Rightly, American parents are up in arms over the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” to their children in public schools. When the left denies this is happening, they are lying. In fact, the situation is much worse than most parents know.
Public school curricula throughout the land are not just teaching Critical Race Theory, they have been shaped and molded in almost everything they do by Critical Theory, of which Critical Race Theory is only one element.
Some history is helpful here. What is commonly known as Political Correctness or “Wokeness” is actually cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms by a German think tank, the Institute for Social Research, usually called the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School’s goals were the destruction of Western culture, the Christian religion (and all religion) and, starting in the 1950s with Herbert Marcuse, the white race. One of the tools they developed for attaining these ends is what they called “Critical Theory.”
The term is something of a play on words: the theory is to criticise. By constant, unremitting criticism of every characteristic of “bourgeois” society – the family, the schools, the churches, different social roles for men and women, distinctions between ethnic groups and races, normative heterosexuality – they sought to delegitimitize all aspects of traditional America and Western societies.
By the late 1940s, Critical Theory was already shaping curricula in teachers’ colleges and college education departments. Today, it completely controls those places, to the point where if a student who wants to become a public school teacher does not mouth the lies it demands, he cannot graduate.
One of those lies is “Critical Race Theory,” which blames blacks’ problems entirely on white “discrimination.” Society must be completely remade to eliminate “racism” of all kinds, which is defined as acknowledging what everyone knows, that racial and ethnic differences are real.
Does anyone seriously pretend there is no difference between, say, Swedes and Italians, or Irishmen and Russians? How many people, looking for a good time on a Saturday night, go to a Russian bar? But should any student in a college education department say that, he would be doomed. What Critical Theory demands is endless cant, all the time and about everything.
But, again, Critical Theory does not stop with race. It lies behind sex education in schools, the goal of which is to make every kind of deviant behavior “normal” while condemning traditional Judeo-Christian morals. It permeates the teaching of history, where instead of presenting America as an example for the world, it is seen as a criminal enterprise from the start. It is now influencing math and science, where the very idea of objective truth is denounced as white, male, and “oppressive.” If a student is black, any answer he gives to a math problem must be accepted.
The members of the Frankfurt School, as early as the 1930s, said that it does not matter whether students in public schools learn any skills or any facts. All that matters is that they graduate with certain “attitudes.” In other words, schools are not about transmitting knowledge but are instead Skinner boxes, places where students are psychologically conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to live by ideological lies. Should they doubt the lies, they have been conditioned to look in the mirror and see “another Hitler.”
The parents who have risen up to demand Critical Race Theory not be taught in their public schools have seen only the tip of the iceberg. Broader Critical Theory shapes everything public schools teach.
The goal is to produce, through endless conditioning, good little cultural Marxists who will launch an American cultural revolution, like that in Mao’s China, where everything old will be swept away. And what will succeed it? The members of the Frankfurt School refused to answer that question.
The origins of “political correctness” or “cultural Marxism” can be found in the early parts of the 20th century from the Frankfurt School, which was the headquarters for the Communists scheming in Germany. Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm were all there.
