Flawed arguments against the public education system (and wicked roundhouse kicks)

My friend Aaron recently shared a link to an article on WorldNetDaily by martial arts icon, living meme and patriot Chuck Norris. It’s the first in a two-part series on American public schools – or “progressive indoctrination camps,” as Norris prefers to call them.

Claiming that “a liberal bias in our academic curricula and system is overwhelmingly dominant and ubiquitous,” Norris argues that free thinking and equal opportunity are threatened by the “sociopolitical agendas” and “scientific paradigms” that supposedly dominate public education today. “Why should liberals want to change the public educational system,” he asks, “when it is turning out the product they have been striving for years to produce?”

It’s a great bit of fear-mongering on Norris’s part, hitting all the right paranoid notes. Clearly, anyone who disagrees with such a half-baked rant is a just a product of the very liberal education system that Norris opposes. By calling him out, in other words, aren’t we actually proving his point?

Obviously, the answer is “No, of course not.” Norris is certainly entitled to his opinion, rooted as it seems to be in union bashing and push polling. But as we all know, the whole “liberals are out to get you” approach, despite achieving enormous success in the public arena over the past few years, doesn’t automatically make a person right. To be fair, neither does the “conservatives are out to get you” approach, despite the overwhelming amount of supporting evidence these days.

Indeed, it seems odd that someone as accomplished in the martial arts as Norris would attack with an argument so flawed, and so open to logical and juvenile criticism alike. I’m certainly no expert in the ways of punching and kicking, but even I know that you don’t want to leave yourself open to your opponent’s attacks. Norris has done so in a big way here, and I don’t just mean in the “Sure, Delta Force, whatever you say” ad hominem sense.

Norris, after all, is essentially arguing that the generally liberal lean of the country’s educators is proof that the education system itself is a sinister conspiracy of progressive indoctrination. He tosses out a number of “real news headlines from the past several weeks and months,” none of which are sourced or presented with any context, and the bulk of which are examples of circular reasoning worthy of the most insidiously progressive logic textbook.

Headlines like “Teens ask for more sex ed, greater condom availability” and “Principal orders Ten Commandments yanked from school lockers” can’t be taken as proof of a massive liberal conspiracy, unless you already assume that such a conspiracy exists, and that these are the symptoms of it. Indeed, in this day and age, it doesn’t take a raging liberal to acknowledge that teens asking for more sex ed and greater condom availability might be a sign of the public school system doing something right, even if the particular schools that those teens are attending might be a little lacking. Either way, by the time you get to a headline like “No opting out of pro-gay school propaganda,” you’ve clearly abandoned any pretense of objective proof.

Can we really take the alleged liberal bent of the teaching profession as proof that public schools are progressive indoctrination camps? Doesn’t that assume that teachers are incapable of leaving their personal politics at home? Couldn’t there be other reasons why the world of academia seems to attract more liberals than progressives? Isn’t it just as reasonable, for example, to point to the fact that conservatives have traditionally rejected fancy, big city book learning in much greater numbers?

Indeed, if you wanted to be a total prick about it, couldn’t you just as easily approach the issue from the opposite end, by rounding up all the failures of the American public education system and asking them what they think about Norris’s argument? If a disproportionately high number of the people who think he’s got the right idea identified themselves as conservative, would that prove once and for all that public schools are progressive indoctrination camps? Or at least explain why the liberal kids are getting higher marks in their social studies classes?

That’s what I mean about leaving yourself open. An actor and patriot tried to make a perfectly reasonable argument about a campaign of liberal tyranny targeting America’s innocent children, and look how quickly it degenerated into partisan name-calling. Personally, I blame the Canadian public school system and its godless, socialist agenda.

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