After kvetching for quite a while about California’s newly-updated curriculum standards at Law & Liberty, Greg Weiner makes a point worth considering:
This is among the fundamental problems with seeing education as a handmaiden of activism. It is invariably politicized, and those who do the politicizing invariably succeed only because they already have the power to do so. This is a classic study in power replicating itself under other guises. That the guise is “resistance†is one of the oldest tricks in power’s book. It is why the Cuban “Revolution†is still called one more than six decades after it won, and why Mexico managed to get “institutional†and “revolutionary†into the name of the one party that dominated its politics for most of the 20th century.
Power operates in its own interest. But it might serve the interest of those who possess power over the curriculum of California’s public universities not to adopt a language and course of study in which most people—including those whose rights are supposedly being vindicated—do not recognize themselves. (Consider that just three percent of Latino Americans use the curriculum’s preferred “Latinxâ€; among the minority of Latinos who have heard the term, only a third endorse its use.)
More broadly, the problem with the curriculum is not its political imbalance. Were that the case, the solution would be to balance it with other perspectives. The real problem is that it is politicized in the first place.
It would be nice if public education were actually educating students, preparing them for productive lives, and making the U. S. more competitive with other countries not so burdened with nonsensical thinking and grievances. Sadly, that’s not the case and the consequence will be more people with unhappy, dissatisfied lives and an impetus to importing more workers without the impediments of young people educated in the U. S.
One of the reasons foreigners enroll in our colleges and universities is the perceived high quality of our undergraduate and graduate programs, especially in STEM. But some countries, namely China, have already built up their own university systems to near the levels ours are reputed to have. Any actual decline in quality will make the foreigners stay home. Most of our STEM graduate programs are majority or plurality foreign nationals. The graduate students actually create the science and technology the schools take credit for. Without the foreigners, many of our STEM programs would have to shut down or be sharply downsized.