A Texas mother said recently that she opposed teaching a book about the working poor to high school students because it was socialist and Marxist. During an interview with the conservative group Women on the Wall, University Park mother Meg Bakich explained that the book “The Working Poor: Invisible in America” was the wrong lesson to be teaching in an advanced placement English class for college-level high school juniors, the Dallas Morning News noted this week…. “I realized there is a real agenda here because [the school] explained to me English III is teaching social issues,” Bakich complained to host Alice Linahan. “How is that going to help my child read better and write better?”
There are few things that make my head feel like exploding more than listening to an angry White Conservative try to sound intelligent. I’m not sure that Meg Bakich means well, but what she really doing is working to ensure that her child grows up to be every bit as ignorant, narrow-minded, and prejudiced as she is. How she can see teaching a class on a book about the working poor to be “socialist” and “Marxist” defies rational understanding.
Education is supposed to be about broadening one’s horizons and gathering information that will allow a student to make informed, intelligent decisions about the world and their place in it. Unless of course you’re talking about edumication, which in Texas means sticking to the dominant, Far Right, Christian narrative. Stray from that, and you’re likely to be accused of being a Marxist or a socialist or something even worse- a (GASP!! OH, THE HUMANITY!!) Liberal.
I might have given Ms. Bakich a pass had she not played the “teach both sides” card. Poorly.
“These are feeding children values and beliefs that I don’t hold, and I don’t value. So, I gave some suggestions. If you want to understand poverty in a Marxist or socialist environment, let’s have the children read ‘We the Living’ by Ayn Rand,” she asserted. “And then let them compare that with poverty in free markets, and read ‘America the Beautiful’ by [potential Republican presidential candidate] Benjamin Carson.”
So, let me see if I have this straight. On the left, we have arch-Conservative Ayn Rand, for whom survival of the fittest was the highest art form. On the right, we have Dr. Ben Carson, a Teapublican who could only be charitably described as a blithering idiot. THAT is what Ms. Bakich considers to be “teaching both sides?” Arch-Conservative and Looney Tunes Conservative?
What Ms. Bakich fears is that her child might be taught about evil Liberal (Socialist? Marxist?) ideas like critical thinking, independent thinking, and evidence-based reasoning. Education is about teaching children to THINK. Anything else is indoctrination. When parents meddle in the education process, thinking that they have a right to impose their belief system, child can’t be given a well-rounded education. What they get is edumication, a corrupt, one-sided indoctrination into the “right” or “acceptable” way of viewing the world. Children who are indoctrinated instead of learning how to think for themselves aren’t going to be the ones to move this country forward, because they won’t know how to ask the questions that need to be asked. They won’t know how to look at things critically. What they’ll know is what they’ve been taught to think.
Welcome to our new idiocracy…sponsored by people like Meg Bakich.
