By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I’m not being facetious: Sometimes the double-standard on the left is so blatant that it strikes me as a ploy, an attempt to get conservatives to overreact and come across as extremists. When I first read the comments of Stanford University political science professor Rob Reich about the need for tighter regulation on home-schoolers to ensure that “children are exposed to and engaged with ideas, values, and beliefs that are different from those of the parents,” I thought it might be a set-up along those lines. (From what I can tell, Reich is not related to former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.)
I thought to myself that Reich’s double-standard was so obvious that he could not intend for his comments to be taken seriously.
But I reread Reich’s words, as reported in the summer 2015 edition of City Journal in an article by Matthew Hennessy. Reich is not being sarcastic or engaging in an exercise in reductio ad absurdum. He means what he says, even if it is preposterous. Come on: Reich is not concerned about ensuring that students will be exposed to views different from those of their parents. His concern is with exposing students to views different from those of liberal parents, to views out of step with the politically correct secular leftist biases of the academic world.
Do you think Reich would mount a crusade to ensure that pro-life views are fairly represented in public school classrooms? Or that the views of Americans with traditional views on marriage are given equal time to those of the proponents of same-sex marriage? Or to guarantee that respect for the U.S. military and its role in world history is included in the curriculum at those schools?
Reich’s goal is to promote “diversity” only when doing so challenges traditional beliefs. Like most in the academic establishment these days, he looks favorably on schools that promote the politically correct consensus on matters of sex and race. It is no accident that the liberal academicians who spent their entire lives teaching us about the dangers of censorship — now that they control our schools — favor censorship of everything that challenges their views on political and cultural matters.
If I am wrong, and it turns out that Reich would favor government regulation to guarantee a vigorous presentation of the arguments against legalized abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as the case for intelligent design in biology classes, in our public schools, I’ll apologize and eat crow in an upcoming edition of First Teachers.
On another topic: In praise of Bill Maher. That’s not a misprint. I am about to say something complimentary about Maher. The militant atheist and HBO talk-show host is high on my list of least favorite people. He is a sneering cheap-shot artist, who seems to be convinced that an angry insertion of four-letter words into his analysis of a topic makes him more persuasive, especially when Catholicism is the topic. If I found myself in the same room with the man, I would try to make myself inconspicuous behind a potted palm to avoid having to talk to him.
But — what’s the right cliché? — “You have to give the Devil his due,” “even a broken watch is right twice a day,” “even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.” Maher hit the nail on the head in a recent discussion about Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old boy detained by the Texas police after school authorities mistook as a bomb a clock he had made and brought to school as a school project.
The media have lionized the boy as a victim of racism and Islamophobia. President Obama invited him to the White House to make amends for the bigotry he experienced and commend him for his scientific abilities. He received a message of support from Hillary Clinton, along with an offer to visit with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and an invitation to be an intern at Twitter. The Internet and social media are filled with comments about the shameful way this budding young scholar was stereotyped.
The mea culpas were everywhere, as Americans line up to make clear to anyone who will listen that they do not want to be associated with the narrow-minded school authorities in Texas who “overreacted” and “assumed the worst” about the boy on the basis of his race and religion.
And that may be the way the country should react. Maybe the boy was completely innocent and naive about the appearance of his clock. Perhaps it is unfair to speculate, even to oneself, that he was acting upon instructions from neighborhood activists seeking to conduct a test-run at the school with a contraption that looked like every bomb I have ever seen in the movies. (Admittedly, I am no expert of what homemade bombs look like. But neither are schoolteachers and principals.)
Perhaps President Obama had the FBI conduct a thorough investigation of the boy and the construction of his clock, before assuming that racism and xenophobia were the logical explanation for why the school authorities were alarmed, rather than simple common sense.
Maybe it was a coincidence that the clock looked like a bomb. If you haven’t seen the clock, do an Internet search. The clock was set inside a case much like that of a laptop computer, filled with batteries and wires. The dang thing was beeping!
My problem is that I can imagine just as much uproar in the media and among government officials, to say nothing about “concerned parents,” if a local reporter had come across Mohamed’s clock among a collection of science projects at the school, and had run a story, along with pictures of the clock, in the local Texas newspapers, with the headline, “Do You Want Your Children Going to School With This in the Room?”
Enter Bill Maher. Jorge Ramos, the news anchor for Univision, appeared as a guest on Maher’s program in late September, just a few days after Mohamed had been detained by the Texas authorities. He told Maher that the boy’s detention was an example of hostility toward minorities in the United States and “dangerous to democracy.”
Maher’s response? “This kid deserves an apology, but we need perspective — did the teacher really do anything wrong?” After noting that “lots of teenagers” around the world have joined ISIS, Maher responded sarcastically, “Teachers are supposed to see something that looks like a bomb and say ‘Oh wait, this just might be my white privilege talking’?”
Bull’s eye! You can bet your bottom dollar that the Secret Service would be running around as if their hair were on fire if Mohamed’s clock had showed up in the back seat of one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign SUVs.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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