“Capitalist hegemony,” “white privilege,” “teaching for social justice,” “critical pedagogy,” “liberation,” “oppression studies,” and “classroom resistance” (students who refuse to buy into all of the above).
All these are buzz words in the field of “revolutionary education.” And all are taught through Bill Ayers’s work, and through the work of like-minded activists, in a required “School and Society” course at my university — and other institutions of higher learning.
This has been going on since the early 1990s. My university required education majors to read the Mao and Castro-worshipping Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a “classic manifesto” that has sold nearly one million copies. (For a description of the pedagogy, click here). Not only was it required — not a big deal in itself, if part of a rounded reading list — but that was all that was offered in a class that future teachers must take. When I searched other schools, I found much the same thing. Apparently, “queering” the curriculum, assaulting capitalism, and denouncing “color-blind racism” is de rigueur.
Check the reading list at an area university. There may be exceptions, but judging from Amazon.com and course assignments, “teaching for social justice” is rampant. It got so bad that FIRE and the National Association of Scholars (disclosure: I’m president of NAS’s Illinois affiliate) had to fight accreditation requirements that future teachers have the right “dispositions” (see here and here). They did so successfully, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this indoctrination requirement.