http://web.mit.edu/anscombe/www/index.shtml

Where the left won the battle is in the schools of education in the universities. They took those over to insure that THEY were the ones teaching the teachers. The final nail in the coffin happened about 8 years ago when they imposed “dispositions”screening for all teachers in training. This means they screen the student teachers, generally in their junior year, to see if they have the proper “dispostion” to become a teacher. Of course, this means they make sure the student has the proper leftist leanings.

FIRE has been successful in dealing with a few cases of conservatives kicked out of education schools, but the vast majority are cranking out radicals to teach our kids. And, yes, I believe Ayers was one of the architects of the dispostions idea.

In our house education was not exactly a priority and, as for books, if you looked high and low in our house you would have found only the World Book, my dictionary and thesaurus, perhaps a Bible lying around somewhere, my textbooks and library books, and the Science Fiction I bought at local stores.

However, I was extremely fortunate in high school to have had a dedicated school librarian who encouraged me to read plus a few outstanding teachers, and “old-fashioned” as they were, the spirit of the early 1960’s had not yet tainted them. They set me on my course, and in the subsequent several decades I have done an awful lot of wide-ranging supplemental reading.

But, then, I had a fairly good idea of where to look in my explorations because of the things my formal education taught me, the subjects it explored, the directions it went in, the people and books and concepts it introduced me to.

So, what happens if the entire educational system, a large majority of the teachers in it, and virtually all the curriculums (many likely created by Bill Ayers or one of his acolytes) and textbooks are dedicated to ignoring, obscuring, twisting, and leading you away from the whole traditional world view, and its leading thinkers and their ideas and writings, its values, subjects, concepts, philosophies, and ways of thinking? What then?

How do you find your way back to a tradition that you may not have a clear idea even exists, or that you have been told is not worthy of study–“dead old white men,” “colonialism,” “greed and rapacity,” “slavery,” “oppression,” “war,” “environmental degradation” and all that? Where are the signposts to point the way and lead you back?

How to sense and find what you don’t even know is there to be found? How to take a book out of the library if the librarian has decided it is just not worthy to be “selected” for the collection? What if the only history of the U.S. used as a textbook is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and you don’t know any better–after all the school has chosen it, so it must be accurate, right? What if the fact that a book is titled “A People’s History” of anything just doesn’t set off alarm bells, because you haven’t been taught to be wary of what that “People’s” in the title likely means?

And that, of course, is the whole idea.

Forgive me, but I would ask how long ago that was for you? As a teacher at both high school and college levels, I must say that the public schools k-12 are cesspools of leftist thought. It is unbelievable how this line of thinking is woven into everything throughout the school day.

At my community college recently, the course “Intro to Atheism” was being promoted on the overhead screens throughout the main building. Where was the “Intro to Christianity” class, you may ask? My answer, “Surely, you jest.”

I believe that rather than focusing on trying to storm the bastions and take back today’s corrupt, almost totally leftist dominated higher educational establishment (and popular “culture” as well)–projects that, even if doable, are going to take several generations of intellectual street and house to house fighting–Conservatives need to focus, right now, on making every effort to get as many children as possible out of the equally corrupt public school system and into homeschooling, in insulating them as much as possible from today’s popular culture, and on developing Conservative curriculums.

In a parallel effort, Conservatives also need to focus on endowing, strengthening, and growing existing conservative institutions of higher learning here in the U.S.–Hillsdale College in Michigan is actually the only such Conservative educational institution that I am aware of–and then on establishing more thoroughly Conservative colleges, universities, and centers of learning.

The culture is poison, and we need to see if we can find a way to immunize people, give them defenses against, and better alternatives to it.