Should Teachers Be Avengers?
Teachers should do more to steer people to the progressive point-of-view. Democracy’s supposedly “wrong” turns in Brexit and Trump need correction. So say a number of teachers in opinion pieces in the TES (Times Education Supplement). The word “brainwashing” comes up.
The latest has Oliver Beach proposing that teachers work harder at shaping student dispositions — “The next world leader is sitting in a classroom today”. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/01/09/brainwash-children-trump-teachers/ ]
What is so striking is the irony. These “thought leaders” do not admit that they are proposing groupthink!
All this has been foretold and expected through the use of sophisticated propaganda techniques precisely designed to develop this progressive mindset. This book lays it out — Soviet Impregnational Propaganda, Baruch Hazan, 1982 — “ . . . the basic propaganda target is the large social group and not the individual.”
The chapters include these groupings to be manipulated: sports, the cinema, theater, language studies, and literature. The aim of these propaganda techniques and formation of opinion is to “promote uniform behavior of large social groups”. Today, since 1982, we could guess that media and the education system have been added to that list of groupings.
We should recognize that these opinions being now parroted are indeed the result of successful permeation. We should strive mightily against teachers taking on the role of heroic avengers — shaping students to predispositions rather than becoming objective, analytical and independent thinkers. Individual thinking is not the norm while collaboration and group projects are being normalized in schools.
Unfortunately, this shift to social/emotional learning (SEL) in education outcomes has already seen much worldwide adoption. Even the valued OECD’s Program for International Student Assessments (PISA) has been testing for non-academic factors in school. One question students are to reply Yes or No to is: “I feel happy at school.”