Politics and the Classroom

Good news from Iran, reported by Amir Taheri.  The Iranian revolutionary regime has decided to purge the universities. 

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to "cleanse" the Iranian educational system of what he calls "the corrupt influence of the infidel"

This the second time that the Iranian regime has decided to purge the education system.  The first time was in 1980 when:

A committee created to "cleanse" academia purged more than 6,000 professors and lecturers, virtually destroying Iranian academia.

That will really help Iran in its program to take over the world.

Politics and education don’t go well together.  In an article about “safe lecturing” Robert Weissberg writes about the danger of offending minority students at the university with controversial course content.

an African-American student who mangles "blacks disproportionately commit more violent crimes" into "blacks are criminals" can demand that the university itself plus sundry student-based organization rectify this "offense."...  [C]rimes against racial sensibilities requires action. This is the raison d’etre for these injustice monitors and justifies salaries. To compound matters, certified victims have diplomatic immunity and can never be punished for false accusations or foolish hyper-sensitivity.

The result is that professors tend to purge anything that might be offensive from their course material.  You can’t say that the rule in the constitution counting slaves as “three-fifths” of a person for congressional apportionment was actually a device to limit the representation of slave states.  Some black kid heard somewhere that the three-fifths rule meant that the founders were racist.

Of course, the same thing happens with the feminists and K-12 education.  In their rage to force girls to be free they have utterly transformed the education system so that nothing can happen that offends their ideas of gender neutrality.

So the result is that in education today, nothing happens. Teachers can’t teach without looking over their shoulder, and content is dumbed down to make sure that the teacher doesn’t get into trouble.

It’s probably been ever thus.  But that doesn’t make it right.