American Education: No child left un-radicalized

 by Scott McKay

Iknow, I know. The first half-dozen comments under this piece will provide the criticism that I shouldn’t use mealy-mouthed words like “almost” in a headline like the above.

Which is another way of saying that among the American Spectator’s readership, there isn’t a lot of dissent to the idea that our educational system, from bottom to top, has gone to seed. 

I will defend the use of “almost” only by noting that there are still educational institutions out there providing quality instruction. In virtually every city of size, there are at least a handful of options where kids won’t be indoctrinated into the kind of anti-American woke stupidity that has become virtually omnipresent in the public schools. And of course, there is the burgeoning panoply of resources available to homeschoolers, which stands as the silver lining to the mess we’re in.

So I’ve now provided the justification for my hedge. And we can move on.

To saying that the education system, chiefly in the public sector but certainly not limited to it, is beginning to calcify as a fundamental, existential threat to the American way of life.

I could regale you with polling data and statistics showing the cavernous ignorance that our schools are infecting our youth with, but you almost certainly already know these things.

For example…

Darializa Avila Chevalier is about as total a poster child for American education as there is, given that she’s 32 years old and has never not been in school, including more than 14 years of post-secondary education, and with every utterance, she demonstrates that she knows literally less than nothing. 

And Chevalier has studied largely at competitive institutions — most notably Columbia — which at one time were known as centers of learning.

Now Columbia produces communist Dominicans with genocidal attitudes toward Jews.

And those lunatics with functionally room-temperature IQs are celebrated by fellow “highly-educated” and privileged urbanites in cities like New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles.

This isn’t a new problem. Joy Reid has a degree from Yale, after all.

But the stupid is one problem. The crazy is another.

How does this draw a salary at an American institution of secondary education?

A radical, Israel-hating California teacher claimed she married a Gaza resident online to help him gain American citizenship — and push her pro-Palestinian agenda. 

Americanpolitics discussion

Laura Pinho, a dance teacher at Canoga Park Senior High School in California, announced her nuptials in a wild June 16 CODEPINK Zoom webinar called “Challenging Zionism In Our Schools.”

When CODEPINK activist Marcy Winograd congratulated her on her marriage and asked her to share details about her life, Pinho, 51, launched into a pedantic monologue about how she only married Salem S.E. Abu Amra to advance “Palestinian rights and freedoms.”

“I have power as an American citizen. I have a passport that I was just born with, and how can I live in this world if I don’t make every effort to equalize the playing field on whatever way that I can,” she said in the webinar, first uncovered by the North American Values Institute.

Englewood New Jersey Mayor Michael Wildes — who is also an immigration attorney and former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York — told The Post that Pinho is playing with fire.

“She can be prosecuted criminally, brought up on federal conspiracy charges. Marriage fraud is one of the top five crimes you can perpetrate including terrorism and drugs. The fact that somebody would be foolish enough to say they actually did it makes it actionable for the federal government to investigate,” Wildes said.

Marrying someone to obtain a green card is federal crime and can carry a five-year prison sentence and up to a $250,000 fine, according to the Department of Justice.

The odd couple tied the knot April 5 in Utah, which allows marriages to be conducted via Zoom, according to records posted online by the Utah County Clerk and obtained by Israeli nonprofit NGO Monitor.

Utah allows virtual marriages in which both parties aren’t in the same location so long as they have secured a Utah County marriage license and provide valid ID and two witnesses, who also don’t have to be physically present in the state.

It’s fair to allow that high-school dance teachers might not be possessed of the most intellectual rigor on campus, but even so… huh?

And the open advertisement of marriage fraud isn’t even the most shocking piece to the puzzle that is Laura Pinho’s extracurricular life…

The bride has a 5-year-old child with Derek J. Reid, 51, an improv coach who also lives at her address, according to public records.

Reid told The Post that he and Pinho were domestic partners and never officially married, and that they’re currently separated and the two sleep in different rooms at the same address. He said he had no knowledge of her marriage to Abu Amra.

…

“She’s been radicalized — I don’t know anything about that… the crowd she runs with… I’m worried for her,” Reid said.

…

She claimed she first met her husband through mutual friends on Facebook and donated an undisclosed amount of money to him, and he proceeded to message her to say thanks.

…

Pinho heads her school’s Students for Justice in Palestine club and bragged about injecting her virulent anti-Israel  politics into her dance curriculum. 

Politics

She posted video from a school cultural event in which her students performed the “Dabke Dance” — a Palestinian folk dance that has come to be associated with terrorism.

…

She boasts that she steered her students into radical anti-Israel protests.

“Students have rights, powers and abilities…. they do the fighting, they do the protesting, and we are there to guide them…. that is the role that I have found as one of the co-sponsors actually for the Students for Justice in Palestine Club,” she said.

Pinho has a long history of antisemitic posts on social media.

If you don’t like that horrific story as evidence that something is broken, then feel free to make this make sense…

There was a time when Smith College was considered a good school. I’m not sure how that could still be true if they can’t get the most basic things right.

You might ask how it’s possible for formerly respected institutions to go so badly wrong, and this is a fairly wide window into why…

Bringing this back to Miz Chevalier, there is a line of correlation — I would argue causation — between the graph above and the subject on everyone’s mind, namely the communist takeover of the Democrat Party.

And it’s this: the Gramscian long march through the institutions, in which committed Marxists have invaded everything from university administrations to scout troops and then corrupted them like viruses or cancer cells infecting a host, has now penetrated to the heart of the Democrat Party.

And at no point during that march, at least since the early 1960s (I’d argue even that isn’t true), were liberals ever willing to stand effectively against the Hard Left. 

Conservatives allowed liberals to run institutions like schools, the arts, publishing, and the like because liberals were, at least nominally, willing to keep those institutions open to people of diverse intellectual and philosophical viewpoints.

Then came the Marxists, who pushed the liberals around. And when the liberals sided with the Marxists, the conservatives simply went elsewhere. That’s why you can’t find conservatives in education — or if you do, they’re on the fringes and alternate institutions.

Now the liberals are finding themselves without homes at places where they’re now discriminating in their appeasement of differing sorts of the transgender confused.

And we wonder, when the moral and intellectual rot infects every level of a system which should have become a marketplace, if not an industry, 100 years ago or more, why we’re setting record levels of money on fire to produce armies of Darializa Avila Chevaliers and Laura Pinhos.

The answer is obvious. When you put the worst people in the country in charge of basic, fundamental institutions through which we run most of the population, you will reap very predictable results.

Which begs the most important question: when will we stop throwing good money after bad?

https://spectator.org/american-education-is-in-almost-irredeemable-decline/