Two recent books warn of the influence of Marxism in American education—James Lindsay’s The Marxification of Education and Heather Mac Donald’s When Race Trumps Merit. Lindsay’s book is heavy on theory; Mac Donald is, for the most part, content to let others explore philosophy—her task is to demonstrate the absurd consequences of Marx-inspired Critical Race Theory (CRT) in virtually every area of public life, including, and perhaps most importantly, education. Among other things, she draws upon her considerable expertise as a fine arts critic to expose the incursion of CRT into the concert hall and the art museum. Those considerations, as she would readily admit, only scratch the surface of the extent to which Marx, under the cloak of CRT, is promoted in schools across the country.

Marx, Education, and CRT

James Lindsay, PhD (Math, University of Tennessee) is president and founder of New Discourses. He does not fit easily into any category other than his own, and the policy positions he occasionally promotes don’t always seem to be the best responses to his own concerns. For example, he condemns the incursion of Marxism into public education but does not encourage greater choice for students and parents. He defines school choice as “necessary but insufficient” but seems to have far more objections to choice than reasons for it, even warning of “school choice traps.” He describes himself as a “left-wing academic” but feels the Left has driven itself off a cliff. His organization offers “consulting” to entities afflicted with “woke-ism” but a description of his consulting services employs as much jargon as that which he criticizes, just a different species of jargon. In general, his strength seems to be in his ability to penetrate and expose theory, and it is this iconoclasm that conservatives seem to appreciate.

To be sure, he is an independent thinker: Lindsay, in collaboration with two colleagues, drew national recognition utilizing the “Grievance Studies Affair” in which the group submitted twenty “hoax articles” to various academic journals to show the absurdity and intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary gender theory, queer theory, critical theory and the like. One of their notable successes was “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” It was published. Also published, to the benefit of dog owners everywhere, was “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.” Several other papers were either published or were under review before Lindsay and his co-conspirators revealed the charade. In addition to Lindsay’s book under review, he has also written even closer to Mac Donald’s concerns: His additional books include Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (2020), and Race Marxism: The Truth about Critical Race Theory and Praxis (2022).

Lindsay’s book, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education, is about the most important educational philosopher you’ve never heard of, Brazilian Paolo Freire (1921–97). Freire was raised in dire poverty, and at considerable personal sacrifice, was an advocate for the destitute in South America. Unlike other neo-Marxists, especially those in academia, he did not mind getting his hands dirty on behalf of the disadvantaged. For example, he spent years developing literacy methods for Brazilian peasants.

In The Marxification of Education, Lindsay discusses Freire’s iconic book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Lindsay accuses Freire of subordinating the traditional goals of education—literacy, numeracy, moral formation—to the urgent demand to free the oppressed from the oppressor. Freire introduces new incomprehensible jargon that includes “Codification,” “Decodification,” and “Conscientization.” Freire’s goal is pursued in successive steps: he instructs teachers to provoke students to the injustice in their lives, and even more, in the lives of those less fortunate than themselves.

This is an emotionally charged, psychological exercise, the consequence of which is to lead students into zealous and indignant fervor. This is what Marx blithely called “sharpening the contradiction.” Lindsay reports that in a case study in Nigeria, teachers were so effective that students became “emotional wrecks.” According to Freire, and employing a well-worn false dichotomy, this will involve abandoning what he calls the “Banking Model” of education, in which teachers “deposit” information into passive students rather than engaging them in the classroom. Instead, teachers should follow a “Dialogic Model” in which faculty and students together supposedly discover knowledge—if not “truth.” Freire insists that students will eventually see the need to study and equip themselves academically and intellectually to mount a crusade which necessarily means not only social improvement but social upheaval.

Lindsay argues that students never reach this visionary stage. Because of the preoccupation with revolution, the consequence is most evident in the distressing contemporary rankings of American students. Lindsay explains that Freire creates “Critical Pedagogy,” which the author notes might be attractive to educational theorists, though perhaps not so much to overworked teachers. Critical Pedagogy is euphemistic jargon that refers to teachers encouraging students to use a Marxist framework to view the world; that is, pupils should try to identify oppressors and the oppressed across the disciplines. Freire’s antecedents, as he himself sees them, are not solely drawn from educational thought; rather, Freire’s pantheon includes not only Marx and Lenin, but also Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, and Hegel. 

DEI: Denigration, Equity, and Exclusiveness

Heather Mac Donald describes herself as a “secular conservative,” but her latest book may well lead the reader to prayer. She is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, well known to those who read her essays in City Journal and elsewhere. Her writing is unswervingly well-informed, intelligently written, and incisive. Where Race Trumps Merit has already been reviewed on this website, so the attention here focuses on the connection with the classroom.

When Race Trumps Merit expertly and exhaustively exposes a destructive ideology. Mac Donald describes an assault on excellence, a celebration of mediocrity, and an orgy of absurdity. In a book full of disturbing narratives, it may be that her most unsettling observation is, “We are in uncharted waters.”

About her book, Mac Donald says, “I explain how the foolish pursuit of undermining meritocracy in favor of equal outcome is sacrificing excellence, destroying beauty, and threatening lives.” She also notes that since 2020, every American institution has been condemned for its systemic racism. The most worrisome may be in education since students are more vulnerable than adults, and who are confidently told by strangers that they are racists. Mac Donald’s book is nothing if not timely: Since the Claudine Gay scandal at Harvard, the country is enjoying a quasi-free speech moment in which it is permissible to question anew diversity ideology. Schools are sensibly reintroducing standardized tests and some DEI positions are disappearing.

Many take as given that DEI is all about race.  Why, even the recent eclipse was racial—who would have thought?! But distress over race may be little more than a DEI stalking horse. As much as anything else, DEI is a revolt against tradition and authority and a grasp for power. This helps explain why DEI, as Mac Donald so ably demonstrates, is so destructive of established canons, religion, and aesthetics. DEI might be better translated Denigration, Equity, and Exclusion; that is to say, the abstraction, “Equity,” whatever that might mean, cannot be achieved without destroying cultural legacies. Considered as such, CRT may have its own covert logic. As Nietzsche warned, “Creators must also be destroyers.”

Some may find that Mac Donald spends too much time on the fine and performing arts, nine chapters, but that is not the case. What disturbs the author is not so much that kids are not attending a Puccini opera, but that the cultivation of real aesthetic sensibility is slipping away. If an individual has no appreciation of beauty, they will not recognize and resist vulgarity. I have long considered the elective Music Appreciation to be the most important undergraduate class I took. One of the most successful magnet schools in the country is devoted to the arts. It is a third to a half minority, many from the inner city, and is strong in math and science as well.

Dewey and Marx

It is not hard to draw a line from DEI delirium to the one who first re-purposed education for political change, so much so that some have wondered if John Dewey is fairly described as a closet Marxist. At the least, the parallels between Dewey’s ideas on education and the main currents of Marxism are striking. To be sure, it is well known that, compared with other intellectuals of his day, Dewey was embarrassingly slow to recognize the nature of the Soviet Union.

Neither Marx nor Dewey had any place for traditional religion as it was an obstacle to change; both were harsh critics of capitalism. Whereas Dewey tried to disguise his socialism, Freire is explicit in his use of Marx. Freire’s thought, moreover, blends Marx with Liberation Theology which gives his thought a religious veneer, thereby ostensibly side-stepping Marx’s (and Dewey’s) antipathy for religion. For Dewey, secular democratic socialism should command our devotion.

Both Freire and Dewey promote a “student-driven” environment, which exists in name only. Such a hypothetical classroom requires a certain temperament, adequate finances, cunning, time, energy, and a small class—a skill set and environment few teachers can offer. Even those “experimental classrooms” where this has been giddily introduced do not last—nor can they. At least Freire is candid about classroom management, Dewey is not.

All these ideas are hopelessly theoretical and when they don’t work, more ideas are introduced, adding abstraction to abstraction. Neither Marx nor Dewey were able or willing to recognize the seismic gap between their theory and practice. Dewey spent only two years in the classroom, in Oil Town, Pennsylvania, and, according to a biographer, when he left, the townspeople were “glad to see him go.”

To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, “These people live in a world that God never created.”

Lindsay blames errant educational philosophy for the condition of our middle and secondary schools. He could say more about Freire in Colleges of Education where he is venerated. The Brazilian is not hard to find: Chapman University, for example, boasts a “Paolo Freire Democratic Project” in its College of Educational Studies. Mac Donald focuses on the constitutional doctrine of “disparate impact” (Griggs v. Duke Power Co. [1971]), which established that if minorities are under-represented, they are victims of racism, no matter if there is intent to discriminate or not. Thus, today’s medical schools, law schools, engineering schools, art museums, concert halls, and much more—are all racist, never mind that Griggs no longer controls jurisprudence or legislation as it once did.

Neither author, unfortunately, offers meaningful solutions to the worrisome problems they describe. Mac Donald’s recommendations are surprisingly weak given the strength of her analysis; she suggests an organization of some kind where those professionals who protest might find refuge from “cancellation.” Lindsay says to “rid the classroom of Freire,” without providing clear guidance on how this might be done.

What both Lindsay and Mac Donald fail to address, or perhaps perceive, is that Marxism and DEI are not simply ideologies, they are ersatz religions. Although the central thrust of Freire and DEI is primarily nihilistic, spiritual longing abhors a vacuum. But unlike other religious traditions that require mercy and charity, the new Marxism is harsh, judgmental, and unforgiving. Wealthy prophets deliver “anti-racist” jeremiads. The chief virtue of this neo-religion is self-indulgence, as its adherents prove their conversion by groveling in pseudo-guilt and faux repentance. Confessions are no longer private but obnoxiously public and narcissistic. Original sin is indelible “whiteness,” but guilt is no longer individual; rather it is ambiguously “systemic.” But if “everyone is a racist,” as the doctrine goes, how can the blind lead the blind?

At some point, all of this is just silly and preposterous and does nothing to identify and address real racism that still exists all over the globe; to the contrary, we are rapidly losing ground in the pursuit of human dignity and equality. Let’s count on Lindsay, Mac Donald, and others to keep urging us forward.