Dictatorship of virtue : how the battle over multiculturalism is reshaping our schools, our country, and our lives

"Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears." - Robert W. Sarnoff

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The last batch of extracts:


"All fantasies are fantasies of omnipotence. But then you ask yourself: what happens when one fantasy meets another? There’s a duel to the death.
—DANIEL BELL"


"Why do they teach us that white people suck?
—Elementary school student from Brookline, Massachusetts"


""What we found was a conscious perversion, a deliberate sabotage," David Stiliman said. The Stilimans and their allies found that the [high] school was guided by New Age “edubabble,” as David called it, theories that stressed social conscience and something called moral education, along with peace studies, as much as academic pursuits, and that presented the world through a 1960s prism, whose key concepts were Western racism and Western colonialism... The statement of philosophy, for example, blithely affirmed: “Knowledge and reasoning without commitment to action are useless.” Mao Zedong could not have put it better.

"The key word is ‘diversity,’", Ronni Stiliman told me. “That’s all heard since we came here, diversity. But what they mean by diversity is not diversity of opinion. Diversity means skin color. Diversity in Brookline means different colored people who have been trained to think alike. They treat different opinions with contempt.”"


"The most popular text of the first half of the twentieth century, David Saville Muzzey’s An American History, was first published in 1911...

Muzzey, for example, chronicled the protests of women at the denial of rights and opportunities that went automatically to men. He provided a powerful description of the treatment of the Indians, who, he said, “were cheated by rascally government officials, fed on rotten rations, debauched of whiskey, and robbed of their lands.” Muzzey, however, portrayed the Indians as primitives and savages. In his 1941 revision, he talked of the treatment of the Indians as “a chapter of dishonor” for the white men, but the Indians themselves, he said, "nowhere advanced beyond the stage of barbarism... They had some noble qualities, such as dignity, courage and endurance, but at bottom they were a treacherous, cruel people who inflicted terrible tortures upon their captured enemies.”

Even the great revisionist historian and liberal hero Charles Beard, writing in the prologue to his History of the American People, published in 1918, had to explain why he gave so little space to the North American Indians. “They are interesting and picturesque, but they made no impression upon the civilization of the United States,” he said, showing a tough-mindedness that would be excoriated now. Anybody who has even flipped casually through a social studies or history textbook today would see immediately how thoroughly any such sentiment has been expunged."


"The message of the [history] texts of the 1970s, FitzGerald concludes, "would be that Americans have no common history, no common culture and no common values, and that membership in a racial or cultural group constitutes the most fundamental experience of each individual."...

In 1983, Glazer and Ueda examined six of the most widely used high school texts. They concluded that, in fact, the central story was still present, that the feared “Balkanization” had not become reality. At the same time, they found that a vast transformation of the focus of the major texts had taken place since the 1920s, when progressive and liberal historians like Beard and Muzzey dominated the field. In every one of the six texts, the total number of pages devoted to blacks and other minorities far exceeded the number of pages given over to ethnic Europeans. Indeed, European immigrants groups got about one-quarter or less of the attention given to blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and others."


"The multiculturalist dilemma is to justify multiculturalism while accommodating these awkward facts [that curriculum reform has not helped poor American children who continue to fail, drop out and despair, and that some ethnic groups {chiefly, Asians} do very well in the school system despite their not being accommodated]. One thing that the cult of the New Consciousness cannot allow is the notion that certain cultures, certain values, certain ways of behaving, are better than other ways and can help to explain why some groups of children do better in than others, with or without multiculturalism. Ideological multiculturalism requires that all cultures be equal in value. And since there is inequality of performance, that inequality must be blamed on the system, the oppressiveness of the dominant culture, on identity eradication, on the failure of the system to impart self-esteem. In short, the establishment must still be at fault. It hasn’t changed enough. It must be changed even more, which means, in practice, that the very philosophy that has failed to produce results for the children that most need help must be pursued with ever greater vigor."


"She felt that the exams themselves showed the leftist bias of the school. There was, for example, this sly multiple-choice question: "A characteristic of the 13 English colonies was (a) complete religious freedom, (b) free high school education, (c) class distinctions, or (d) universal voting." Of course, class distinctions is the correct answer. The question seems designed to demonstrate that something negative was the sole feature all the colonies had in common. She noted the test item that asked students to identify the “Hellenic epic which established egotistical individualism as heroic.” The correct answer: The Illiad. The subtext: individualism is egotistical and egoism is a prime characteristic of Western culture, as opposed, apparently, to more communitarian, less selfish, more rhythmic others. Stotsky found this question: “What would you do if you were drafted at 18 to fight in Central America?” An Asian studies question: "What would you do if you were in the military and you were in a situation similar to My Lai? How would you decide what orders to follow?" Stotsky suspected that Asian studies did not include the study of Chinese imperial totalitarianism or the rape of Nanking by Japan. It seemed to have more to do with America than Asia, with a stress on American atrocities, as though they were the whole picture."


"There seems to be precious little diversity at Andersen Contemporary. Everything is multicultural ideology, ethnic association, and victimization at the hands of Christians and white people. There is no alternative, no debate, no differing points of view. This is not a school; it is a cult, and it is a cult whose benefits have yet to be proven in practice. There is no proof at all, for example, that there is any educational benefit in choosing books to read or individuals to study because they represent an ethnic group... Moreover, one question that is never even asked by the multiculturalist ideologues concerns those Asian children, so far culturally from the American mainstream, yet doing so well in school.

Second, it seems that the ideology underlying the MCGFDA program is more likely to nurture a sense of injustice and entitlement than it is to lead to the elusive grail of self-esteem.

Third, nice as it is to be respectful of different ways of doing things and of the many American traditions, the plain fact is that not all "cultures" provide for equal success in the postindustrial, high-tech, bourgeois-capitalist democracy in which we happen to live. This is not a matter of good or bad. It is a matter of preparation for the world as it exists, not as the teachers of Andersen Contemporary might dream it. For children to hear stories about the Ojibwa medicine man is certainly unobjectionable, just as they might read about Bahar or Winnie-the-Pooh. It is when the medicine man and modern science get put on the same plateau that confusion sets in.

Fourth, and most important perhaps, the radical form of multiculturalism practiced in these schools and others paradoxically diverts from the deepest lessons that need to be learned about the principles and values that lead to a respect for difference in the first place. The journalist Jonathan Rosen has written about a conversation he had with Lucy Dawidowicz, the late historian of the Holocaust. He asked her whether she thought the Holocaust should he taught to public students. “I’d feel a lot safer if they learned the meaning of the Constitution instead,” Dawidowicz replied.

That is why it is more important for children to know about George Washington than Crispus Attucks or Sacajawea, why one should be primary in American education and the others secondary. Washington was a central figure in the long and painful development of the idea of liberal democracy, which includes within it the concept of the inviolability of the individual, the respect for equal rights under the law, the concepts of equal opportunity and of government as the protector of human rights, not the opponent of them."


"One characteristic essay in the book is “Racist Stereotypes in the English Language,” by Robert B. Moore, which starts out with this premise: “If one accepts that our dominant white culture is racist, then one would expect our language—an indispensable transmitter of culture—to be racist as well.” Moore goes on to give examples of “racist terminology,” particularly in the connotations attached to the word “black,” as in “blackguard,” “blackball,” “blackmail,” and others whose origin, the author suggests, is in the negative view the dominant white society has of black people.

The article goes on in this vein and is certainly interesting, but it fails even to consider the possibility that there is an explanation of the phenomenon described other than the one based on racism. It does not deal with what would seem to be a crucial historical fact: that most of the words given as examples to prove the existence of contemporary American racism predate the existence of contemporary American culture. It does not raise the possibility that the symbolism of “black” versus “white” could be naturalistic in origin, having to do with the dark of night and the light of day, rather than with the existence of racial difference. The Chinese language, for example, which evolved in a society with only one race, has similar connotations as English for the words “black” and ‘white”—black in particular appearing in Chinese expressions as “black market,” “black hand” (a metaphor for an evil person), and “black society” (a literal translation of the Chinese expression for criminal gang).


"The scene was a panel discussion at the enormous convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco at the end of 1991... As the conversation wore on, however, a striking absence became (to borrow a rhetorical device quite trendy in the academy) present. While there was much said about combating racism, sexism, and homophobia, one thing that almost never came up during the entire panel discussion was student writing and how to make it better... The conversation at the MLA panel never touched on such matters as the poor writing of many college freshmen or ways to impart to students some sense of the beauty and power of language, of how to turn to advantage that remarkable instrument called English, enriched and refined over the course of centuries. All of the talk centered on politics—on how to combat the evils of society in writing classes...

Whereas in the good old days of freshman composition you learned classical form, organization, the hazards of dangling clauses, of mixed metaphors and malapropisms, of hackneyed phrases, of clichés, and of the need to use words like “compel” and "focus" correctly, now you would learn how writing itself is implicated in the struggle for power.

The operative term, “critical literacy”... is a part of critical theory in general, that word “critical” another of the many code words adopted by the multiculturalist movement. Actually, “critical” means heavily influenced by the economic determinism of Karl Marx."


"Language is a creation of society that serves the holders of power, enabling them to maintain that power by controlling very way in which thought and ideas are expressed—even while, of course, giving the impression that the way things are, the status is entirely rational, inevitable. Thus, for example, the rules and regulations in writing that have traditionally been taught mirror the rules and regulations of a society dominated by white men. The grammar of language mirrors the grammar of political hierarchy. As Ruszkiewicz summed it up: “Traditional writing instruction can only reproduce the status quo.” It inhibits change, keeps women and minorities in their inferior places, favors that "linear, patriarchal logic," which is really only the logic of the dominant class, race, and gender.

The idea seems ridiculous on the face of it, since the great historic challenges to power and authority have been based on the same mastery of language and rhetoric that, the critical theorists hold, perpetrates the power of the dominant culture. One of the reasons for the triumph of Martin Luther King, Jr., is that he was a better rhetorician than his opponents. Still, all you have to do is leaf through the pages of the journals in the field of writing and you will see the critical literacy argument everywhere. Open, for example, to the first article in the first College English of 1990, and you will see "The Sublime and the Vulgar," by Karen Swann, identified in the article as an assistant professor of English at Williams College. Swann has clearly mastered the standard MLA prose style, whose purpose, in my somewhat-jaundiced view, is to show the writer’s profundity by the use of a very complex and elusive jargon, sentences like: "But the discourse on the sublime promotes an anti-critical, affective mode of engagement with power which turns a perception of the arbitrariness of things to the advantage of at least certain representational forms, as the subject becomes oriented to the shape or figure for its own sake, in the register of aesthetics.” Swann, I think, is saying that the ruling class uses the idea of standards as a way of maintaining their power against what they see as the vulgar masses—the mass these days being, says Swann, "the feminists, minorities and Marxists."

In the next volume of the journal, a piece on black women writers reminds us of an article of faith: even if black women writers sometimes portray black men as violent, as rapists, as criminals, we all remember that “the ultimate source of black women’s oppression is white racism, which also victimizes black men.” That may be true, but what is it doing in College English?"


"The important thing in this work of transformation is “To see to it that cultural literacy is not equated with lists of facts". No, “liberation pedagogy,” she says, means “reading the world and reading the word.” It means that literacy must be united with a “consciousness of consciousness,” meaning, it would seem, an awareness of oppression and the need to do something about it...

A lot of this, both the speeches and the scholarly articles, involves a kind of applied Marxism, the creation of a connection between what Marx called the structure and the superstructure. The structure in this case is the power of the white race and the male sex; the super structure is the language, the grammar, the rhetorical methods used to maintain that power. This is true. The analysis of the use of language as an instrument of social order is not far-fetched; nor is it original. Incorrect grammar excludes people just as bad manners do. It was not an accident (as the Marxists, including current Marxists, love to say) that slaves were prevented from learning to read and write...

What is actually kind of funny is the failure of the critical theorists to see the extent to which they are the ones now captured by a thought-channeling jargon, how their corrugated-iron constructions imprison them in petrified dogma, utterly unattached to any actual experience of the world. Still, it is not difficult to see the simplistic appeal of the theories of critical literacy in contemporary America. They provide an explanation, a startling vision of the world for those who feel that they have been excluded from the full benefits of American life, or who feel that they have suffered from prejudice. The problem with the theory of critical literacy is not that it is wrong and useless. The problem is that, like so much of the multiculturalist thrust, far too much is made of a few useful insights. They are stretched too thin, stated with exaggeration, immoderation, proclaimed to explain everything, and brought into the service of an eccentric, certainly disputable, vision of the nature of American life whose main premise, only modestly caricatured here, is that there is little to distinguish late-twentieth century America from eleventh-century theocracy.

... [Students with bad writing] also, frankly, need to know why it is more helpful, especially when time is limited and choices have to be made, to know King Lear than Native American chants. To assure them that their nonstandard English is just as good asstandard English is to doom them to a cruel fate, because once they get out of college, they will find that it is not as good - even if the tenured, salaried, retirement-pensioned and medically insured teachers who inculcated them with that nonsense still have their positions at the university"


"The newspapers carried a report of “cultural diversity” training at the Federal Aviation Administration during which male air-traffic controllers were required to run a gauntlet of women who fondled them and made comments about their sexual parts. I don’t know if some men might have enjoyed this fondling, though, certainly, it would have been fatal to admit it if they had. The point of the session was to enable men to understand what it is like to be a woman and to be sexually harassed by a man."

"Across the country in Pennsylvania, according to R. Randy Lee, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the state Human Relations Commission, the Realtors’ Association, and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association agreed on a list of “unacceptable” words in real estate advertisements. Numerous words were banned, the idea being that phrases like “ocean view” could be offensive to the blind or “master bedroom” to women (the implication here was that the word “master” stood for the male and his dominance over the female). Mr. Lee reported that the Fair Housing Council of Suburban Philadelphia filed lawsuits against landlords and three newspapers demanding damages in excess of $1 million. An ad for a “rare find” in Chester was pulled after it was called “racist.” The argument here as that the house was located in a largely black area, so the "rare find" phrase suggested that blacks rarely live in nice houses."

--- Dictatorship of virtue : how the battle over multiculturalism is reshaping our schools, our country, and our lives / Richard Bernstein (1995)