A closed loop system

How the New Right needs to take ground back on education

- Photo by George Garrigues

Public high schools are as much a place of socialisation as they are places of learning. For many, it’s more of the former than the latter. But when class is in session, are our teachers presenting their lessons neutrally?

One of my favorite teachers in high school was a socialist. He was a history teacher. And he was one of the most biased teachers I have encountered. To an extent, he propagandized the kids. But he was a captivating teacher, he inspired a love of history in me. He cared about his students, he wanted to see them succeed, and he went the extra mile. I have some cognitive dissonance about him.

There were two history teachers in my school that taught at that level. In my class we learned about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Russian revolution, Gandhi and India. In my friend’s stream they learned Irish history, World War 2, the Middle Ages. We were assigned these streams; they were not a choice. Maybe it was merely a case of wanting what I didn’t have, but I remember feeling a sense of envy that I couldn’t learn about that too. And yet, there was still something in my history teacher’s class for me, I became enamored by the great men of history we learned of, how they shaped the world for better or worse. How they responded to the great events that transpired. Even today as an adult, that appreciation still shines through the layers of dust and detritus that accumulate atop one’s sense of wonder.

But my teacher’s biases were still imparted. It’s natural, children are impressionable. The effect here is magnified when children go through crisis. Later that year a former friend of mine who had gone off the deep end shot his father and then himself. On the rare occasions he had shown up to class that year, he and I had gotten into arguments. The police found evidence he had been planning a school shooting. Naturally there was an investigation, so the police came and spoke with the parents and some of his friends. Hardly an event that could be swept under the rug, and soon the whole school knew of it. There were rumors he had a hit-list. If such a list existed, I suspected I was on it. The situation being what it was, I was sent to the guidance councillor. He too was a man that cared, but he was hardly a professional. The discussions about my former friend, and my own situation somehow segued into the merits of Marxism, and the communist manifesto. I suspect I was a willing participant from the jump. Highly political by nature, I may have relished the opportunity to dispense with the unpleasantries of my own mortality and abstract into the injustices of world.

I can’t say that either of them was responsible for my childish beliefs in socialism and leftism as a teenager. But at the least, it can’t have helped. It reflects a wider issue in our society: Adolescents tend to be more disposed towards leftism. The adults teaching them are often left leaning if not leftist. And at the least, there’s a synergistic effect there, and on occasion a deliberate amplification. However, when I was at high school, some 15 or 20 years ago, while almost all teachers in my public school were liberal or leftist, most aimed to restrain their views in front of the children. They were baby boomers and Gen Xers, they still knew that restraint was a virtue, even if their behaviour fell short of it at times. Millennial and Gen Z teachers? I suspect restraint is more frequently a foreign concept. It’s not entirely their fault, they’re not entirely adults.

We can zoom out even further, to the education of the educators. When I walk past the Department of Education near my local institution, the glass and walls are covered in child-like chicken scratchings and political signalling in Māori, and political posters from an organisation that was, up until a few days prior to the time of writing, an arm of New Zealand’s indigenous ethnocentrist party. There are statements on how evil the current government is, poorly drawn caricatures of our conservative coalition government leaders as a three headed hydra (the implication being that their heads ought to be displaced from the body). Of course, these attitudes are hardly a new phenomenon among the student body. Campus has for many decades been a source of radical ideas and general dissidence with perceived conservative authority. What has shifted in these decades, is the endorsement of and approval to institutionalise and enshrine such behaviour. I took some education papers in university, they happened to be mandatory papers for anyone wishing to become a high school teacher, so I got to see what today’s teachers were being taught. They were stimulating classes, but it was heavily imbued with leftist ideology. I remember my lecturer (who was also took my smaller class-room style tutorial) telling my tutorial class as if it were the most common of facts: “And, feminism benefits men just as much too.” – I raised my hand – “How?” – She took a moment to think before answering: “Because it allows men to be what they want to be”
“But doesn’t it benefit men to have more power than women? Like I understand why feminism might benefit women, but I don’t understand how a society that doesn’t preference men could benefit men”
“Not all men want to have to be strong and stoic all the time, and it’s not good for their wellbeing to be forced to conform” she responded.

Not all men, true. But quite a shifting of the goalposts.

I liked this lecturer. Really liked her. She was attractive, and I wanted to have sex with her (I never did). I didn’t want to press the case further. But her disposition was reflective of the broader ideological positioning of those who both select and educate the young adults who will one day be the teachers of our children. And so, from the education academics to the student-teachers they select and train, to the children being taught, It’s a closed loop system.

For too long the political right’s answer to this problem is merely one of antagonism and top-down directives to ‘shape up and get in line’. When that hasn’t worked, it has been to under fund public education, and encourage parallel streams outside the system, so that non-liberal families have choice. It’s a natural human reaction that those who exist in dependence on the system find this outrageous, that they react by doubling down and telling that authority to get bent. Reactance underlies those very chicken scratchings that adorn the entrance to the Department of Education in my city’s university. It reflects the fact that center right conservative parties in the neoliberal era have viewed public education as an annoying distraction.

That’s not to say it’s all bad, the increasing leftist polarisation of teachers seems to be contributing to younger Gen Z and now Gen Alpha boys shifting to the right, either out of rebellion, or frustration at being told they have the original sin of being male. Though that is a positive externality, it’s only a silver lining. If the new right is to succeed in a great renewal of our society, it must start with the way our young are being raised. While it is our instinct to look at the family, and virtue grounded in religion as the means to fix this, we should not ignore where our children go to learn and grow.

The new right must not only take the education system seriously, we need to infiltrate it. We need people willing to work their way into the system at all levels, to be willing to slip beneath the radar, to go deep cover, and then to be in position to start implementing the changes that we need so that we can moderate the influence of leftists on education. While well-run charter schools and support for home schooling empowers families who want choice over the influence their children receive, at a system wide level, it is the equivalent of conservative governments taking their toys and going home. It misses the fact that these options will always be a minority choice, that most children will still attend public schools. It misses the fact that it’s not enough to give choice to parents, or to give directives from the top that exist outside of the education system proper. We must actively shape these institutions rather than hoping people who have come up through these systems see the light. The new right has correctly identified the levers of power that deep state bureaucrats and intelligence agents use to mold our systems of government, but thus far we have failed to see the real lesson of all of this:

We’ve been playing the game with one hand tied behind our backs.