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How I Worked With the John Birch SocietyJul 12 '00 (Updated May 27 '08) Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line This is my story about an unusual experience. I was helping a friend’s mother move from one apartment to another. My friend’s mom is a bit older, so she and “Dara,” my female friend, left the heavier lifting to me, “Bob,” “ Jake,” and the three teenage boys. She and her mom handled the lighter stuff. Bob was my friend’s brother, but I didn’t know him well. “He’s pretty much into his politics,” was about all I recalled her saying about him, though I did remember later that she had told me more. The boys were Bob’s home-schooling students in his Political Science class. Bob was paid a small amount to come to the house of one of the boys and teach them about contemporary politics. Jake was a (soon-to-be) neighbor. I liked the sex-typed division of labor. It made me feel manly and traditional. After awhile, as we hoisted a couch, I asked one of the boys, “Hey, is Bob a pretty good teacher? Or is he too serious?” I was kind of kidding around. He and I worked well together. The Boy, a blond haired lad, slender but strong for his size, said, “Yes, He’s great. Lately we’ve been reading how President Clinton has been having his enemies killed, and how the media is covering it up.” He was serious. There was no irony in his tone, nor on his face. I remembered a group email I’d gotten a few months back about some people close to Clinton disappearing, and how I’d wondered if the email was meant to be taken seriously. I said, “Oh really? Clinton? And why isn’t the media writing about these murders? That would be pretty serious if the President was having his enemies killed. I mean, I wish he could keep his pants on, but he’s been a good President.” Together, we negotiated a couch around a corner in the stairwell. The young man said, “It’s because there’s a liberal conspiracy to control the news we get. The liberals control the papers and the schools, and they want to take God out of the schools. That’s why my parents and I decided on home schooling.” “I see,” I said, “and what else is Bob teaching you?” “Mostly about how there’s too much government. The liberals want to take away our right to have guns, they give money to social programs that don’t work…stuff like that.” I asked him how he felt about Big Government deciding whether a woman could have an abortion, and he explained that that was different. Killing an unborn child was murder, and we should punish murderers. He told me how Clinton and other liberals supported murder. I wanted to ask him about the murder of thousands in Nicaragua and El Salvador, back in the Reagan-Bush days, but I held off. I wasn’t sure if his home schooling had covered that period in history yet. Together, we got the couch into the apartment. Later, I spoke with Bob, his teacher. I asked if he presented a balanced perspective in his Political Science class, or whether he presented a consistently conservative view. He told me that he presented the truth. He explained that the educational system in our country has been corrupted by Secular Humanists, who believe that there are no moral absolutes. These Secular Humanists, he explained, deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, believe in multiculturalism and homosexuality, and are influenced by Communists. They taught evolution in the schools, and that it’s OK to do anything that feels good. Liberals also believed in a unified World Government, he told me. I had thought I was a liberal, but I had never heard of a unified World Government. I asked what’s wrong with multiculturalism, given how many cultures make up our great country. He explained that our country was founded by Europeans, based on Christian principles, and that those principles should be honored. Now, my Judeo-Christian principles are a part of what guided me to work with disadvantaged kids, so I thought I’d ask him how he thought we could best help the most disadvantaged children in our country. He said we had to teach them to take responsibility for their actions, and that we should not be so concerned about self-esteem. I voiced my agreement with him about self-esteem, since I’ve found that the most lasting self-esteem comes from meeting challenges (the kids I work with love challenges), not from being told “you’re smart,” even when a kid screws up. But then things got really funny. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Woody Allen movie in which a couple of intellectual types are pontificating about some writer or movie director in the lobby of a theater, and Woody says something like, “Well, he happens to be right here; let’s see what he says,” and pulls the guy out of the wings. But that’s more or less what happened next: Bob started telling me how all the liberals were into “whole language” instruction, and that whole language instruction was a major part of why our poor kids can’t read and write. “If they were educated with phonics-oriented methods, and not whole language, poorer kids would do just fine. But the liberals want to validate not being able to read and write. It’s part of their whole notion that anything is OK as long as it feels good.” I asked Bob how much time he’d spend working with kids in the inner city , and how much research he’d read on whole language versus phonics instruction. He said it didn’t matter; he knew he was right. What he didn’t know was that he was talking to a research psychologist who had just published a paper in the American Educational Research Journal comparing whole language and phonics instruction for at-risk and not-at-risk kindergarten children. I didn’t tell him at first. I said, “What if we had an expert here—someone who had done research on whole language and phonics instruction? Do you think they’d agree that phonics instruction is better for all kids?” He said, “So-called scholars are a part of the Secular Humanist conspiracy. They’d just say what the liberals want to hear.” What we actually found (in our research) is that self-proclaimed whole language and phonics teachers don’t teach that differently. Whole language teaching methods are said to emphasize exposure to literature, creative writing, validation of children’s “stories,” and environmental print. Phonics teaching methods are said to emphasize memorizing ABCs, establishing letter-sound correspondence, and gradually building up toward the reading of words and sentences. In practice, phonics-oriented teachers tend to use worksheets more. What we found was that most teachers tended to use BOTH whole-language- and phonics-oriented methods of teaching, regardless of what “theoretical orientation” they claimed to subscribe to. Further, we found that to the extent that there are differences, at-risk kindergarten kids tended to benefit most from whole language instruction. Kids who entered kindergarten with good pre-reading skills did fine regardless of teaching method. If the previous paragraph is a bit thick, consider only the bottom line: the story is more complicated than Bob thought, and whole language instruction is helpful for kindergarten kids who have the least exposure to written language when they enter kindergarten. To force phonics-oriented methods on the poorest kindergartners would be to their disadvantage. Note that I agree with Bob about the importance of phonics-oriented instruction (along with whole language) in the later grades. I think people should be able to read comfortably and spell competently by the time they get to high school. When I finally mentioned that I had done research in the area about which he was expounding, he grew silent, but I could tell he was not listening to what I said. He is a bright guy, but did not want to hear that the real picture is more complicated than the one he painted. I found myself frustrated that this man could spew so much rhetoric, but was utterly unwilling to consider a view which differed from his own, even from someone who is considered by some to be something of an expert in the area about which he was speaking so confidently. I later realized that this Home Schooling Teacher was that same brother who had been described by my friend as being in the John Birch Society, a rather conservative organization, to put it mildly. After my conversations with Bob and his students, I concluded that these kids were being indoctrinated as much as educated. But there are some further ironies to my moving day. I didn’t mention that Jake was a Black guy, did I? He and I wound up exchanging some funny quick glances as Bob and his students kept on bad-mouthing Clinton, liberals, Secular Humanists, and multiculturalism. But in spite of what could easily be seen as thinly veiled racism in some of policies our conservative co-laborers were advocating, they were gracious to Jake (who was admittedly pretty quiet), and fairly gracious to me. They were NOT gun-toting Bubbas, looking for some Blacks, or Jews, or Homosexuals to shoot. In fact, I own a gun (a little .22 with which I kill only empty beer cans, and only in Montana), and I don’t think Bob does. They were just every day people, one of whom happened to be an extremely conservative home schooling teacher, and the others who happened to be vulnerable young boys who believed everything Bob taught them. Is most home schooling Right Wing Indoctrination? I very strongly doubt it. In fact, I’d guess many home schoolers are “hippy types” who want their kids to get a more balanced education than our public schools’ outdated and Euro-centric textbooks can provide. Most are probably somewhere near the middle of the road politically, and just feel they can do a better job of educating their children, relative to overcrowded and under-funded public schools. But I certainly would encourage any parents who are considering hiring someone to home school their children (as compared to doing it themselves) to interview the people to whom they will be entrusting their children very closely, to ensure that the values they are being taught are consistent with their own beliefs. Is there such a thing as Left Wing Indoctrination? Heck yes! I’ve known students on major University campuses who came out of classes with bewildered looks on their faces, having been taught that all heterosexual sex is rape, that all men are potential or latent rapists, that PMS is a myth perpetuated by men to oppress women, that ALL Indian tribes lived in harmony with nature and did not deplete natural resources, etc. No-one is immune to getting a little carried away when they become involved in a cause. But in most cases, there is some system of checks and balances. For every high school teacher, or college professor, with an extreme left wing agenda, there is another with a right wing agenda, isn’t there? And hopefully, there are still some out there (at all levels, from kindergarten through graduate school) who still believe in intellectual objectivity: in seeking out Knowledge (and teaching the tools to acquire knowledge) rather than seeking out information that supports a given view. At the high school level, whether in regular schools or in home schooling, I believe political science students should be taught both liberal and conservative positions, and encouraged to debate amongst themselves for BOTH sides, such that they can better understand the positions of those whose views may be different from their parents’ political subculture. I do this in my own college teaching (psychology can get very political), but it certainly wasn’t happening among Bob’s high school political science students. Are there educators out there who manage to lean to the “left” or the “right” without losing their objectivity? Of course! If you want to do some challenging and enjoyable reading, I heartily recommend The Chomsky Reader (1984), by Noam Chomsky, an irreverent intellectual hero to many left-leaning teacher-types like myself. But I equally heartily recommend Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), by Dinesh D’Souza, a “conservative” writer whose challenges to political correctness are a delight to anyone who has seen PC undermine intellectual objectivity. By the way, I didn’t consider joining the John Birch Society, but I did have an interesting (and generally pleasant, if at times frustrating) afternoon moving furniture with Bob and his young students.  |
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