A Conservative Kid Runs the Liberal Gauntlet: 7th Grader Decries Liberal Bias in Classroom

In the April 9, 2007 issue of the Weekly Standard, Mary Eberstadt’s article title, “Do Campuses Tilt Left,” initially appears to be a rhetorical question. After all, any conservative who attended college in the past 40 years could attest to the fact that all public university faculties and many private school faculties as well not only tilt left but do so openly and proudly. Thus my interest in Eberstadt’s title question with the obvious answer known to all was piqued. All, that is, except the left-leaning universities themselves, who apparently cannot recognize how homogeneously liberal their faculties have become.

In recent years, conservatives have produced several books aimed at exposing liberal bias on college campuses, such as David Horowitz’s newest title, Indoctrination U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom. These books contain hundreds of specific examples of college professors and administrators actively teaching personal political opinion as fact and universities uniformly supporting liberal causes, liberal candidates, and a liberal curriculum. Yet according to Eberstadt, in a new study sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO, liberal educators have published an attempt to discredit conservative authors who expose liberal indoctrination on publicly funded campuses. According to the study conducted, of course, by educators and researchers beholden to liberal employee unions, there is no accurate quantitative method available to determine the percentages of Democrats and Republicans among faculty and administrators, thus there is no bias.

By that same logic, there is no accurate quantitative method available to determine the percentages of terrorist and non-terrorist Muslims in America, thus there are no Muslim terrorists in America. Actually, many professors, like Ward Churchill, already think there are no terrorists in America except President Bush and that our government staged 9/11 as an excuse for war, so perhaps this type of circular logic makes sense in a demented way.

The liberal study’s criticism of conservative books claiming liberal bias on campuses, ironically, was expressed in these words: "passing off personal opinions as facts is not science." I found that statement fittingly hypocritical, since even high school and middle school students today are suffering through anti-conservative lectures and diatribes that are blatant examples of teachers “passing off personal opinions as fact.”

Conservatives attending graduate school, sadly, expect such treatment and steel themselves against it. In some ways, being forced to defend one’s viewpoint is beneficial, as it develops confidence and clarity of thought, since one’s positions are constantly under attack. Sadly, even middle school children who consider themselves conservative must constantly be vigilant in filtering liberal bias from what should be objective classroom teaching, particularly of history, government, and current events.

Spy The News! is pleased to welcome a guest contributor today, who is uniquely qualified to report on current liberal indoctrination efforts on school campuses, and can assist Eberstadt in debunking the AFT and AFL-CIO study that claims there is no proof of liberal bias in academia. Today’s guest reporter is the lovely and talented O-Be-Wise Daughter #1, who is a 7th grade student at what most would consider a high quality public middle school in a metropolitan DC suburb. O-Be-Wise Daughter #1 is an aspiring writer, who is developing interests in history, politics, and government, following in O-Be-Wise’s footsteps. Her favorite teacher in this 7th grade year is her U.S. history teacher. This teacher, however, suffers from an academic flaw: “passing off personal opinion as fact is not science [or in this case, history].”

When asked over the weekend to write about her experiences as a young conservative student in a liberal classroom, O-Be-Wise Daughter #1 wrote the following, edited here for spelling:

As a middle school student in the 7th grade, I often experience political pressure from students and teachers. I know, first hand, that this pressure starts much earlier than middle school. When I was in 3rd grade, I was taught by my teacher that Christopher Columbus was a “bad man.” We were read stories about Columbus kidnapping Native Americans and taking them to Spain to work as slaves. The images of scared little Indian children and sad men and women were pasted into our minds. Lucky for me, I was able to go home and receive the truth from my parents. But how many of my classmates, still to this day, believe that Columbus was a mean and evil man?

Now, once again, I face an even more obvious political pressure. My history teacher is a perfect example. She almost always incorporates some reason why Republicans are unintelligent, and also incorporates rude comments and apparent disgust toward President Bush into our lessons. Our class has wasted multiple class periods discussing reasons why President Bush isn’t a suitable president. What makes it worse is the fact that the other students are being subjected to liberal ways of thinking, as well as the utmost disrespect for our president.

As one student put it after sharing a rude joke about President Bush, “I’m a Republican, but these jokes are just too funny.” Is it funny? I certainly don’t think so, and I know a few other students who don’t either. My honest question is: are we attending school to receive political opinions, and hear rude commentaries, or are we here to learn and gain an education?

It is plain that Americans have many different political standpoints. But I feel it’s unnecessary to bring these opinions into the school environment in such ways. No student should feel like they have to be in favor of a certain political party just to “fit in,” and they especially shouldn’t feel pressured. I for one will never change where I stand in politics. I will remain a conservative child in a conservative family.

The AFT and AFL-CIO study would have us believe that middle school exposures to liberal indoctrination like these described above do not occur. Spy The News! thanks O-Be-Wise Daughter #1 for her courage in standing up for herself and conservative principles at some risk to her grades, and for bravely sharing her experiences with an international audience of readers.
A disheartening aspect of this student's experience is her observation that the few other conservative children are finding humor in the Bush-bashing and they, like the proverbial frog who slowly cooks to death as the temperature in the water pot increases, are slowly embracing the marginalization of their conservatism. Despite our best efforts to convince them otherwise, children often believe their teachers know more about school subjects than parents. When history is presented only from the liberal perspective and the student does not go home and discuss it with parents, parents may never become aware of what their children are learning, or not learning, in all those hours under the influence of liberal teachers.

Eberstadt recently edited a new book titled Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys, which contains essays by former liberals who were so put off by the overwhelmingly liberal bias they experienced in college that it pushed them to investigate and eventually embrace conservatism in response. With attentive and active parental involvement, perhaps a new generation of conservative youth can be shepherded safely through the increasingly liberal gauntlet of American academia and bring the concept of “fair and balanced” to faculties and administrators that so desperately need it if they wish to remain credible in the public eye.

Previous posts discussing liberal bias in schools:
Can Teachers and Professors Hide Personal Bias? AZ State Senator’s Bill Would Require It

Avoiding Mistakes in Iraq by Revising “Quagmire Quixote” Histories of Vietnam War

Avoiding Mistakes in Iraq by Revising "Quagmire Quixote" Histories of Vietnam War

Napoleon Bonaparte once stated that “history is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” During the Vietnam War, and in the intervening years since, liberal academia, in bed with liberal media, embarked on a joint operation I refer to as “Quagmire-Quixotism,” in which they tilted their collective eggheads against windmills of truth in Vietnam and published news headlines, body counts, and historical textbooks that ultimately convinced a majority of Americans that the Vietnam War was a mistake and the threat of Communism in the region had been exaggerated. American universities, including the one from which I obtained an M.A. in History many years ago, remain under the unyielding (even to facts) liberal rule of professors drunken with the wine of quagmire hysteria to the point that college course on the Vietnam War are anything but exercises in historical research or original thought.

To challenge the Quagmire-Quixotism professors with military facts or to place blame for failure in Vietnam on Congress, the Media, or the anti-war movement was truly a suicidal act for a graduate student, at least if one valued his/her GPA. Under silent protest, I dutifully digested Anti-American apology pieces posing as textbooks, such as America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, The Ugly American, and other quagmire folklore. Liberal academia, of course, did not curb its voracious appetite for debunking and rewriting long-accepted historical records with just the Vietnam War. Not believing any American should be revered, even if doing so might be in the national interest, liberal history professors and eager graduate students set out to discover and publish any and all salacious accounts of presidential behavior. The resulting collection of theses, dissertations, and textbooks provided us with such important “facts” as Jefferson’s alleged sexual encounters with slaves, Lincoln's manic depression and latent homosexuality, and the debunking of the cherished story of Washington chopping down the cherry tree.

The Founding Fathers, under the poison pen of these revisionist historians, went from wise and inspired to white and despised, as historical focus shifted only to their race, their wealth, and their allegedly selfish motives. One of my children once asked, “is it true that Christopher Columbus was an evil man who killed Indians and took them as slaves as gifts for the King of Spain?” That was an interesting dinner conversation, but that was taught as historical fact in our local school. Not content with indoctrinating college age students, academia published texts designed to sow the seeds of liberal anti-Americanism even among the very young.

Fortunately, after decades of indoctrination, serious students of history are ironically using revisionism to debunk the debunkers, and the history of the Vietnam War is fertile ground for rescuing facts that have been slowly drowning in academia’s quagmire. A case in point is Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Having previously examined sections of the book, I was pleased to see TigerHawk quoting from it to defend the “slow” development of the Iraqi military under U.S. training and supervision. The reminders of General George Washington’s battlefield errors and the pitiful training and organization of American troops in the Revolutionary War should give pause to those who believe that by now Iraq should have assembled a fully functional national military. Our expectations are too high and our patience seems to be shortsightedly wearing thin.

What piqued my interest was TigerHawk’s reference to Moyar’s book as “excellent revisionist history.” That statement caused me to reflect on the idea that while “revisionist history” used to be a pejorative term for works that debunked America’s heroes, history has now been rewritten to such an extent by liberal academics that “revisionist history” today refers to rewriting the rewritten histories and biographies dominating all current textbooks and classrooms. Years ago in graduate school I could scarcely have imagined that I would recommend a “revisionist history” to anyone. Yet when one thinks of today’s alternative media, such as Fox News, conservative radio, and Internet bloggers, it is clear that all of these are in fact current efforts at revisionist history, attempts to assure that liberal-hijacked media and academia cannot provide unchallenged the “version of past [or present] events” people will agree upon in the present or future. There are two sides to every issue, especially depictions of war, lest one focus solely on the horrors of war while neglecting the reality that at times it is a means to a worthy end.

Historical scholarship such as Moyar’s Triumph Forsakenshould be, but is not, welcomed in America’s universities. Spy the News! recommends Triumph Forsaken for anyone who believes Vietnam could have and should have been an American political and military victory. It is also a suggested read for Bush Administration critics who have accepted the oft-repeated mantra that Vietnam and Iraq deserve the quagmire label. The book extensively discusses impatience as perhaps the greatest contributor to America’s disgraceful withdrawal from Vietnam, with that impatience displayed by politicians looking to make names for themselves, the media, and some within the U.S. military itself. Impatience appears once again to be leading the U.S. to potential failure in Iraq, and without proper historical perspective, we may be doomed to repeat previous mistakes. Thankfully through alternative media, unchallenged biased liberal historical perspectives are becoming, ironically, a thing of the past.