Basic Ed

DEI Goes Underground

Rooting out DEI requires more than a key word search. DEI is buried deep into educational, corporate and government material and culture. (Transcript for DEI Goes Underground available below.) Making Sense and Knowing Numbers are available in paperback and digital formats at most major outlets. Learn More [https://basiceducationseries.com/education/] Transcript: To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe. – Marilyn vos Savant Hello again. Ed Thompson here, and I hope this podcast finds you doing well. This is Buried Lede #23, entitled, DEI Goes Underground. While we can breathe a sigh of relief in seeing the president commit to getting DEI out of government agencies like education and the military, actually getting this pernicious, destructive ideology rooted out is not as easy as signing an executive order. Springing from the Marxist doctrines of oppression versus oppressed, DEI came out of the gate with the deceptive name Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. After all, who wouldn’t want Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? Like so many Marxist Utopian ideas, that sounds good on paper but translates in practice to the worst of oppressions. Having segregated graduations or classes is divisive not inclusive. Telling children of color they are victims and white children they are racist oppressors is not diversity it is division. There is even an attempt to use supposed cultural norms to excuse poor academic achievement or behavior. The implication is that holding certain groups to the same standards as others would somehow be racist, when the complete opposite is true. DEI is not what it seems. Currently, it may not be acceptable to label programs with titles like DEI enforcement or DEI implementation, but the left in America have become master craftsmen in their cunning and willingness to twist and bend words to their Orwellian liking. I call it lying, but let’s be generous and say their euphemisms abound. To make matters worse, they are now papering DEI over with terminology that lends itself to reasonable justification by the not quite bright. One example in the Florida education system is The Leader in Me book, published by Franklin Covey, and used in Pinellas and other FL counties. While the initial stated lofty goals might sound like it is academically oriented, on page 13 is this line, “Greatness is not seen as affirming a high position or accomplishing a heroic feat, but as having strong character and unique talents which may or may not include the ability to read, write, or use a calculator.” That belies any pretense of actual education. Elsewhere in the program, the dedication to DEI is explicitly laid out, but you wouldn’t know that without thoroughly examining the materials. In the case of the University of Central Florida, the school’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion was simply renamed the Office of Access and Community Engagement. UCF kept Andrea Guzman, Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, by changing her title to fit the new, rebranded office. At Florida State University, the most recent Fall 2024 “Professional Drag Show” event was renamed “Owl Manor” to circumvent the law. The left would compare their subterfuge to the underground railroad of the pre-Civil War era helping slaves escape from oppression. I say it’s more like the Nazi trains carrying unsuspecting Jews and other disfavored people to “new and better” camps with freshly installed shower facilities. Right or wrong, the psychs who run the DEI program of Marxist ideology will not give up easily. For that reason, it takes more than looking for a few key words to alert you to the DEI presence in educational, corporate or government material and practice. DEI swept into education with no opposition, including weaving its way into the school texts themselves. Corporations were shamed into opening their HR departments to the so-called ‘experts’ who proceeded to enforce DEI and anti-racism indoctrination as requirement for employment. The Biden administration went flat out ramming DEI and anti-racism into every federal agency, including the military. The military recruitment numbers immediately tanked and have only begun to recover after Trump issued a no-DEI executive order since taking back the White House. So how do we eradicate the anti-American and divisive DEI and anti-racism that has worked its way into every corner of society? The starting point for each one of us is to stand up and call out DEI for being unworkable and destructive. Like most bad ideas, DEI can only persist when no one dares speak out against it. The time to speak is now. At the local level it takes talking out loud and challenging those who refuse to end DEI programs in school or at work. When someone says diversity is our strength, you say no, it is competence and unity that are our strengths. When they tell you it isn’t fair that outcomes are different, you say people are different and forcing equal outcomes despite those differences in intelligence, competence and work ethic is what would be unfair. When they say being inclusive means having to favor one group over another, you say, no, that is bias and exclusion at its worst. As for what to look for, the best way is to assess material by looking at it through the lens of what we should have as ideals. Is everyone treated fairly, is everyone given an equal opportunity, and is everyone expected to perform to the same standard to get any anticipated reward. A key with educational material is to roll up your sleeves and look for slanted ideas and unnecessary indoctrination that has been injected. Don’t buy lofty generalities or the outright lies denying that DEI or CRT is being used. You must follow the wisdom of look don’t listen, and read for yourself. Truth is always the great leveler, which should be the goal of any educational information. If we are teaching people how to think, and not what to think, everybody wins. This was once the goal of education that made great civilizations great. Looking at the entertainment industry, we see the abusive use of DEI. Trying to diversify World War II American soldiers who were largely white men into other races and women wouldn’t make any more sense than doing a story about a Congolese tribal war by including whites and Asians or depicting Henry the VIII or Thomas Jefferson as Asian women. Hollywood insists on going further. Instead of simply including a diversity of characters where appropriate, they make DEI the plot, with characters lecturing the audience with words or deeds to prove the DEI or CRT premises and shove them down the audience’s throat. You can make the straight people all stupid and mean, and the gays all noble and fair but that doesn’t make it any more true than making all blacks violent and dumb and all whites decent and smart, or all men brutal and all women caring. One key to spotting DEI at work is the generalizing of any group as good or bad. Group bias runs heavy throughout DEI, CRT, anti-racism and other Marxist or totalitarian ideologies. Pitting one group against another is the totalitarian way to power. A major flaw in DEI is viewpoint discrimination. For example, BLM, Black Lives Matter, is considered a valid and desirable viewpoint while ALM, All Lives Matter, is characterized as racist and wrong. When you find censorship and invalidation of viewpoints, you may have found DEI at work. There is good reason why the simple yet powerful themes laid down in America’s founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, are popular with all people. The idea that individuals have natural rights and freedoms and that those apply to everyone with equal measure, have resonated many times around the world. The truth is undeniable. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basiced.substack.com [https://basiced.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

28. mar. 2025 - 11 min

How Education Became Indoctrination

Once education included free will and the spiritual nature of man. An individual, taught how to think rationally, could make rational choices. (Transcript for How Education Became Indoctrination available below.) Making Sense and Knowing Numbers are available in paperback and digital formats at most major outlets. Learn More [https://basiceducationseries.com/education/] Transcript: Here we go. Learning never exhausts the mind. -Leonardo da Vinci Hello again. Ed Thompson here, and I hope this podcast finds you doing well. This is Buried Lede #22, entitled, How Education Became Indoctrination. Once upon a time America taught its young people by following proven, time-tested methods that had worked beautifully in education for centuries. These were not American inventions. They were used for millennia all around the world. They included the basic three Rs — reading, writing and arithmetic. Languages and history, especially of one’s own country and culture, were added. Science and arts rounded things out. Trades were taught early for those so inclined, and apprenticeships enabled nearly anyone to acquire the functional skills that would translate easily into a productive job for life. These were the time-honored educational traditions that had brought Western civilization forward through the Golden Age of Greece, Pax Romana, the European Renaissance in art and the humanities, and the Age of Enlightenment that brought forth a major scientific revolution and the liberal ideas that formed the basis for modern free societies. Bottom line, these techniques worked. So the question has to be, what went wrong? To find out what we start with when. When did American education begin to change? Many people might think this is only a recent development. After all it’s easy to look back at our own youth and think fondly that it was different then. You know, the good old days. It was good back then, etc. But was it? I’m afraid that the slippery slope of decline in American education began much earlier. It’s a little like the frog and the boiling water story. Public education has declined slowly over many decades while we weren’t paying attention. Students being required to learn less and less don’t notice what’s being lost. How could they? They look around and see everyone else at about the same level. It’s all about normalization and the dumbing of America. To give you an idea how far things have fallen, there was a time when a degree in classic literature required studying in both Greek and Latin. Today Princeton University offers their highest literature degree without a word of either. Yale’s English majors can now graduate without even reading Shakespeare. That would be the equivalent of getting a degree in classical music by only listening to rap music. For some specific comparisons, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at age 34 and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818. Read it sometime. It’s a short book that will give you an eye-opening experience of the vocabulary level of the early 1800’s, especially knowing that she was only 18 years old when she wrote it. The educational difference between then and now is embarrassing. Granted, most citizens then were not as highly educated or well-read as Thomas Jefferson or Mary Shelley, but they did learn their basics very well. The liberal education of yesteryear, and I use the word liberal as it truly applied in yesteryear — maximum civil liberties for rational citizens, representative governments with limited power, open and free markets — resulted in an American and French revolution that unleashed an entrepreneurial spirit that still drives our civilization forward today. Unfortunately, there were other revolutionary forces at work as well. During the 1800’s, Germany was becoming a major intellectual center of the world. You had Hegel developing new theories of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Marx and Engels writing on society and government. Karl Marx developed his theories of class warfare, communism and an ideology of materialism. Marx took a hard turn away from spirit and religion. According to him, man and all life was nothing more than what he called matter in motion. Pavlov, the Russian famous for his experiments with salivating dogs, spent years studying in Leipzig. Germany was the place to be. A lesser known but equally important doctor took up residency at the University of Leipzig. Wilhelm Wundt would change the direction of psychology forever. Wundt, like Marx, was a materialist. Psychology prior to Wundt was, as its name suggests, the study of the soul and mind. Wundt would change all that by redefining psychology as a physiological subject rather than a philosophical one. Another hard turn away from spirit and religion. Marxism and Wundtian psychology became a marriage of convenience that appealed to the totalitarian minded. Both ideas invalidated the human spirit. Both denied free will, God and natural rights. Both could justify a lot of bad deeds. After all, man was nothing more than an animal to be trained and controlled. And so it went. Together these philosophies led to a devastating death and destruction wrought by the Nazis in Germany, the Soviet regime in Russia and the Maoist regime in China that cost many millions of innocent lives. However, the so-called free world did not escape the damage these ideas caused. Previously the concept of education included the idea of free will and the spiritual nature of man. An individual, taught HOW to think rationally, HOW to read and speak and compute, and then presented sufficient data could himself make rational choices that would further his own and others’ survival. He would be an educated citizen. Common sense could prevail. That changed after Wundt. According to Wundt, man was nothing more than a programmable beast, thought was nothing but the chemical firing of neurons, and education merely the proper stimulation of nerve endings. These were the ideas that led to the psychiatric horrors like electric shock and lobotomies that disabled and killed too many defenseless victims. And it was the students of Wundt who brought these same ideas to American education. Men like G. Stanley Hall, Edward Lee Thorndike, and John Dewey, who was considered the father of American education, to name just a few. In the decades leading into the 20th century, these men and others infiltrated the top universities like Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, bringing in this new psychology. But nowhere was the impact felt more than through what became the Columbia University Teachers College in New York. There the disciples of Wundt established experimental psychology and merged it with education, which is how it stands today. A great number of teachers went forth to implement this new social conditioning form of teaching. It is the reason why public schools don’t teach, but they do indoctrinate. What else would you do with a stimulus-response creature like man? Later on behavioral psychologists like B. F. Skinner invalidated the very existence of free will and dictated that behavioral conditioning was the only path to good behavior and a decent society. More recently critical race theory was spawned from the bowels of Marxism and injected into schools and society, turning groups against each other and pushing our culture toward a 1984 dystopia. And right there is the real divide between freedom and tyranny, between self-determinism and state-dictated behavior, between free thought and cowed compliance. I have no doubt that you can see in which camp those in charge of our schools currently reside. That is why there is such a heavy push for indoctrination in schools, as well as a push to censor voices in the general society. Think about it. If you didn’t believe man was a spiritual being, or had free will or that a person had the ability to choose rational action, and if you believed man was nothing more than a reactive animal or worse that he was just a bunch of matter in motion, atoms and molecules bumping into each other, as Marx and Wundt believed, you might be inclined to demand complete control of everyone else around you. With that in mind, perhaps you can better understand why otherwise decent people might call for indoctrination and government control of education and society in general. They have been duped, they are afraid and they have lost their way. The current scene is not good, but remember that it is darkest before the dawn. We can turn the ship around. But in order to do so, we must first identify the real enemies and confront them head on. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basiced.substack.com [https://basiced.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

10. feb. 2025 - 11 min

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