Sin Of Commission?

I'm going to draw a parallel here, on both sides of the aisle.

Hugh Hewitt draws our attention to John Leo's excellent piece on the Newsweek flap as well as the fallout - much of it from Hugh's interview with Terry Moran last week - about antimilitary biases in the media.

Let's connect it to education.

Leo says:

[T]he focus ought to be on whether the news media are predisposed to make certain kinds of mistakes and, if so, what to do about it. The disdain that so many reporters have for the military (or for police, the FBI, conservative Christians, or right-to-lifers) frames the way that errors and bogus stories tend to occur. The antimilitary mentality makes atrocity stories easier to publish, even when they are untrue. The classic example is CNN's false 1998 story that the U.S. military knowingly dropped nerve gas on Americans during the Vietnam War. On the other hand, brutal treatment of dissenters by Fidel Castro tends to be softened or omitted in the American press because so many journalists still see him as the romanticized figure from their youth in the 1960s.

Bingo.

And as King and I among others have been talking about for years, there are few departments on campus more relentlessly, dogmatically left of center than Education.

So is it reasonable to think that teachers - who for a generation have come from the most rigorously, vigorously leftist departments in higher ed, and graduated into jobs controlled by one of the most reliably left-of-center unions in existence - might accept left-wing indoctrination and the minimization of dissenting views without even thinking about it, as Leo sees in the media?

It's a question I'd love to ask the public ed system's most passional proponents. Of course, when you ask such questions and get inflammatory strawmen for answers, it bids one to think one might be onto something. Hewitt's interview with Moran was a rich vein of such straw. Money quote from Moran:

If you notice what I said was, do you think it's appropriate, from that podium, speaking for the president of the United States, to instruct an American magazine as to how to go about its business. And what I was trying to do was draw a line that Scott McClellan agreed with. If you notice later on that you're absolutely right. It's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report. I was just trying to draw that line, that there may be things which are right for the media to do, but that I think that whether you are liberal or conservative, you don't want the government telling the media to do.

Of course, nobody, least of all the Administration was telling the press what to do - merely criticizing the job they do now, which is, the last I checked, our First Amendment right.

In the same vein was Michael Boucher's response to my post the other day on the idiotic exercise in masturbatory pseudojournalism story on the Teenage Republicans' troll for stories of left-wing indoctrination and suppression of non-left opinions in schools, the flap that led to his Strib op-ed that I tackled last week:

It is unfortunate that you support collecting Dossiers on private citizens.

This guy's teaching "critical thinking" to your children.

It's the "when did you stop beating your wife?" of the 21st century, assigning some nefarious, outrageous, authoritarian intent to the civic, civil act of paying attention to who's teaching our kids, and what, as Moran assigned it to the act of criticizing the media. Given that Boucher is a teacher and president of a Social Studies teachers association, I have to ask; I've long felt that the public schools' claims that they want "involved parents" to be mere lip service, more about baking cupcakes for the bake sale than actually impinging on what is taught.

Which is, indeed, what I'm promoting; paying attention to what your kids are being taught. I welcome the teachers with whom I (and, at the moment, my kids) disagree but who present rational arguments and engender critical thinking. This is a good thing and, by the way, not what I'm attacking; it also seems to be beyond the intellectual capacity or pedagogic background of too many teachers I've run into. (And it should go without saying, the teachers who are maliciously doctrinaire are a whole 'nother thing).

Leo's conclusion as re the media:

He's right, of course, and the remedy is in scrutiny of every antimilitary/anti-Christian/anti-police story that appears. Many are necessary and accurate exercises in reporting, but many are not. For years those stories in the latter category went unrebuked. The blogopshere has ended the free pass system for axe-grinding in print. And that's a very good thing.

In print - and in the classroom.

Posted by Mitch at May 23, 2005 06:27 PM | TrackBack