“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next,” goes the apocryphal saying. This may explain why leftist Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, doing the bidding of a leftist teachers’ union, has halted reform of his nation’s wanting education system. After all, the philosophy in it has long been his.
This is “significant for us, because Mexico has already sent us large numbers of the products of this educational system,” writes American Thinker’s Monica Showalter. “And the World Bank confirms that Central America’s educational system is pretty much just like it. For Democrats here, though, it’s the perfect formula for new voters.”
As Showalter explains, many Mexicans aren’t just poorly educated — they’re miseducated, indoctrinated full-bore with Marxism. Along with their sub-literacy, this makes them easy prey for leftist demagogues.
Showalter then cites a 2013 Wall Street Journal article detailing just how corrupt and politicized education is in southern Mexico. As the writer José de Córdoba reported:
SAN LUCAS QUIAVINI, Mexico — During a recent teachers strike in this Zapotec Indian town in the poor southern state of Oaxaca, parents who brought in replacement instructors discovered that the children hadn’t been taught the words to Mexico’s national anthem. Instead, they had been trained to sing a popular leftist song which acts as an unofficial anthem to a local chapter of the teachers union.
“We don’t know the words to the Mexican anthem,” said Leticia Diego, a student, apologizing to a visitor one recent morning. About a dozen seventh-graders then shyly sang the leftist anthem, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.”
The union here is the National Coordinator of Educational Workers, or CNTE, a radical and powerful wing of the country’s national teachers union. Analysts say it has long maintained an iron grip over some of Mexico’s poorest states — one that goes beyond what children are taught, and extends to lengthy strikes, disruptive protests and violent clashes.
De Córdoba also writes, Showalter summarizes,
that the teachers go on strike for so long it amounts to an effective school year, depriving students of any education at all. They are massively overpaid, too, and strike because they want more. Like true commissars, they penalize any teachers who resist their efforts to strike or indoctrinate, with lost privileges, loans, job changes, and promotions. They collude with leftist guerrilla groups aiming to overthrow the government. And they steal like thieves — forcing the government to shovel cash into their left-wing projects. They scream about “privatization’” and any effort to set school standards. They also abuse any parents who resist. Instead of learning to add or subtract, the students are forced to don black balaclavas and reenact the Marxist Chiapas [Zapatista uprising of 25] years ago. And these leftists treat their jobs as valuable sinecures, allowing their ignorant offspring to inherit them like cash cows, never mind the students who will have to endure such incompetent teachers.
In other words, they are the perfect model of the modern Marxist criminal.
Showalter claims that Central America’s miseducation system is even worse. This helps explain why Hispanic immigrants — who constitute upwards of 40 percent of all immigrants and a vast majority of illegal aliens — vote Democrat by 70- to 90-percent margins upon naturalization (and sometimes even before). It also explains why Democrats just love immigration, even if they don’t love immigrants themselves, which is why they want them in our nation but not their neighborhood.
Examining this Mexican Marxism’s roots, Showalter writes that in “the wake of the Spanish civil war, rabid leftists fled the country and first landed in Puerto Rico. Some stayed, but Mexico extended to them the entire educational establishment at the university level, and from there, they spread into the school system, to the earliest levels. They converted what had been education to Marxist indoctrination, and in the absence of any other education, it was all the children of these countries ever learned.”
While this no doubt must have had a devastating effect, hard-core Mexican leftism actually predates the Spanish Civil War (1936 and 1939). In fact, a vicious, anti-Christian Mexican regime that took power in the 1920s under President Plutarco Calles would often imprison people “for wearing religious items, saying ‘Adios’ in public (which literally means ‘with God’), or even questioning the laws. Public worship was a crime punishable by hanging or firing squad,” as The Catholic Gene relates.
This led to the uprising of faithful peasants known as Cristero War, which claimed 90,000 lives and was movingly and accurately portrayed in the spectacular 2012 film For Greater Glory (trailer below).
As to Mexican leftism, it not only didn’t start just when the Spanish Civil War ended; it also can’t be blamed entirely on formal (mis)education. (This is true of leftism everywhere.) Today, the media and entertainment, especially, play a huge role, as popular culture shapes popular thinking. These entities also influence the degree of virtue in the people — and virtue, or lack thereof, is what really informs about a society’s fate and fatal mistakes.
This is why the Founding Fathers — part of America’s real greatest generation — so frequently stressed virtue. And here’s one short example of what happens when it’s lacking. British statesman Winston Churchill correctly called socialism the “gospel of envy,” and envy is a Deadly Sin. Sin characterizes vice-ridden people, who merely exhibit man’s default; that is, what fallen man naturally falls into unless he strives for virtue. Thus, it’s no surprise that America’s descent into decadence is accompanied by an embrace of socialism. (Read more on this here.)
Importing ready-made socialists just exacerbates this problem, of course, and it’s not only Latin Americans. Given the leftism of Western Europe — and that, really, most all today’s immigrant groups are to the “left” of Middle America — it’s hard to find newcomers who actually do “enrich” our country, as the immigrationist selling point goes.
This is why we’d be best served today by prioritizing exports over imports — with people being no exception.
Image: cbies via iStock / Getty Images Plus
