Report Reveals Massive Indoctrination of Students at Universities Through ‘Transformative Civic Engagement’
CAIRCO note: America's higher education system functions as a hotbed of inculcation of liberal progressive, Marxist, multicultural, open borders, and frankly anti-American propaganda. This article exposes this deep seated, pervasive, and well founded agenda.
Students at hundreds of colleges and universities are being systematically indoctrinated into the “New Civics” of social justice activism, according to a report released this past week by the National Association of Scholars.
The report’s findings suggest that the suppression of free speech on college campuses that is making headlines is only the tip of a very large iceberg. What lies beneath the surface is a massive, publicly funded program of indoctrination through a remaking of the curriculum as a vehicle for advancing the political agenda of progressivism.
The full NAS report, MAKING CITIZENS: HOW AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES TEACH CIVICS, can be found here.
The “New Civics” can accurately be called indoctrination because it is far more ambitious and open than the left-liberal bias in classroom instruction encountered by students for decades... but the “New Civics” has ambitions for transforming the entire institution and all academic disciplines into “change agents.”
The “New Civics” is replacing traditional “civic literacy,” and it’s campus-wide ambitions have the endorsement and support of university administrators. In public institutions like the four cases documented in the MAKING CITIZENS report, it sees no conflict in using taxpayer dollars to accomplish its progressive mission...
... the vision and impact of the “civic engagement” and New Civics movement extends far beyond the campus. The aim is to turn the entire curriculum — including technology, engineering, and computer science — into little laboratories for incubating and motivating millions of progressive activists — not to be good citizens, but to be activists “doing good work for democracy.”
The NAS report explains the difference between the goals of traditional civic literacy and the goals of Civic Engagement — and why the former must first be destroyed in order to advance the latter. For example, students coming out of the New Civics movement may not have read the Federalist Papers or Washington’s Farewell Address, but they will be well versed in Washington’s ownership of slaves and the ” institutionalized hypocrisy” of the assertion “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. In short, the New Civics teaches students not that America is an exceptionally successful and noble country but a country in need of a radical “rebirthing.”
More than that, the message is that because of these deep imperfections, students have a civic duty to become “engaged” in political activism to right the wrongs inherited from the past...
The three-year 525-page MAKING CITIZENS report uses four in-depth case studies to document and illustrates the “New Civics” movement. The four institutions are the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University at Ft. Collins, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, and the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Public documents were augmented by interviews, course syllabi, and classroom observations where possible.
Based on extensive research, the report concludes that:
CU-Boulder has replaced the Old Civics with an enormous New Civics infrastructure dedicated to training a core of progressive activists and extending the New Civics into every corner of CU-Boulder, both inside and outside the classroom. ‘CU Engage’ is the administrative heart of the New Civics and contains those programs devoted exclusively to propagating the New Civics — including INVST, the Leadership Studies Minor, Public Achievement, and CU Dialogues...
The landmark MAKING CITIZENS report makes ten national and four Colorado recommendations for confronting and rolling back the New Civics takeover of higher education...
The progressives’ “New Civics” project is not a fad or a by-product of Obama’s radicalism: it has grown over two decades from an acorn to an oak and now a forest. Where are the leaders who will confront this powerful, entrenched establishment dedicated to producing an entire generation of social justice warriors?
Related articles
College Civics Now Means Leftist Indoctrination and Activism, Brenda Walker, Limits to Growth, January 15, 2016.
The Real Reason Race Relations Have Deteriorated, by David Byrne, American Thinker, January 12, 2017.
Full report
Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics - With Case Studies of the University of Colorado, Boulder; Colorado State University; University of Northern Colorado; and the University of Wyoming, Dave Randall, National Association of Scholars, January 2017.
CAIRCO Research