Government Indoctrination Centers ("Public School")

One of the remarkable self-indulgences of contemporary educators in the public schools has been the introduction into classrooms of programs which systematically undermine moral principles that have come down over the centuries, and which children have been taught by their parents.  These programs have usually been developed by intellectuals outside the field of education, extensively marketed by both commercial firms and non-profit organizations, and are often eagerly embraced by educators who have been taught in schools of education that their role is to be that of agents of social “change,” not simply transmitters of a heritage of knowledge.  These programs have a remarkable variety of names and ostensible goals, one of the earliest names being “values clarification,” though other names have proliferated after parents and others discovered what “values clarification” really meant in practice and raised objections.

The phrase “values clarification” is very misleading.  When parents tell their children not to steal or lie, or engage in violence, there is no ambiguity as to what they mean.  Ambiguity is introduced by programs which confront students with carefully crafted moral dilemmas, such as a situation where is ship is sinking and there are more people than the lifeboats can hold, so that decisions have to be made as to who is to be left to drown, perhaps beaten off when they try to climb out of the water into a lifeboat that is already so full that it will capsize if another person climbs in.  Because received moral principles do not always apply, the implication is that each individual should develop his or her own situational ethics to replace traditional morality - not only where traditional moral principles fail but in the vast range of more ordinary situations where there are no such dilemmas as those in contrived examples.

If such exercises seem remote from the purposes of a public school education, they are not remote from the philosophy introduced into education by John Dewey a century ago and promoted by schools of education to the present day.  Nor were they remote from the thinking by Woodrow Wilson.  Like so much in the vision of the anointed, this view of education exalts those who believe in it, and so it is not simply a set of testable hypotheses about social events.  Also like other aspects of that vision, there is not price to be paid by its promoters for being wrong, however large a price ends up being paid by individual students or by society at large.

“Values clarification” has been just one of a wide range of high-sounding names for classroom programs to re-shape the attitudes and consciousness of the younger generation. Other names have included “affective education,” “decision-making,” “Quest,” “sex education,” and many other imaginative titles.  Such titles are often simply flags of convenience, under which schools set sail on an “exciting” voyage in an uncharted sea of social experimentation in the re-shaping of young people’s beliefs and attitudes.  The ever-changing names for these programs reflect the need for concealment or misdirection, since few parents want to be told that schools are out to undo what the parents have taught their children or to mold those children to be what third parties want them to be.



Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.111