The Wrecking of Our Schools

 

 

Source: American Dissident Voices, November 1997

 

 

by Dr. William L. Pierce

 

About a month ago the Clintonistas celebrated the 40th anniversary of one of the proudest moments in the history of America’s march toward the New World Order, a moment whose memory makes every Clintonista misty-eyed and brings a lump to his throat. That was the moment in 1957 when the Federal government sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to force, at bayonet point, the racial integration of Little Rock’s all-White Central High School, and the White citizens of Little Rock did not revolt. The Clintonistas still like to give their clenched-fist salute when they gloat with each other about this easy victory over the hated White racists who wanted to keep Blacks out of Central High School. Bill Clinton made a special trip back to Little Rock a few weeks ago to lead the gloating.

 

Today the enrollment at Central High School is 60 per cent Black, and conditions there have changed accordingly. Two of the members of my organization, the National Alliance, are high school teachers in Arkansas, and they wrote to me with comments about their own experiences in Arkansas schools today, along with comments by some of their colleagues which had been published in local newspapers. You won’t find any of this in the New York Times or the Washington Post, of course, because it’s news which doesn’t fit. One teacher wrote to me that while the 40th-anniversary hoopla was still going on in Central High there was a gang fight in the school involving approximately 40 Black students. It took six policemen using pepper spray to break it up. That’s pretty routine stuff at Central High these days. Other teachers report about school plays being broken up by rowdy Blacks in the audience and about the teachers’ frustration over the fact that they’re not permitted to do anything to control the Black students. The school administrators are afraid to have records of suspensions and expulsions which show a disproportionately large number of Black troublemakers.

 

Little Rock schools are still operating under various court orders, and court-appointed Clintonistas monitor very closely everything in the schools regarding race. One teacher writes: “When the deseg monitors come to my classroom, they don’t ask me anything about the curriculum or the success of the students. They count the Black and White faces and check to be sure that I have posters of African-Americans on the walls. Never mind that I teach British literature.” “Deseg monitors” in the classrooms. Doesn’t that sound Orwellian, like something right out of George Orwell’s novel 1984? Actually, it’s Clintonian. It is a real shame that we are permitting it to happen in America.

 

The real shame for us is not that Black students are having gang fights and otherwise behaving the way they always do; it is that nearly 40 per cent of the students at Central High are still White and are subjected to this environment. The Little Rock school board is able to keep a minority of White students in the formerly all-White Central High by making it a so-called “magnet” school, with many advanced courses that are not available at other high schools. The Clintonistas want to keep the schools racially integrated, and so they are forced to employ such stratagems as magnet schools, but they really don’t like the way these things work out in detail. What has happened at Central High is that the students have resegregated themselves: the Whites are 39 per cent of the general enrollment, but make up nearly 90 per cent of the enrollment in the courses for gifted students and 87 per cent of the advanced classes. There was a major article in U.S. News & World Report a few weeks ago lamenting this fact and asking what can be done to achieve complete racial mixing at Central High and other public schools across the country. The Clintonistas always have looked on schools which separate students into different classes on the basis of ability as “undemocratic.” In the case of racially mixed schools, ability tracking also has the embarrassing result of exposing the differences in ability between Blacks and Whites.

 

Now race, unfortunately, isn’t the only problem in America’s schools – although it’s a big problem, especially in the cities. It’s the racial integration of our schools which has brought drugs, gang fights, schoolroom rapes, assaults on teachers, and a general atmosphere of indiscipline to the education of our children. But the same people who pushed so hard for the racial integration of the schools 40 years ago have been pushing for other changes too, and in the long run these other changes may prove to be at least as destructive.

 

I’ll give you an example based on my own experience. I receive a great deal of correspondence from people all over the United States, and one of the things which impresses me is the inability of a relatively large percentage of our adult population to use the English language effectively or correctly. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar are very often abysmal. These people who write to me are virtually all high school graduates, and many of them also are university graduates, some with advanced degrees, but they have failed to learn how to use the English language at what used to be a grammar school level.

 

As a child I attended schools in five different districts from Virginia to Texas, and I believe that the standards in these schools were only average. But the standards were such that a substantial portion of the people from whom I receive letters today would not have been permitted to graduate with the low level of proficiency in English manifested by their letters. And it’s not that these people are unintelligent; I’ve spoken personally with many of them who are quite intelligent. They just didn’t learn English, and I’ve worried for a long time about why this is so.

 

We all understand, of course, that the schools have been dumbed down in order to make it possible for Blacks to cope with them. But this shouldn’t have made it impossible for Whites to learn who really wanted to learn. I was discussing this problem with a professor of education at a major American university just last week, and he explained to me that it’s not just the racial integrationists and egalitarians who have been changing the nature of our schools in recent decades. The feminists also have had a major role in the wrecking of our educational system. Feminists are solidly entrenched in the education departments which train our teachers and design our school curricula. They have gained a virtual stranglehold on many facets of our educational system. And let me tell you, if there is any bunch of people in this country with wackier and more destructive ideas than the racial egalitarians, it is the feminists. They have been busy feminizing the education of our children, and it shows up in the inability of an increasing number of Americans to use English effectively. The key to understanding why this is so is the fact that the feminists not only promote the teaching of feminist propaganda in the schools – denying any essential differences between men and women, among other things – but they also are changing the way in which children are taught, in order to bring it into conformity with their own ideas.

 

Feminists, for example, always have been against competition. They regard competitiveness as a masculine trait, and they try to discourage it in every way they can. They are in league with the racial egalitarians in pushing for an end to the grading of students. Setting precise standards and then grading students numerically according to their performance relative to those standards is anathema to them. They see it as psychologically damaging to the students – especially to those who make low scores. They much prefer a warm and fuzzy approach to evaluating students. Their goal for the classroom is cooperation, as opposed to what they like to refer to as “cutthroat” competition. They love committees and work groups and consensus. They want to see the students deal with learning as a group, with the brighter students helping the duller students. They like to see problems talked to death in a group. It’s really not stretching their ideas very far to say that whenever the members of a student group disagree about the answer to a question or a problem, the feminists would like to see the students vote on the correct answer. They really do have a different view of the nature of reality.

 

The feminists also don’t like to see a strong emphasis on rules. It destroys creativity, they believe. Rules and details should be relegated to a secondary position, and students should be given the “big picture” instead. They should be able to talk about a subject in broad terms without worrying too much about the details. And the feminists don’t much care for an analytical approach to any subject. Analysis is too masculine.

 

What all of this means when it comes to the teaching of English to students is that the rules of grammar, punctuation, and style are de-emphasized, and the students instead are given a “feeling” for what constitutes standard English.

 

Here’s a specific example of the way in which the feminist influence in education has affected Americans’ mastery of their language. When I was a student back in the fifth or sixth grade, one of the most important tools I learned for understanding grammar was the diagramming of sentences. This involved breaking down a sentence into its constituent structural components and analyzing their relationships to each other: subjects, predicates, conjunctions, direct objects, objects of prepositions, modifying phrases and clauses, and so on. I had to fit every word in the sentence into a structural diagram which emphasized the role of the word in relation to the other words. It seems as if every night for a couple of years I was diagramming sentences. And I was called to the blackboard hundreds of times to diagram sentences. I didn’t enjoy it, but it taught me to look at language analytically. It gave me the habit of building sentences the way an architect designs buildings: a very useful habit, I believe.

 

But most high school graduates today – not all, but most – have never diagrammed a sentence. The concept is completely unfamiliar to them. Instead, they have been taught to see the “big picture” in English, to get a “feeling” for it. The feminists regard diagramming with distaste: too analytical, too masculine. They have succeeded in having it phased out of most curricula. The consequence is that most high school graduates are not able to use English with a reasonable degree of precision. They have not really mastered the language. Of course, they usually can say approximately what they mean when they write a letter, and that’s good enough to get by for most purposes. The decline in the degree of precision with which the average American uses English more or less matches the general decline in the level of civilization in our society.

 

This decline is sufficient that most Americans are no longer bothered by the dropping of the old, sexist rule that a pronoun must agree in number with its antecedent, and so the language can be made more nearly Politically Correct without alarming too many people. For example, in the bad, old days of grammatical rules a teacher might have announced to a class: “Any student who wishes to graduate with his classmates must do all of his homework.” Today the Politically Correct teacher would announce instead: “Any student who wishes to graduate with their classmates must do all of their homework.” A bit less precise, a bit more open to misunderstanding, you must admit – although a reasonable person could guess what the teacher probably meant. The important thing, though, is that it keeps the feminists happy.

 

Perhaps it seems foolish to worry about such matters as the gradual loss of facility with English by the average American at a time when our entire society is under attack by those who are determined to destroy us. Why should we even think about the diagramming of sentences or the agreement of pronouns with their antecedents when we have a growing flood of non-White immigrants pouring into our country, when we have a rising tide of racial intermarriage, and when Bill Clinton is in the White House? Why should we even concern ourselves with the gradual dumbing down of our schools when we have a government of traitors and criminals who are hell-bent on suppressing our freedom as individuals and our sovereignty as a nation and dragging us into the New World Order?

 

Certainly, if we could in any quick, direct, and simple way halt non-White immigration, halt racial intermarriage, get Bill Clinton out of the White House, get rid of the other traitors and criminals in Washington, and restore our government to health and honesty, that’s what we should be doing, instead of worrying about the details of what’s been done to our schools. The fact is, however, that it all hangs together. In order to solve the big problems, we must first understand them, and to understand them we must look at the details, at all of the little specifics.

 

What’s been done to our schools is one of those details. Understanding this detail, understanding who did it, what their motivations are, and how they did it is important to us – really, essential to us – if we are to understand how to deal with the big problems. It’s important to understand that the damage done by feminism in our schools is more than teaching some Politically Correct nonsense about there being no difference between the sexes, because this helps us to understand that the damage done by feminism in our armed forces is more than merely putting women into formerly all-male combat units. We need to understand that wherever feminism gains a dominant influence, it brings with it a different way of looking at the world and of dealing with reality. And this different view of reality has profound consequences – ultimately lethal consequences – for our whole society.

 

Everything hangs together: our schools, our armed forces, our government. Understanding the problems in one area helps us understand the problems everywhere else. For example, thinking about the way in which feminists have de-emphasized competition in our schools and discouraged the competitive spirit of American children gives us insight into the growing softness, the growing wimpishness, that we see in so many young men these days.

 

And learning about the role of the feminists in the destruction of our society leads us to a better understanding of other destructive influences. We can understand better, for example, why the Jews, whose own traditions are anything but feminist, have so enthusiastically promoted feminism in our society. We can understand better why the media of news and entertainment, which are so largely under Jewish control, have worked so hard and for so long to ram feminist propaganda down our throats.

 

Understanding is essential. It doesn’t do us much good to become angry and wave our arms and shout about the evils of the New World Order in general terms. If we want other people to agree with us and join forces with us, then we must be credible and we must help them understand what’s going on and why. We must be specific. We must explain the details as well as the big picture. And we need a lot more people to join forces with us if we are to be able to compete effectively with the Jews and their many allies.

 

More than that, we need understanding – a thorough, detailed understanding – of what has happened to our society if we are to have any reasonable chance of building a sane and healthy society in its place someday, a society in which our children and grandchildren can live and learn and grow strong again, free of the destructive influences which have afflicted this society so grievously. And a sound educational system will be a very important part of that new society. We must know in detail what is wrong with the present educational system if we are to be able to build a better one someday.

 

And listen: if you’d like to participate with me in learning what we must do to build a better society and in helping other people understand these things too, I’d like to hear from you.

 

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