Why the Left cherishes “educators”

Yesterday, I wrote about the peculiar socialist inversion that sees doctors — who study for years, work insane hours, and hold our lives in their hands — routinely denigrated, while teachers — who study for a short time, work the world’s shortest hours, and don’t hold anybody’s lives in their hands — celebrated as society’s most worth martyrs.  My conclusion was that

Thinking about it, of course, this socialist inversion makes perfect sense.  Teachers produce the next generation of socialists; doctors cost money by saving the lives of old socialists who no longer contribute to the commune.  The relative values assigned these jobs in a socialist society has nothing to do with their contributions to the individual and everything to do with their contributions to the state.

In his column today, Dennis Prager confirms my point about the central role teachers play in a socialist culture.  He wrote a post about the way in which conservative parents are surprised that their children come home from college spouting hard-core Leftist ideology.  They shouldn’t be surprised, he says:

Virtually every institution outside the home has been captured by people with left-wing values: specifically the media (television and movies) and the schools (first the universities and now high schools). In the 1960s and 1970s, American parents were blindsided. Their children came home from college with values that thoroughly opposed those of their parents.

And the parents had no idea how to counteract this. Moreover, even if they did, after just one year at the left-wing seminaries we still call universities, it was often too late. As one of the founders of progressivism in America, Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University before he became president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Eighty-eight years later, the president of Dartmouth College, James O. Freedman, echoed Wilson: “The purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values,” he told the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College.

Even now, too few conservative parents realize how radical — and effective — the university agenda is. They are proud that their child has been accepted to whatever college he or she attends, not realizing that, values-wise, they are actually playing Russian roulette, except that only one chamber in the gun is not loaded with a bullet.

Sick or dead citizens are much less important than indoctrinated citizens.  Leftists have always understood that, and conservatives have been too slow, too stubborn, and perhaps to honorable to recognize this reality.