Pierce on schooling

 

 Pierce was on a university faculty for three years and still cares a great deal about education. His critique of American schooling reveals much about the way he sees American society in general. In a recent article in Free Speech entitled "The School Problem," he argues that schools have three fundamental missions in a society of the sort he envisions. I believe he primarily has elementary and secondary education in mind in the following quoted material.

 First, schools pass on a people's cultural, intellectual, and spiritual heritage from one generation to the next. By teaching to children the language, literature, history, and traditions of a people--by teaching children about their people's heroes and legends and achievements and mores--the schools help to assure cultural continuity, among other things. And they provide a sense of racial and cultural identity. They enable a child to define himself relative to his people and to the rest of the world.

 Second, schools teach technique; they help children acquire the knowledge and skills needed for them to become productive and self-supporting members of their society, whether those skills are welding, computer programming, accounting, or household management. They teach the child or the young adult techniques which will be useful to him or to society: how to play a musical instrument, how to type, how to repair a motor vehicle, how to fight with and without weapons, how to draw, how to swim, how to raise children, how to grow food, how to build a house.

 And third, schools train and develop character in children, so that they will grow up to be the strongest and most valuable citizens that their genetic inheritance allows. The schools challenge, test, and condition children; they force the child to exercise his will, to discipline himself, to endure discomfort, to make plans and carry them out, to overcome fears, to accept responsibility, to learn the consequences of failure, to be truthful, to act honorably, and generally to

 develop and strengthen those traits of character valued by his society. 1

 Using the achievement of these three missions with white children as the standard of assessment, America's schools just aren't measuring up, Pierce asserts. And why aren't they? Pierce argues that three "isms" are getting in the way: namely, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and feminism. He says these three ideologies are solidly entrenched in the minds of the powerful "progressive" faction within the education establishment and serve its overall agenda.

 For a long time, of course, the more "progressive" elements--that is, the nuttier elements--in America's educational establishment have been fretting about exposing young people to all of the racist, sexist, homophobic, and elitist influences inherent in the writings of White authors from generations less Politically Correct than our own. These include all the writers whose works American schoolchildren traditionally have read: Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Tennyson, and Kipling. They are hateful people when viewed from a Politically Correct perspective. I mean, Homer and Chaucer completely ignored Blacks, as if they didn't exist! And Shakespeare made a number of very insensitive references to Jews. Kipling was an unabashed White supremacist. And they were all elitists: not an egalitarian among them. "Progressive" educators have skirted this problem by censoring the works of White writers before presenting them to students, keeping the more objectionable works out of sight.'

 According to Pierce, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and feminism operate under a division-of-labor arrangement in our schools, each specializing, as it were, in obstructing the attainment of one of the three fundamental missions of schooling: multiculturalism impedes the transmission of white children's Western, European heritage; egalitarianism undercuts the attainment of the acquisition of knowledge and skills; and feminism undermines the development of character. In "The School Problem," Pierce outlines in turn how the fulfillment of each mission is subverted.

 Pierce says that schools are not even trying to pass on a European, or even American, identity and sense of connectedness to the next generation of white people. The reigning ideology of multiculturalism, says Pierce, pushes for a multi-racial, "diverse" society, in which all cultures are

 equally valuable. Multiculturalists are not about to single out Western traditions for special attention or praise. The result is that no culture is taught in depth, and students come away with a few superficial facts and generalizations about a number of cultures. What white youngsters do manage to learn about their own heritage isn't likely to make them feel very good about it, because despite their rhetoric, multiculturalists have a negative view of the West generally and Euro-American traditions and history in particular. Multiculturalists don't want to encourage the development of racial consciousness and loyalty among white youngsters--among minority youngsters, yes, but among white youngsters most certainly not. In today's schools, white students are deluged by tales of their oppressive and exploitative ancestors—especially the men among them. After year upon year of exposure to this kind of schooling, white children become instilled with a negative and very distorted view of their own people and feelings of guilt.

 Pierce says that some of the charter schools set up for black children do a better job of providing for racial and cultural continuity than the schools white children attend. (Charter schools are public schools which are allowed to operate independently of most outside bureaucratic control.) He tells of a newspaper article which describes black children in such a school dressed in traditional African garb and, with clenched fists, pledging allegiance to their fellow Africans. "If a White school tried with equal fervor to instill a sense of European racial consciousness in its students," Pierce asserts, "the government would be all over the school with subpoenas in a minute." 3

 And then there is egalitarianism--the belief in the essential equality of all individuals and groups--and its impact on the schools. Pierce says that imparting knowledge and technique is what schools do best. But they don't do it nearly as well as they could because their egalitarian "articles of faith" lead them to refuse to recognize distinctions among people and consequently attempt to fit everyone into the same mold. "It used to b e that we weren't afraid to recognize the differences in people," Pierce points out. "We understood that some people would grow up to be welders, construction workers, or farmers; and some would be mathematicians, poets, or rocket scientists. We also understood that shop courses made more sense for boys than girls, and that girls needed home economics courses more than boys did." 4

 In prior times, Pierce points out, we acknowledged the obvious reality that some students were academically more capable than others. He contends that this fact of human existence has been a source of great anguish to the egalitarians, and that they have come up with ways to get around it. What do they do? They water down the curriculum. They

 disparage and downplay the importance of intellectual pursuits. They lower academic standards. They do away with rigorous, objective tests of achievement. Then, with all that in place, every student can succeed--at least as the egalitarians have defined success--and the myth of human equality can be maintained. The egalitarians have been able to perpetuate the comforting but false notion of human equality in their own minds--they desperately want it to be true—as well as in the minds of others. The big problem, however, is that, whether they realize it or not, they have done it at the cost of academic excellence.

 Pierce says that it is a fact that, on average, black students are significantly less capable than whites of handling a traditional curriculum. But no one dares say it--or, for that matter, even speculate about the possibility that there might be racial differences in intellectual functioning—for fear of being called a racist. No matter how much research evidence is marshaled to support the conclusion that blacks as a group have lower intelligence, no matter how much evidence we take in with our own senses, the egalitarians hang onto their belief that the races are exactly the same in this regard and insist that everyone else does too. Pierce says that egalitarians can be counted on to manipulate reality to make it appear that their beliefs are valid. If white children are in a school with large numbers of black children it is safe to bet that the curriculum, academic standards, and assessment mechanisms will have been adjusted to ensure that white performance will be brought back to the level of the black students.

 Pierce argues that along with our refusal to recognize intellectual differences among the races, we also refuse to recognize attitudinal and behavioral differences among them. Blacks on the whole, claims Pierce, have lower self-control and a greater propensity to be disorderly and violent. As the schools have been integrated, Pierce asserts, they have brought these problems with them to the classrooms white students attend. Pierce says it is true blacks change their values and behavior in the direction of white patterns to some extent when they are mixed with whites. But it works the other way too, contends Pierce: whites begin moving toward black norms. White youth educated with blacks can be predicted to be less academically oriented, more disruptive, and more violent than their forebears who did not have the "benefits" of diversity--so Pierce argues.

 Pierce claims that most whites have been so "sensitized" and brainwashed that they have a very hard time dealing with racial realities. They see the problems in urban schools with drugs and gangs and poor attitudes toward schoolwork and yet refuse to acknowledge the racial dimension of the problems. They have bought into the false egalitarian myth of the absence of racial differences in anything other than skin color.

 Although then again, Pierce notes, when white people are looking for safer and better schools for their children, they seek out whiter schools for their children, even if they can't fully admit to themselves that that is what they are doing. So maybe they haven't been totally brainwashed after all.

 And then there is feminism and its impact on educational practice. Pierce informs us that over the past few decades, feminists have gained great influence within the education establishment. "And let me tell you," he proclaims, "if there is any bunch of people in this country with wackier and more destructive ideas than the racial egalitarians, it is the feminists." 5 Pierce says the feminists see traditional educational practice as a male-oriented way of operating, and they are bent on changing things over to bring them in line with a female way of looking at the world and dealing with it.

 Feminists, for example, always have been against competition. They regard competitiveness as a masculine trait, and they try to discourage it in every way they can. They are in league with the racial egalitarians in pushing for an end to the grading of students. Setting precise standards and then grading students numerically according to their performance relative to those standards is anathema to them. They see it as psychologically damaging to the students—especially to those who make low scores. They much prefer a warm and fuzzy approach to evaluating students. Their goal for the classroom is cooperation, as opposed to what they like to refer as "cutthroat" competition. They love committees and work groups and consensus. They want to see the students deal with learning as a group, with the brighter students helping the duller students. They like to see problems talked to death in a group. It's not really stretching their ideas very far to say that whenever the members of a student group disagree about a problem, the feminists would like to see the students vote on the correct answer. They really do have a different view of the nature of reality.

 The feminists also don't like to see a strong emphasis on rules. It destroys creativity, they believe. Rules and details should be relegated to a secondary position, and students should be given the "big picture" instead. They should be able to talk about a subject in broad terms without worrying too much about the details. And the feminists don't much care for an analytical approach to any subject. Analysis is too masculine. 6

 Pierce contends that the effectiveness of feminism's efforts to de-emphasize competition in our schools can be seen in our diminished competitive spirit in this country compared to prior times and in the growing softness and wimpishness of so many young white men. Pierce says it is important to see how everything ties together; since the media are enamored of anything that weakens white people, and feminism does that, it explains why the media have, in Pierce's words, "tried to ram feminist propaganda down our throats." 7

 So there it is: Pierce thinks that multiculturalism prevents the passing on of European culture and identity to the next generation; egalitarianism has wrecked our standards, undermined discipline, and corrupted our curriculum; and feminism has nullified the character-building task of the schools. Pierce acknowledges that this analysis is an oversimplification, but still, he contends, it gets at the heart of the matter if one shares his concern for the fate of European-American children.

 It must be said that Pierce is far from alone in his basic assessment of the ills of American education. A number of outspoken critics on the right share Pierces concerns about the impact of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and feminism on America's schooling specifically, and about progressive education generally. However, I know of no other analyst who explicitly brings the racial angle to his arguments as Pierce does. And Pierce is the only one I know about who openly expresses his belief that the education that promotes the level of cultural identity and continuity among white people he wants to see can only occur in racially homogeneous schools. Ironically, Pierce puts forth the same arguments in making this case as do a number of African American educators who have long advocated separate schools for black children geared to helping them develop a sense of African and black racial consciousness and pride and commitment. Pierce says that it is indicative of what is going on in America that there are such schools for black children supported with public dollars, but that any attempt to create these very same kind of schools, private or public, for white children is immediately and vigorously condemned as "racist" and "white supremacist" and shut down.

 A North Carolina television news reporter came to West Virginia to interview Pierce. While he was at the property, the reporter asked Pierce to show him an example of the children's books Pierce distributes through his National Vanguard Books catalog. Pierce responded by showing him a copy of an illustrated edition of Aesop's Fables. The reporter flipped through the pages and asked Pierce, "What is this all about?" It turned out that this young reporter had never heard of Aesop or his fables.

 Pierce told the reporter that it was a collection of stories, each with a moral, attributed to the Greek writer Aesop, who lived around 600 B.C.. Recalling that exchange, Pierce says that at first he was surprised at the reporter's unfamiliarity with the Aesop material but now realizes that he shouldn't have been. In recent times neither schools nor parents see any need to introduce white children to the stories of Aesop, or to the Brothers Grimm and the others of that sort, that earlier generations of white children read or had read to them.

 When I was a kid one of the special charms that Aesop's Fables held for me was the knowledge that Alexander the Great had read exactly these same stories when he was a child, more than 2,300 years ago. When I read the fable about the dog in the manger or the one about the shepherd boy who cried "wolf and thought about the lessons these fables taught, it thrilled me to think that every great man in our history, for thousands of years, had read these same stories when he was a child and learned the same lessons.

 But not any longer. These fables are...Eurocentric...and so today they are all "no-nos" for White children--which is why we have a White population in America which is increasingly rootless, cosmopolitan, alienated, and atomized--a White population which is unable to defend its heritage or to oppose those whose aim is to destroy that heritage, because they have no knowledge of their heritage, and who believe that anyone who values that heritage must be a "hater" or a "racist." 8

 When I was in West Virginia, I saw one of the children's books that Pierce distributes on Bob DeMarais' desk and borrowed it to see what kind of books Pierce thought appropriate for young children. It was called Annie and the Wild Animals, and it was written and illustrated by Jan Brett. 9 It was published in 1985 by Houghton Mifflin, a major American publishing house. The book looked to me to be something that could b e used in the early grades in schools or that parents could read to their three-to-six-year-old children in twenty minutes or so--it was mostly pictures. Annie is a little blond girl of four or five who lives in the country and whose cat disappears one winter. With her cat gone, Annie makes a connection with a variety of woodland animals. When spring comes, Annie finds her cat along with a litter of newborn kittens in the woods as all the other animals she has met look on.

 I could see why Pierce would favor Annie and the Wild Animals. A little white girl, embedded in a natural world, not a concrete-and-steel

 world. Annie's was a calm world, not a jangly world. Annie directly encounters life; she wasn't living a media-infused, Sesame Street/video game/Disney film existence. And there was a timelessness to the story: it could have taken place yesterday or twenty years ago or a hundred years ago. It wasn't about the hip-hop, bang-bang-bang, go-go-go world of today. It is how Pierce--unrealistically, some would say--thinks white children ought to live.

 In a radio broadcast back called "Brainwashing in America," Pierce spoke to the issue of university education. 10 He told his audience that he had been a university professor during the turbulent 1960s. This was a time marked by the powerful emergence of the so-called counterculture, with its hostility to authority, friendliness to drugs and recreational sex, and encouragement to people to do whatever felt good to them at the moment These were also the years of the civil rights revolution--Pierce says blacks were "demonstrating and generally raising hell"--and the anti-Vietnam war movement.

 Pierce told his listeners that he divided his colleagues on the faculty into four categories on the basis of how they related to all that was happening on campus in those years.

 First, Pierce said, there were the "Trendies." These were the unthinking liberals--in contrast to the second group, the more reflective, doctrinaire liberals and radical leftists (I'll call them "Lefties"). The Trendies were disposed to believe whatever was fashionable, said Pierce. They were the ones who held a moistened forefinger up to the breeze of propaganda coming from their television screens and orating colleagues, and adjusted their views accordingly.

 Then, the third of Pierce's categories, there were the Jews, who, noted Pierce, are more numerous on college campuses than in the general population. The Jews were "up to their necks in civil rights activities," Pierce pointed out—organizing committees to hire more non-white faculty members and recruit non-white students, demanding that the university trustees get rid of their investments in South Africa, and marching and demonstrating and writing letters to the editor and opinion pieces. Jews were also very active in the anti-war movement because, claimed Pierce, unlike World War II, they didn't see their interests being served in Vietnam. And Jews were very prominent among those pushing

 countercultural values—personal license, disrespect for social convention, and the rest. These values subverted morality and order in white society, and the prospect of that turn of events has great appeal to Jews, said Pierce.

 As a result of the activities of the Lefties, the Trendies, and the Jews, Pierce alleged, there was a lowering of hiring and student recruitment

 standards, a lowering of academic standards, and the subordination of the educational mission of the university to a leftist political agenda. Later on, Pierce said, the feminists and gay rights activists got on board and the university became the bastion of Political Correctness (he always capitalizes that term) that it is today.

 Pierce doesn't have a name for the fourth category of faculty with whom he worked at the university, but based on how he describes them, I'll give them a label--"Timids." The Timids were the faculty members who weren't taken in by what was going on—they knew what was up--but they were not willing to express their views openly or to oppose the confirmed Lefties, the trendy liberals, and the vocal Jews (with the first and third categories often being the same people). Pierce said the Timids would say one thing privately and another thing publicly. Pierce said he thinks that these faculty were unduly afraid of the consequences to themselves of taking on the Lefties, Trendies, and Jews and ended up acting in dishonest--and to Pierce's way of thinking, dishonorable--ways.

 Pierce acknowledges that the Timids did have some reason to be concerned about their welfare if they spoke up. Their careers could have been affected if they went up against certain people—tenure and promotions decisions could go against them, salary increases could b e denied, and prime teaching assignments could be given to someone else. And too, Pierce reported, there was some physical intimidation--tire-slashing, disruptions of classes, threats of violence, those kinds of things. And then of course there was the disdain and ridicule that would have been directed at the Timids if they had spoken up or failed to go along with what the Lefties, Trendies, and Jews wanted done.

 As I was listening to the tape of Pierce's broadcast, I thought of one other possible reason for the silence of the Timids. To the degree that Pierce is right, that many people on the right stayed silent and inactive during the 1960s, it could have been that they simply didn't want to live with not being liked and approved and accepted by those on the left. I have observed an interesting difference between those on the political right and political left. Characteristically, those on the right, for whatever reason, want to be liked and approved by those on the left. In contrast, those on the left could not care less whether those on the right like them or approve of what they say or do. They don't give two seconds to worrying about what somebody on the right is going to think of them before saying or doing something. If that is true, the prospect of being confronted by the disapproval, disagreement, or cold shoulder from their liberal and leftist colleagues may well be enough to keep conservative and rightist faculty members silent, inactive, and acquiescent, or even lead them actively to support goings-on which are contrary to their beliefs.

 Whatever the reason for it, faculty who opposed the corruption of the university didn't speak out or display any measure of solidarity in those years, said Pierce. He contended that if they had been bolder and had stood together they would have been able to prevail in many instances. Especially they would have prevailed if the Trendies had been rooted enough as people to do more than align themselves with whatever happened to be in the wind at the moment. But the Timids sat tight and the Trendies went along with what was fashionable, and the result has been the tyranny of political correctness in American higher education. Pierce said the modern university has become "an enemy asset." 11 But honesty and courage at the right time, he asserted, thirty years ago when all of this was catching hold, could have prevented what he views as a great tragedy.

 Pierce expressed intense disdain for modern-day academics who oppose what is going on in the university but won't fight against it, employing the strongest language when describing them I have heard from him. "They are lickspittles [servile flatterers, toadies] and hypocrites, liars and wimps, without the slightest trace of manliness, honor, or self-respect," he declared. "They teach doctrines which they know are false. They grovel at the feet of the Jews and other minorities in order to keep their jobs. They present the worst possible example to young people. It is pitiful to behold, truly disgusting." 12

 In the "Brainwashing in America" broadcast, Pierce reported that, in an address to the faculty, the president of Rutgers University pointed out that on the average blacks possibly may not have the genetic qualities to meet the same standards set for white students. Pierce said the media picked it up and there were calls for the president's head. But instead of the Rutgers president defending what he said and backing it up with evidence, he began groveling and apologizing, whining and begging, and going on about how he hadn't really meant what he said. "Truly pathetic," snarled Pierce.

 Pierce says that traditionally universities have had two purposes. The first has been--and, to his mind, still should be--to train scholars: mathematicians, chemists, historians, philosophers, and so on. The second purpose has been to instill in a leadership elite of young people a sense of commitment to their civilization so that they could maintain and add to it. "The civilization that our universities were a part of was unmistakably and unapologetically Western," he argues, "which is to say, European--or, if you prefer, White." 13

 Pierce says that one can still get a technical education in an American university, by which he means in fields such as engineering and medicine.

 What isn't available now, however, according to him, is the kind of liberal education he favors, one that transmits knowledge about our Western heritage and invokes a sense of responsibility to contribute to the survival and improvement of our culture and our race. Pierce says today's universities are in the business of indoctrinating students with a party line that is anti-white, anti-European, and anti-Western. He believes

 universities have become weapons to destroy white European culture. In post-secondary education, Shakespeare and Milton are out and contemporary black writers (Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou) and pop culture courses ("The Gangster Film") are in. Students raised on television and permissiveness and most likely not among the elite academically--these days, mediocre high school students fill up colleges eager to take their tuition money--too often choose the fun courses, the trendy courses, the trivial courses, instead of the serious, demanding ones.

 Pierce particularly decries the state of history and literature in modern universities. These are the subjects where the "Red Guards," as he calls them, have most left their mark. He says he knows why that is the case.

 History is an inherently racist subject...because, in the first place, it involves the study of what peoples and individuals have actually done, not what the theorists of democracy and equality would like to have us believe they have done. History gives us continuing proof of the fact that there is no equality in the world. It is the record of heroic accomplishment and outstanding virtue on the part of some, contrasted with the chronic ineptitude and appalling iniquity on the part of others. In the second place, it provides the indispensable basis for a sense of peoplehood, a sense of rootedness, a sense of racial identity. It is not something you want to spread around when you are trying to reduce a population to a mass of rootless, cosmopolitan, interchangeable human atoms....

 And literature... well, that's at least as dangerous as history. Who can read the Iliad without his blood beginning to race and without feeling a connection to those ancient people and events? Who cannot be moved by the same spirit that moved Homer? And that spirit has nothing to do with the sickly spirit of democracy and equality. And then there's Shakespeare! There was never a man who observed the human condition with truer eye than he....The great danger in literature--in real literature, in great literature--for the democrats and the egalitarians is that it helps us to understand ourselves in the context of our people. It helps us to complete

 ourselves and become whole. It extends our horizons, helps us see the big picture. It gives us ideals, models--and those ideals, in our literature, are not egalitarian ideals. Nor are the models Politically Correct: in fact, they are much more likely to be heroes than democrats. 14

 Over the past quarter century, Pierce in his various publications--Attack!, National Vanguard, and Free Speech--has given over much space to articles devoted to the history to the white race. Examples include "The Celts: Their Origins and Pre-History," "Leonidas and the Spartan Ethos," "Sven Hedin: Last of the Vikings," and "Denis Kearney and the Struggle for a White America." (Kearney was an organizer of white workers in California in the 1870s.) Pierce has also printed pieces on writers and artists with a strong white racial consciousness such as Knut Hamsun, Arno Breker, Aldous Huxley, and Rudyard Kipling. 15 Many other examples could be cited--political leaders, inventors, military figures, explorers, and so forth, both well-known and obscure, whom Pierce views as being important in the journey taken thus far by the white race and useful as guides and as inspiration for white people now living as they (he hopes) carry on the race's upward advance.

 I don't know whether Pierce is familiar with it, but his approach to white racial studies links him to a new academic trend in universities known as whiteness studies—although his focus on what he considers to b e the exemplary aspects of the white experience contrasts with that of the other practitioners in this field. Scholars in the field of whiteness studies fall into one of two camps: those who concern themselves with the culture of "white trash"; and those whose goal is to "problematize" whiteness, that is to say, examine it either as a means of purging it of its most negative qualities—racism, for example--or of eliminating it as an individual or group identity.

 An example of the first camp is a book called White Trash. 16 This volume includes an interview by Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis of one Jennifer Reeder, who revels in her "white trash" identity. Says Reeder, "I am busty, and I am loud, and I love bad taste. I am bad taste." The book also contains essays on slasher movies, Elvis worship, hillbilly lore, and country music. In the second camp are scholars such as historian Noel Ignatiev. Ignatiev edits a journal called Race Traitor whose motto is "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." He says that studying whiteness is merely a necessary stage en route to what he terms "the abolition of whiteness." "There is no such thing as white culture," Ignatiev maintains. "Without the privileges attached to it, the white race

 would not exist, and white skin would have no more social significance than big feet." 17

 Examples of whiteness studies are springing up around the country. Students at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota enroll in a course called "Race, Race Privilege, and Whiteness," in which they interview their classmates about their experiences of racism and whiteness. Duke University Press has published a collection of essays entitled Displacing Whiteness. n In New Jersey, the Center for the Study of White American Culture devotes its efforts to helping "white Americans participate in building a multi-racial society." 19

 Whiteness studies is not without its detractors, however. David Roediger, the author of the book, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, worries that white culture will unduly come in for attention and affirmation. "Whiteness," says Roediger, "describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back." 20 Professor of African American studies at Columbia University Michael Eric Dyson, whose next book will be partly devoted to whiteness, says, "There's a suspicion among African-Americans that whiteness studies is a sneaky form of narcissism. At the very moment when African-American studies and Asian-American studies and so on are really coming into their own, you have whiteness studies shifting the focus and maybe the resources back to white people and their perspective." 21 And then there is the concern of Margaret Talbot, the author of a New York Times Magazine article on whiteness studies. Talbot says in her Times piece that one unsettling question to be answered about the field is what social good it serves to heighten Caucasian awareness if in doing so you run the risk of swelling Caucasian pride. 2 2

The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds:

 An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce

 by Robert S. Griffin