Whatever happened to... (Part 1)

A troubling walk down memory lane

Whatever happened to…

School—My personal experience was in public institutions until grad school. When I was in the third or fourth grade, I observed that perhaps 20% or so of the teachers were… “off.” Some were a bit sadistic, while others were overly nasty, or enjoyed openly playing favorites. This percentage of “off” teachers would increase as I made my way through high school.

Midway through high school, the material became more difficult, and it was clear that some teachers simply did not have the intellectual wherewithal to go anywhere beyond the assigned textbook, and a few even had trouble with that. The joke among the smarter kids was “What else can you do with a 2.0 from Chico State?” Still, they were all members of a very strong union, that never held pedagogy or welfare of the students in high regard.

At the same time—and this was during the mid-1960s—few of the teachers made any attempt to hide their political beliefs, which with rare exceptions were Leftist. I remember being assigned a monograph on the Soviet Union in the tenth grade, and there was a small section entitled “What’s wrong with Marxism?” Naturally, the teacher had to add her own spin on it, which she called “What’s wrong with…what’s wrong with Marxism?” In retrospect, I see that several young minds were turned to the Left by these sorts of experiences. And, no, there was never any discussion beyond her own point of view.

By then, it became clear that we students were dealing with a powerful and mostly unsympathetic bureaucracy, whereby we were merely the vehicle that kept the big machine going. Worse, there were far too many teachers in it mostly to indoctrinate impressionable kids, while operating in a setting that artificially empowered and protected them.

In undergraduate college, the “off” percentage grew higher, with some professors consorting with students, and misfit instructors—of whom there were many—giving worse grades to students they did not like. Only, it didn’t stop with grades.

A very dangerous rubric of the time, especially as it applied to recommendation letters for medical school, held that the student could request such a letter from a professor, but he could never see it before it was sent off to the med school. As you might expect, and I know this to be true since it happened to a friend of mine, certain profs were not above agreeing to write such letters to purposely sabotage the future of students they did not like.

Fortunately for my friend, the letter was so egregious, and in those days it had to be typed by a department secretary, that she told him, and it was never sent. Only because this letter was intercepted, did he get admitted to Columbia Med School.

Now, factor in around 60 years of academia festering in this environment, and is it any wonder that the Ivies have become DEI laughingstocks, replete with transgender “female” athletes and students unqualified to do much of anything? Bear in mind that the Ivies set the tone for lesser institutions and primary/secondary education.

Tolerance aka toleration—This is a tenet of classic liberalism, that echoes the philosophies of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, among others. The idea is for the government or individuals to provide protections for unpopular groups, even groups they themselves might consider deeply mistaken, or even inferior. An early American example of this was Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia,” passed in 1786.

After World War II, and especially in the 1950s and beyond, tolerance was applied to matters of race, and by the late 1960s, would pertain to sexual orientation, disability, and feminist issues. Ironically, it would be Marxist philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse who would point out the downside of tolerance.

Marcuse held that "the realization of the objective of tolerance" requires "intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed." Thus, his so-called “liberating tolerance” embodied intolerance to anything he considered “right-wing” and welcoming toleration of left-wing movements.

However, for a guy who was wrong about virtually everything, and still remains a guru of the massively intolerant left, he has a point. Mindless “tolerance” has brought us to the present tyranny of countless “marginalized” groups spawning DEI, mutilation surgery on young kids, vastly destructive healthcare policies, and costly and senseless wars.

Here’s a thought: Some things are objectively right, and some things are objectively wrong.