PART 2: A Little Background on My Education and Comparisons to the 1990s

Nothing over the past few years has been more ironic than this news story that was published last week about a North Korean defector who complained about the propaganda in our elite college educational system. After going through tremendous personal suffering to escape the North Korean Communist dictatorship, she had some strong words to the press about the educational system in the United States.

"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park said in an interview with Fox News. "I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."

From later in the story,

“During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen. "I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing," recalled Park. "Then she said, 'Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’ “It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with.”

The propaganda is so good that Kim Jong Un recently applied to Harvard to learn these techniques.

So what was the primary cause for the intellectual decline of our education system? Why are many of our advanced educational institutions, the government, and large corporations embracing a theory that divides the population of our country into groups designated by race and advances the philosophy that the United States is historically racist? The question is a complicated one that leads to difficult questions. The only comparison I can give is my own personal experience in college that took place two decades apart. As mentioned in my previous post, I attended California State University, Fullerton for my BA between the years of 1995-1998 and Arizona State for my MAS degree during 2019-2021. The stark differences between these two separate educational experiences were vast.
When I started California State University, Fullerton, the Television and Film Degree covered vast subjects. To achieve my degree, I had to take classes in Critical Thinking, Communication and Entertainment Law, Ethics, Television and Film Production including participating actively in student productions and internships, as well as cultural classes revolving around the Language of Film and Creative Writing. It was a cornucopia of diverse ideas that was intended to open your mind to different types of thoughts as well as understanding basic rules and principals on how the industry functioned. One of my required classes was called Visual Communication. What made this class interesting was the professor (I apologize but his name has slipped my brain). He promoted the importance of understanding language with an emphasis on government and corporate propaganda. He also focused on some of the language used by con artists like Jerry Lewis during his annual Labor Day MDA (Muscular Dystrophy Association) Telethon using Jerry’s own language to show his exploitation of disabled individuals with the primary goal of achieving donations from individuals and socially pandering corporations for the medical industry. Other classes during my junior college years in history or philosophy also dived into open-minded critical analysis of United States culture. The basic philosophy was to understand diverse viewpoints from many different cultures and organizations within the United States and to create the important historical mindset of understanding your culture and country’s flaws and go about improving on them. It was positivism for the future wrapped around a cynical but knowledgeable take on the flaws inside our society.

The 1990s was littered with many of the ideals of the 1960s/1970s individualist hippie culture that embraced the social identity and civil rights movements. But even though many of the criticisms of the United States government, culture and corporate behavior were discussed, the knowledge was provided as a tool to understand and learn from our historical mistakes. As the 1990s went on, Generation X successfully took over the culture from its predecessor with its focus on personal tolerance, individual responsibility for your actions, and a distrust of governmental and corporate institutions (See the band Pearl Jam’s war on TICKETMASTER and the riots in Seattle against NAFTA and Globalism). Generation X was also cynical as hell and distrusted much of the previous beliefs practiced by their parents and grandparents. As the 1970s hippie and social movements started to fade away due to Conservative backlash and evolve in the 1990s towards a new ideal, many of the elite, liberal institutional professors came up with a new idea for the future. This is represented through this quote from the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

“Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado (coauthor of this primer) put their minds to the task. They were soon joined by others, and the group held its first conference at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989.”

At Columbia, one of the godmothers of the movement, professor Kimberle Williams Crenshaw created The Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies to continue the research on these ideas.

“The Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies was established to examine how social structures and related identity categories such as gender, race, and class interact on multiple levels to create social inequality. The first such center of its kind, the Center’s research projects and initiatives will bring together scholars and practitioners from law, sociology, feminist and gender studies, human rights, social justice, and other fields to explore the relationship of intersectionality to their work, to shape more effective remedies, and to promote greater collaboration between and across social movements.”

As the theory has gained significance in our culture, it has become intolerant of divergent opinions. This is what has led to the demonization of anyone who is ‘perceived’ to say anything negative about LGTBQ issues. It evolved into censoring Alex Jones in 2018 to the out-of-control monster that has swallowed our culture and is ‘cancelling’ people from online society for minor infractions that occurred during someone’s youth. Now, the proponents of this educational theory complain about the United States historically racist roots while ignoring the dangerous, freedom destroying practices of the government and corporations who have used this movement to accumulate wealth, power and threaten individual rights.

The problem is being noticed by economists, conservative politicians, and the brave voices of the medical community that dealt with more censorship over the COVID-19 pandemic than any group of people and are beginning to speak against our government’s actions. Financial expert Charles Nenner had this to say about the United States political system from this article and related to his prediction of the eventual decline of our economy,

“Everybody does whatever they want because nobody trusts the government…I think the left is more dangerous than the right…I see things deteriorating very fast because nobody knows what’s right or wrong anymore in the United States…I think the world will take the United States on because they have no clue what they are doing anymore.  This looks the same as before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because how stupid can you get.  In the end, the United States will get its act together, but first, they have to be hurt very seriously.”

Those first three sentences are absolutely important to understand what is occurring. And the education system is absolutely responsible for not understanding the true problems impacting the United States and misguiding the next generation of students into focusing on minor social justice problems while the world crumbles down.

Next week, I will begin my first evaluation of one of my Master’s Classes: Los Angeles Film and Culture. Some of the content from this class is a nice beginning to understand the nonsense that has taken over our society.