Perhaps the New Year is a good time to talk about all things new. Then again, you really don’t have to wait until the beginning of the year to bring it up. In fact, it’s all the rage these days. New! New! New! Change! Change! Change! It just may be the preeminent, culturally approved mantra of our age.
This was made painfully clear to me this past June while attending our younger granddaughter’s high school graduation. With the young “scholars” in robes seated by rows and sporting various messages and images on their caps, every single speaker, be they faculty member or student, focused on just one word: change.
Repeatedly the principal and selected teachers advised the students to be ready for change, to expect change, to thrive in the midst of change. Not to be outdone, each student, including the valedictorian, also droned on and on about…change.
Sitting captive in the bleachers, I was taken aback. What about the things of permanence, I wondered? Amid all this talk about change, why didn’t the teachers, those in authority positions, also take the opportunity to encourage their students to face the future with a modicum of stability, one founded on lived, time-tested, and unchanging verities? It was as if they were sending their defenseless charges to the wolves without equipping them first for the inevitable battles to come.
You may well wonder why this got me so exercised. After all, isn’t change a given? The answer, of course, is yes. Life is always changing and to remain healthy we must continually adapt.
But does that mean there are no constants? Is ALL of life in flux? Are there no underlying, foundational truths or natural laws that remain stubbornly hardwired and unchanging?
And are we actually to believe that all change is good? Is the “new” always better than that which came before? To listen to the speakers this past June, the answer would seem to be “yes.”
As with much that passes for conventional wisdom, this mindset didn’t just materialize out of thin air. It comes from someplace. What you see, in other words, is not always what you get. It’s often just the tip of the iceberg.
Specifically, in the field of education, the focus on “change” has been in vogue since the early 1970s. As the decade of the 60s reached its ignominious demise, and the New Left came to realize their revolution in the streets had failed utterly, they switched gears. Rather than give up hope for revolutionary change, they devised an ingenious new strategy: target the soft, fertile ground of academia.
After all, who better to advance a purely speculative theory with almost no real-world applicability than the intellectual? Who else would be as apt to leap at the chance to finally wrest control away from all those witless “C” students who mindlessly run the world? This was the chance to make their mark and, as it turned out, they were not about to let such an opportunity go to waste.
What the New Left was pedaling is a form of stealth Marxism dubbed “critical theory,” also known as “cultural Marxism.” Of its many variants, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are perhaps the most widely known today.
As I’ve written before, this calculated deviation from orthodox Marxism arrived on our shores in the 1930s, thanks to our old friends at the Frankfurt School, that ambitious group of radical intellectuals who had fled Hitler’s Germany.
Rather than a direct frontal assault, as Marx proposed, they concluded that the most effective way to bring down Western Civilization was through infiltration – by undermining the system and its institutions from within. They would move from the streets to the suites, as later devotees put it. Or, as Van Jones famously said, give up the “radical pose” for Marxism’s “radical goals.”
Enter Paulo Freire (1921-1997) and his “Critical Pedagogy,” also known as “Critical Education Theory.” Freire today is a legend in North American schools of education. In fact, his 1970 book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” is the third most-cited source in all of the humanities and social sciences. So he’s not just some fringe character. He’s mainstream.
A Brazilian, Freire was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist and staunch evangelist for Liberation Theology, the latter a mixture of Marxism and Catholic theology. One of my divinity school professors once dubbed it “Marxism in a Christian key.”
According to Freire, the purpose of education is entirely political. It’s not intended, in other words, to help the student succeed in reading, writing, and arithmetic. On the contrary, that sort of education only promotes “reproduction,” the method by which those in power indoctrinate students into becoming cogs in the existing system. (Which is how math, by the way, came to be labelled “racist.”)
Freire uses the Marxist terminology of “colonizers” to describe those who hold a monopoly on “knowledge,” knowledge that ensures the system will perpetuate itself, feeding the newly “educated” into the colonizers’ demeaning, bourgeois jobs.
According to Freire, not only does colonizer knowledge enjoy a total monopoly on all knowing, but it has effectively displaced the prior (and altogether superior) knowledge of the “native people,” now sadly marginalized. On the periphery, their voices no longer count. They have been relegated to living in an enforced “culture of silence,” even though, in truth, they possess an uncorrupted, unfallen nobility. The problem is that they are unaware of this inherent sinlessness because they have been forced to judge themselves negatively by somebody else’s standards.
The purpose of Freirean education, then, is to rebel against colonizer culture, transform society, foster revolution, and seize the means of defining “literacy.” In so doing, the noble victim is emancipated from the grip of a corrupt and unjust social order.
But because this unjust social order is all-pervasive and its oppression internalized and “camouflaged,” Freirean education works to expose the colonizers’ “false consciousness,” to “demystify reality,” as Marx put it, so as to liberate the student and, ultimately, recruit him to take up the revolutionary cause, resulting in the takedown of the entire system.
So just who are these “colonizers”? They are, if you haven’t guessed already, the “privileged,” mostly white, male, and heterosexual. In fact, there is a whole hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed rankings (see the helpful chart above). In many instances, though, the “oppressors” don’t even know they are oppressors.
Thus, one of the main functions of Freirean education is to help the oppressors recognize their privilege and to repent of their unearned success. This involves what Freire calls “problem-posing education.”
Drag Queen Story Hour offers a good example of such problem-posing education. Its stated purpose, according to proponents, is to present a situation that leaves the students questioning what they once thought they knew about society, their parents, religion, even their instincts. Once the erstwhile forbidden fruit is revealed to be desirable, the student becomes far more amenable to alternate realities, in this case Marxian “truths.”
Of course, this is only but one method by which students are “groomed” to see something they wouldn’t otherwise see. The hope is that, armed with new revelatory insight, students will eventually perceive the need to reject their bourgeois values and develop genuine empathy for the victims of their oppression.
As I say, Freirean education takes its cues from the Frankfurt School’s strategy for undermining Western Civilization by stealth, using categories of race, class, and gender (as they relate to victimhood) to a divide and conquer.
It’s sold, however, not as revolutionary dogma, but as a benign, kindly invitation to enlarge our hearts and minds, foster greater compassion and understanding, as well as tolerance and fairness. Yet, in truth, it is an altogether uncompromising ideology intent on taking down civilization while at the same time, perhaps unsurprisingly, offering no viable blueprint for what will replace it. All we know is that it’ll be great.
Needless to say, as hoped, Freirean education has proven wildly successful. Begun in the universities, it has now filtered down into all grade levels. But it didn’t stop there. It also has fanned out into the corporate boardrooms, government, the media, and, dare I say it, into virtually every institution within Western society. It’s almost impossible to escape, even, unfortunately, in our churches (the church being, as Freire envisioned, a parallel educational institution).
Given all this, it’s not terribly surprising that our granddaughter’s graduation ceremony was filled with talk about “change.” For without change, the system simply perpetuates itself. Anything that smacks of tradition, the past, or established truth, is, by definition, colonized, and as such, unjust, racist, sexist, etc. Only the future holds promise for a completely new and righteous version of reality.
Unfortunately, when you tear down the “thin veneer of civilization,” you also tear down its guardrails, guardrails that help prevent human beings from degenerating into their basest nature, of reverting into uncivil, egocentric, amoral beasts interested only in the will-to-power and survival of the fittest, where the strong are free to prey on the weak. In short, a dog-eat-dog world.
So am I against change? By no means. What I’m against is revolutionary change that seeks only to destroy. What I’m for is positive reform/reformation.
While the former is eager to reject all received wisdom including natural and divine law in its headlong pursuit of radical change, the latter acknowledges the necessity for change but seeks to build constructively upon the foundation of all that has come before.
In the final analysis, the one seeks to abandon the eternal altogether, while the other seeks to discern the eternal amidst history’s ever-changing externalities.