Indoctrination, Not Education: Rampant Radicalism in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

Par for the Course(s)

    With few exceptions, GSEIS’ academic offerings indoctrinate students into one or both of the two major GSEIS agendas: the mania for racial diversity or the mania for politicized teaching. 

    The Fiat Lux Education seminar, “Mapping Inequality in Los Angeles: Faces, Places and Spaces” follows this line, covering topics which include “educational achievement; literacy; inequalities in race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and age; disparities in access to health care systems and healthy lifestyle choices; well-being and self-actualization; and neighborhood and community participation and support.”[i]

    Education C125/C207, “Politics of Education” offers a hearty endorsement of the expanding “Political dimensions of education institutions as organizations,” particularly through the course’s “focus on Freirean pedagogy.”[ii]  Unsurprisingly, the professor is Carlos Alberto Torres, head of UCLA’s Paolo Freire Institute, which is dedicated to exalting the memory and expanding the influence of the late education-as-politics theorist.

    The course description of Education 98T, “Urban College Access: Critical Examination of Policies and Interventions,”[iii] bemoans “Urban underrepresented students” who are “one of the least represented groups in higher education and face innumerable structural and individual barriers in gaining access to college.”  Of course, the “Urban underrepresented” group includes the euphemistically-termed “undocumented” student, who certainly does face innumerable structural barriers, chief among, the fact that they’re not here legally. 

    Hitting the trifecta of ethnic tribalism are Education M102,[iv] 253B[v] and 253G, respectively, “Mexican Americans and Schools,” “African Education” and “The Asian American and Education.”[vi]  These courses, by their very existence, carry the message that there are separate ways of learning for separate ethnicities. 

    In particular, Professor Daniel Solorzano’s “Mexican Americans” course does nothing to disguise its status as a forum for a separatist agenda; the course description warns it will present an “Examination of how historical, social, political, and economic forces impact Chicana/Chicano educational experience,” with particular emphasis on “disentangling effects of race, gender, class, and immigrant status on Chicana/Chicano educational attainment and achievement.”  As with Education 98T above, “immigrant status,” particularly illegal immigrant status, is presented not as a legal issue, only a pernicious ‘entanglement’ that the GSEIS academic agenda aims to make irrelevant to the field of education.

    Tying together the concerns of all the “underrepresented” groups which GSEIS works so diligently to separate is the omnibus Education 130C course titled “Race, Class and Education Inequality in the U.S.”[vii]  It offers a “Critical look at some current issues and policy debates in education, including debate over school reform, bilingual education, and affirmative action.”  This course might be arguably necessary if the racial drumbeat of individual courses on each of these groups didn’t already suffice to communicate the GSEIS agenda of ‘all race, all the time.’ 

    While a small sibling to the Education Department, Information Studies does not stint in its focus on diversity (read: race) issues.  Information Studies 227, “Information Services in Cultural Diverse Communities”[viii] expands the IS argument that despite all common sense, information is a partisan and political issue.  As such, the class promises, students will be given help in “Understanding [the] role of information institutions in promoting cultural diversity and preserving ethnic heritage.”  Not studying, not observing – “promoting.”