressive, even radical “social justice”, which of course means boycotting anything connected to Israel.
The NEA is clearly taking political sides, claiming that it is pledging “to defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism”. The union is also adamant in defending undocumented immigrants, opposing parental rights, and pledging to back mass demonstrations against the administration. This approach is seen by boosters as “social justice unionism”, adding political stances to the usual economic ones.
The political orientation of NEA and the second largest teacher’s organisation, the American Federation of Teachers, with a combined membership of 4.5 million, is pretty clear. Their political donations even before Trump went 95 per cent to Democrats.
But the transformation of teachers into cadres of the progressive Left is not restricted to the United States. It can be seen throughout Europe and the United Kingdom. In the UK, Britain’s National Education Union has drifted ever further to the extremes. Last year, it passed a resolution denouncing Israel as “racist”. Its rabid anti-Israel status has elicited complaints of anti-Semitism. The union has been labelled a “hostile environment” for British Jews.
Such attitudes can be carried into the classroom. This can be seen in California’s ethnic studies programme, shaped by critical race theory, which has been accused of being openly anti-Zionist and of dismissing Jews as white oppressors. As one observer put it, the programme implies that “Genghis Khan was a nice guy. Israel is evil”. San Francisco has seen anti-Israel walkouts in high schools, allegedly organised by an advocacy group with access to student addresses. In Toronto, children as young as eight were reportedly “compelled” to attend a rally that devolved into anti-Israel chanting at the bequest of their progressive teachers.
This takeover of the teaching profession by the far-Left poses a profound challenge to liberal institutions. Teaching always had some inherent political implications, but in the past the emphasis remained on learning maths and language skills, while exposing students to various viewpoints. Today, students in many places are treated mostly to highly partisan takes on issues, from the Middle East to gender and climate change, with little interest in alternative views.
In many ways, the Left-wing orientation of teachers reflects the biases so deeply entrenched at the colleges where they learn their craft. In 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of college faculty identified as either far-Left or liberal compared to just 12 per cent being conservative or far-Right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled. Even in purple Arizona, Democratic professors appear to outnumber their GOP counterparts by 28 to 1.
Today teachers, whose training now focuses far more on radical themes, tilt towards the Left, more so even than Hollywood actors. And once they have graduated, more of these teachers embrace an agit-prop orientation.
Their actual record of educating young people has become ever more awful. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card, found that barely a quarter of students are proficient in reading, with the results little better in maths. Pressed by educational theorists, schools have abandoned phonics and other effective approaches for “whole language”, producing a population where 60 per cent of 4th graders are poor readers.
The long-term results of teacher failure are hard to contradict, and the impact is pervasive. A recent federal survey suggests that 28 per cent of Americans now occupy the lowest level of literacy, up from 19 per cent in 2017. We may now also be seeing the first reduction of the average American IQ in 100 years.
This decline in educational outcomes is evident not only in the US but across the West. Across Europe, students’ scores have been plummeting as well. Poland, Norway, Iceland and Germany, for example, recorded a decline of 25 or more points in maths between 2018 and 2022, which can surely only partly be attributed to the Covid lockdowns. Canada, too, is seeing its performance standards dropping over time. Indoctrination also has its consequences; a recent study of Canadian college students found 80 per cent claiming that fears about climate change affect their mental health.
All this bodes ill for the future of the West, as the pattern of indoctrination, and poor instruction, grows deeper. Once Western educational institutions, based on liberal principles, represented a distinct advantage. Now our educators seem more interested in ideology as opposed to knowledge. It’s bad news not just for conservatives or Jews, but for our societies’ ability to compete against countries, like India or China, who still focus on basic skills and prefer actual results, not just endemic virtue-signalling.
This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Anti-Israel protest at George Washington University, by Ted Eytan via Flickr under CC-BY-SA 2.0 License.
Email this Story
