America's Real Pandemic: Liberalism in Education

Growing up in a very affluent suburb of a major U.S. city, I feel fortunate to have been surrounded by so many conservative republicans during my formative years. My parents and extended family were republican, most of their friends were republican, and most of my neighbors were republican. The first time I was told to be skeptical of the U.S. public education system occurred with the election of 2008. As an eight-year old, I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that, according to my family, Obama was a bad choice for president; it didn’t matter if it would be “historic”, as was the sentiment I was having jammed down my throat every minute of every day at school. Every class I went to, there was talk of Obama. I can’t recall one teacher bringing up the Republican candidate, John McCain. Despite what I was hearing at school, when I was at home, I was told that Obama’s policies were sloppy, that he wasn’t working for “America”, as he claimed, but rather for himself, and that his actions were predicted to wreak havoc on the economy and job market. 

At school, I was taught that people who didn’t like Obama distrusted him because they weren’t “tolerant” of the idea of having an African American man as President of the United States. I remember telling this to my parents one day, and in response I was told that I needed to look past “race” as a qualifier for someone to be in a position of power. What race you are does not matter; your education, work ethic, and morals do. I remember being confused as to why this thinking was being championed as “racist” at school, since this made sense to me, even as a young child, and did not seem discriminatory in the slightest. Actually, this idea seemed quite inclusive, and quite indicative of the American Dream. If you work hard enough, you can make it. Wasn’t this the point of it all? As my parents had suggested, I began to question what I was being told at school. I assumed that since most of my friends’ parents were republican, their parents were telling them the same things that mine were telling me. I maintained this distrust of the education system through the remaining decade of my hometown education, and it is a mentality that has only increased in passion since I have been a student in college and have found myself exposed to a high frequency of full-blown Marxist professors and a cohort of naive students who only find socialism appealing because they remain attached to glorified images of Woodstock hippies. 

However, it wasn’t until this year that I realized that I was correct in the assumption that many of my peers’ republican parents had told them to be weary of the education system, but was incorrect in assuming that my fellow students would listen to what their parents were telling them. Growing up in what can be seen as a cesspool of entitlement, it made me viscerally ill to see that these spoiled individuals- who were gifted with new phones on demand, had monthly “allowances” of up to $2000, and had access to all the drugs, alcohol, and indulgences they could possibly get their hands on- were threatening to burn down and loot cities for the sake of “Black Lives Matter”, and were claiming that the “system was broken”. Indeed, the system must be broken if it allows for individuals like these, who had been handed everything from cars to a college education on a gilded platter, to start claiming that they are “oppressed”, and that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is either “racist, tone-deaf, fascist, misogynistic, uneducated, or a neo-Nazi ”. That these individuals, who have never worked a day in their lives for anything, are waging a war against the millions of working class Americans who constitute the backbone of this country would be laughable, if not for the fact that this very thing now poses a fundamental threat to our democracy. Thanks to the infiltration of the public education system with radical liberal ideology, students from across the nation are rising up to fight for an ideology that they know nothing about. 

As a college student myself, I hear and see everyday where these radical left students are getting their ideas from. They think that they are rebelling against a corrupt system, as that is what they have been indoctrinated with throughout their high school and college educations. However, if you are on the side of Hollywood, Big Tech, and the major media outlets, then you are not a revolutionary; you are the problem. Our current education system enables teachers and professors to unabashedly indoctrinate young minds with glorified ideas of “revolutions” and “new world orders”, of which these brainwashed students are told they will be at the forefront. These radical ideologies are seeping into the curriculum across all fields and disciplines, as the far left believes that they have full momentum going forward. As a conservative college student, this is alarming. The political climate on college campuses is so polarizing that if I were to openly speak my mind in class, my grades would suffer, my social connections would suffer, and my academic opportunities going forward would suffer. Lately, this has caused me to question the meaning behind a college education. If all my grades signify is my ability to conform to liberal ideologies, then the original intention of the education system, which was to promote original thought and critical thinking, is all but a dream of the past. We are currently living in a nightmare realm where Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is allowed to make radical claims that the whole education system needs to be pushed even further left in order to prevent another “Trump-like figure” from emerging. 

Being a conservative college student, it is easy to see why the liberal and Marxist college students pose such fundamental threats to both our society and our democracy. They have been taught that feelings precede facts, and that if you deny hard evidence long enough, it just “doesn’t exist” any more. They have been taught to be soft, and that “fragility” is a strength. They have been taught to work for nothing, yet to expect everything. Most importantly, they have been brainwashed into following a hypocritical ideology that directly clashes with their own self-interests, and have been taught to be so blinded to the real world that they do not even realize that they are maneuvering the world with blue-tinted tunnel vision. The sheer prevalence of these toxic ideologies across high school and college curriculums, and the repercussions that disagreement with these ideologies carries with, is forcing conservative students across the nation to circle the wagons. Labelled as social pariahs and forcibly outed as conservatives on “hit lists” that are currently sweeping the nation, it is a tricky situation to be in, as many of us still value our grades and education, but are far less willing now to remain complacent. We are at a crucial turning point in our society, where it is imperative for more conservative students to speak out about their beliefs and the mistreatment that they have suffered at the hands of the “tolerant left”. The country is at a tipping point, and if we want a future for ourselves and for our children in the years to come, we need to actively fight to defend our freedoms. 

-N.M