Another Marxist Speaker. SUPRISE!

In a recent edition of the Marquette News Briefs, it was announced that Jonathan Kozol, author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid School in America and Savage Inequalities, will speak on Marquette’s campus on Monday, November 12, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. in the AMU. His visit is sponsored by the Manresa Project.

According to Manresa, “In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Jonathan Kozol moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston Public Schools. He has devoted the subsequent four decades to issues of education and social justice in America.”

Bernard Goldberg, the New York Times #1 bestselling author and six-time Emmy award winning reporter for CBS News, includes Mr. Kozol at number 9 in his book “100 People who are screwing up America.” He writes of Mr. Kozol:

Kozol is the patron saint of today’s powerful liberal educational establishment. … Kozol is a fierce opponent of traditional learning, which he says deadens children’s souls. He believe that education cannot and should not be politically neutral. Indeed, the once-outrageous idea that teachers should use their classrooms to espouse liberal/radical political views – i.e. to propagandize – can be traced directly to Jonathan Kozol. His views on the subject are laid out in his influential book ON BEING A TEACHER, which was written following a visit to Cuba in the mid-70s.
“There is a sense, within the Cuban schools,” he wrote admiringly, “that one is working for a purpose and that that purpose is a great deal more profound and more rewarding than the selfish pleasure of an individual reward.”

Goldberg, in turn, refers us to a 2003 article from City Journal by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Sol Stern:

Kozol brooded over the ideas he’d taken away from Cuba and molded them into a new theory for reforming American education. Taking as his starting point the crude Marxist view that education in all societies is “a system of indoctrination,” “an instrument of the state,” he worked out a method by which teachers could subvert capitalist America’s bad indoctrination and—cleverly and subtly—substitute some good left-wing indoctrination in its place. His next book, On Being a Teacher, is a manual on how to do that.

A typical chapter, “Disobedience Instruction,” shows teachers how to inculcate skepticism of authority. They should discredit obedience by discussing “those ordinary but pathetic figures who went into Watergate to steal, into My Lai to kill—among other reasons, because they lacked the power to say no.” They should invoke mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, too, whose “own preparation for obedient behavior was received in German public schools”—which resemble our own in aiming to produce “good Germans, or good citizens, as we in the United States would say.”

All the book’s model lessons aim to teach little children to withstand America’s state-sponsored brainwashing and to open them up to the self-evident truths of feminism, environmentalism, and the Left’s account of history. At the end of the book, Kozol thoughtfully provides a long list of left-wing publications and organizations—including the information agencies of the Chinese and Cuban governments—where teachers can get worthwhile classroom materials. But, Kozol warns teachers, be stealthy about all this; you can’t let administrators or parents perceive you as so politically oriented that you neglect the basic skills.

The book he is lecturing on, The Shame of the Nation, elicited this critique in the Wall Street Journal by another Manhattan Institute scholar:

Jonathan Kozol has a devoted following, and “The Shame of the Nation” will not disappoint his fans. It’s vintage Kozol–a jeremiad. His core complaints are familiar: American public schools are segregated, and those that have few whites in them are financially starved. He adds only one new element: The standards, testing and accountability “juggernaut” has crushed the “humane and happy” education we once had.

The de jure segregation of the South in 1954, Mr. Kozol argues, was no different from the de facto separation of the races today. Urban children experience “virtual apartheid” and “the conditions of internment.” Visiting schools in New York, Mr. Kozol “cannot discern the slightest hint that any vestige of the legal victory embodied in Brown v. Board of Education . . . has survived.”

Principals in segregated schools “create an architecture of adaptive strategies” that include “a relentless emphasis on raising test scores,” “scripted lesson plans,” “heightened discipline” and other policies that emulate the military–a “command and absolute control” image that Mr. Kozol uses repeatedly. Describing a South Bronx fourth-grade classroom, he writes about the Cuban schools he once visited. In those schools, however, “the students were allowed to question me, and did so with charm and curiosity.” What he saw of Cuban education “could not rival” that which he found in New York “in its totalitarian effectiveness.”

His solution, of course, is to demand LOTS more money for schools, making him a saint to the teachers union (augmented by his fierce opposition to school vouchers). More spending, of course, requires higher taxes. His own proposal is to move schools off the property tax and onto the federal income tax, essentially nationalizing education.

This is the man Marquette is bringing to campus for a major lecture. I have said it before and I will say it again: I do not object that Marquette brings in lecturers who are decidedly leftist in their political ideology (unless circumstances move us into the Catholics in Political Life framework). I object that the overwhelming majority of the speakers brought in are liberals. If Manresa announced two lectures on education, one featuring Mr. Kozol and the other featuring former US Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.

But no such luck. If it were just Mr. Kozol, I would simply blog about why he individually is wrong. Instead, I must blog about both why he is wrong and also reiterate the heavily leftist bias evident in Marquette’s speaker selection year after year.

(P.S. On a personal note, I apologize that I have been absent for a while. We took a family vacation last week, and now today is the first day of the new year at Marquette Law).

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