Classic EssaysWilliam Pierce

The School Problem

by Dr. William L. Pierce

THE EDUCATION OF America’s children is a matter of continuing controversy and anguish for many Americans, including a majority of White parents with school-age children. Americans are unhappy about the level of violence in the schools, which keeps going up, and the educational standards, which keep going down. Parents are increasingly concerned that their children are not safe in public schools, and just about every responsible White adult is concerned about the failure of America’s schools to educate young Americans well enough to keep America technologically and economically competitive in an increasingly competitive world.

Now the politicians are arguing with one another about how to solve these problems — well, not so much about how to solve the problems as how to convince the public that they care, that they feel the parents’ pain, and that they want to help. Bill Clinton wants to demonstrate that he cares by spending $25 billion to build “better” schools and add more facilities. His proposal gives him an opportunity to attack Republicans who don’t support his spending proposal as being uncaring.

For their part, the Republicans are enthusiastic about various schemes which permit students to opt out of the public schools and attend either private schools or so-called charter schools, which are an increasingly trendy variation of the traditional public schools. These Republican programs generally involve tax credits, vouchers, or other financial assistance to encourage private schools or charter schools and make it feasible for more parents to choose them for their children. Mr. Clinton and many Democrats attack the Republican programs as providing more help to middle-class Whites than to working-class Blacks and as undermining the viability of the public schools by draining off the brighter and better motivated White students, leaving only the non-White and the less-educable White students in the public schools.

Actually, the question of what to do about America’s school problem becomes very complicated if one looks at it from the viewpoint of a reformer and considers the pros and cons of the various programs that are being debated today. In this discussion I will simplify the question quite a bit by looking at it from the viewpoint of a revolutionary rather than a reformer. Despite this simplification, perhaps you will find some new and worthwhile insights in what I have to say. And the first thing I will say is that the question of educational quality in America is much more than a question of economics, national prestige, or children’s safety. It is a question of national survival — and much more important, of racial survival. Our failure to understand this last point fully and to make it the basis of America’s educational policy is at the root of our problems today.

To get back to basics, let’s remind ourselves of the three fundamental purposes schools have had in traditional European societies. 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.

So, cultural continuity, the teaching of techniques, and building character: those are the three fundamental purposes of our schools — or rather those ought to be the purposes of our schools.

Unfortunately, the American educational system today completely neglects the third purpose and does rather poorly with the first two. Take cultural continuity, for example. How can the schools serve this purpose well when they cannot even answer the question as to whose culture is to be passed on to the next generation? In a society trying very hard to be multicultural the question is really not Politically Correct.

I must say that some of the new charter schools set up for Black students are serving this purpose much better than any White schools. Some of these Black charter schools are thoroughly Afrocentric, and they at least give the young Blacks a strong sense of identity, if nothing else. In the April 27, 1998, issue of U.S. News & World Report there’s a picture of a classroom in one of these schools, the Black children all dressed in traditional African garb and pledging their allegiance to their fellow Africans with a clenched-fist salute. If a White school tried with equal fervor to instill a sense of European racial consciousness in its students, the Clinton government would be all over the school with subpoenas in a minute. But really, only a school which is racially and culturally homogeneous can serve the purpose of insuring cultural continuity. Furthermore, there must be the conscious will to serve that purpose, along with pride and a lack of fear.

The current multicultural curriculum of America’s mainstream public schools, which treats all cultures as equally relevant and tries to teach every student a little of each, results in all of the students learning virtually nothing, since they cannot relate strongly to what is being taught, and only superficialities are covered.

Teaching techniques is probably the thing that American schools do best, but even there we’ve slipped badly. It used to be that we weren’t afraid to recognize the differences in people. 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 for girls, and that girls needed home economics courses more than boys did. Today, it is not Politically Correct to recognize such differences; everyone must fit the same egalitarian mold. Consequently, we don’t teach anything as well as we used to.

I’ve brushed on two of the causes of the declining quality of America’s schools: multiculturalism and egalitarianism. There’s more to both of these causes. Multiculturalism is not just an educational theory which assigns equal value and relevance to every culture and thereby makes it impossible to teach any culture effectively; it also is a policy of mixing people of all cultures and races together for the sake of “diversity.” This is by far the single greatest cause of violence and disorder in our schools. While the politicians launch one program after another to keep guns, drugs, and gangs out of the schools, they will not face the real problem of which guns, drugs, and gangs are only symptoms, because it is a racial problem, and they are more terrified of being accused of being racists since they feel this will threaten their careers.

When America’s schools were racially segregated, the White schools had no problem with drugs, gangs, or schoolyard shootings. When Blacks, with their much lower capacity for self-control and their traditionally more disorderly and violent behavior, were integrated into our schools they brought the problems of their own community with them. Now even White kids are shooting each other in the schools, just as they are now using drugs and adopting other elements of non-White behavior.

I’ll say that again because most White people have been so “sensitized,” so brainwashed, by the controlled media that they have a hard time dealing with racial realities. They know that Blacks, mestizos, and other non-Whites are a big part of what’s wrong with America’s schools, and when they look for safer schools for their children they instinctively look for Whiter schools — but they’re afraid even to admit that to themselves.

So I’ll say it: Behavior patterns are different for young Blacks than they are for young Whites, and in part these differences in behavior are rooted in heredity, so they don’t disappear when Blacks and Whites are mixed together. Blacks may change their behavior slightly toward White norms, but White behavior also shifts toward Black norms, and the result is more violent, more dangerous, and less orderly schools. That’s a fact of life, and White parents need to recognize it and deal with it without fear.

Black students also are substantially less capable, on the average, than White students at dealing with traditional school curricula. This has been a source of great anguish to the egalitarians, and they have tried to cope with it by changing the curricula and lowering the standards. These changes haven’t brought Black performance much closer to White performance, but they have lowered the performance for Whites. This again is something that most White parents understand but are afraid to admit.

There’s one other important cause for what’s wrong with America’s schools, and it’s not related directly to race. This other cause is the growing influence of feminism on educational theory and practice. I believe we all understand that men and women have different ways of seeing the world and dealing with it. Evolution has made the sexes different. For millions of years men have had the task of hunting and killing the supper, bringing it home, and driving the wolf from the door. The woman has had the task of making the cave into a home and taking care of the children. The traditional difference in responsibilities of the two sexes are the results of real differences: differences in the way man and women see things and the way they do things.

And ever since we have had schools, men have made the decisions about how the schools were to be organized and how the children in them were to be taught. Even though women were teachers, educational policy was made by men — until this century, that is: really, until after the Second World War. For the past 50 years or so, however, feminists have been gaining influence in the educational establishment and changing educational policy to suit themselves. To the feminists, male educational policy is bad policy. To many of them, in fact, it is bad simply because it is male, and they have set out to change that. They have been working to bring educational policy into line with the female way of looking at the world and dealing with it.

To feminists, discipline and competition are male and bad. They should be replaced by permissiveness and cooperation, which are female. Strict rules are not good, nor are absolutes of any sort. Students should be permitted to study whatever they want to study rather than being required to learn a certain standard body of facts and techniques decided on by educators. When problems or difficulties arise, they should be dealt with by talking, not by the application of rules. Giving students numerical grades is bad, because it encourages competition and it hurts the self-esteem of those who don’t do well. Being able to talk about something is more important than being able to analyze it. Analysis is too masculine.

Now, this feminist view of things is a bit over-simplified. Not all women are anti-analytical or opposed to discipline. But the feminists have seized on the very real differences between the male and the female approaches to education, they have magnified these differences, and they have worked hard and effectively to substitute their approach for the traditional male approach. To a large extent the feminists have succeeded in this, and that helps to explain why America’s schools are what they are today.

The multiculturalism of the schools prevents their passing on our European culture and identity to the next generation. Egalitarianism and feminist influence have wrecked our standards, undermined discipline, and corrupted our curricula, so that we do not even teach techniques well. And feminism, in particular, has totally nullified the schools’ traditional task of character building.

In view of these things, Bill Clinton’s program of spending $25 billion for new schools and facilities is worthless: new school buildings are nice, but they have very little to do with the quality of education. Good education doesn’t need a lot of glass and marble, a new gymnasium, or even a lot of computers. It needs good teachers and a good learning environment and discipline and a sound educational policy. One can learn as well in an unused warehouse or a tent as in the shiniest new multimillion-dollar school, if one has a disciplined environment, a good curriculum, and good teachers.

The Republican programs which aim at letting parents send their children to charter schools or private schools have the advantage of providing a safer environment — and in some cases also a more disciplined environment with higher standards and better curricula — than the public schools, but they all dodge the important questions. We ought to fix what’s wrong with our public schools instead of simply abandoning them. But of course, we can’t fix the public schools until we are willing to face the real issues and deal with them. And we will not face these real issues and deal with them short of a total revolution — because it is clear, I believe, that the majority of the White population have no stomach for it. They have been so strongly conditioned by the controlled mass media — so brainwashed — that they simply are no longer capable of challenging the Politically Correct policies on race, equality, and feminism. They are not only confused about these issues, they are terrified of them. Their fear makes cowards of them, and it makes them dishonest.

I’ll give you an example of this by citing something which happened in one of our state universities recently. Our colleges and universities are experiencing exactly the same problems which have wrecked our public schools, and the causes of the problems are the same. Last month, at Southwest Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas, three Black football players were arrested for raping two White female students in one of the dormitories. This sort of thing happens at our multicultural universities all too often these days, and the usual reaction of the media and the university administration is to hush it up. Their excuse for this is that they don’t want to increase “racial tensions.” In the Southwest Texas State University rapes there was a slip-up, however, and somehow the mug shots of the accused Black rapists were printed in the newspaper. The local NAACP was offended by this revelation and issued a statement to the effect that the White girls who were raped had brought it on themselves. The NAACP then raised the usual smokescreen with a lot of blather about “racist” policies against Blacks at the university.

Members of my organization, the National Alliance, who are students at the neighboring University of Texas campus in Austin, responded to this outrageous NAACP statement by distributing an e-mail message to students and faculty at Southwest Texas State University in which the attitude of the NAACP was condemned and in which it was pointed out that the rape of White women by Blacks is a growing problem on our campuses. This started a growing campus discussion about the rapes, about the NAACP’s blaming the girls instead of the rapists, about our response to the NAACP, and about race generally. Black groups organized a public demonstration on the campus to protest what they saw as an unfriendly atmosphere for Blacks, and many White liberals attended the demonstration. The university administration and the local media could only wring their hands, reaffirm their full commitment to Political Correctness, and wish the “racial tensions” would go away.

In healthier times the whole issue would have been settled very quickly with the lynching of three Black rapists. Of course, in healthier times there would have been no rapes, because there would have been no Black football players on the campus. It’s clear that we have a long way to go to restore health to our schools.

* * *

Source: Free Speech magazine, June 1998, Volume IV, Number 6

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George Wright
George Wright
16 April, 2018 7:02 pm

Dr. Pierce’s remarks are more relevant today than when he originally penned these remarks. The part about common language, culture, history, etc. is especially noteworthy.

Paul
Paul
5 March, 2020 11:18 am

Some of America’s finest young men are learning , that college is not just football. At FLorida State and VPI two of the prospective football heroes were released from their conditional scholarships for misbehavior. One struck an insubordinate, white, senior class(woman) in a Tallahassee bar. Integration is tested in the crucible of these venues when alcohol and testosterone become a volatile compound . This gentleman failed . The younger brother of Michael Vick also found himself in disgrace with his profligate behavior associated also with white, promiscuous female “students”.. He was likewise cashiered . It is apparent that , the NCAA has trumped its affiliate NAACP! But to say America has a school problem is an understatement. Ask any poor, conscientious teacher .

Diane Wilcox
Diane Wilcox
6 April, 2021 10:32 pm

We should go back to segregation. We should dump the multicultural nightmare and fire all man-hating feminists, let them rot in their misery.

William W Williams * National Alliance Chairman
William W Williams * National Alliance Chairman
Reply to  Diane Wilcox
7 April, 2021 9:50 am

Racial segregation or “separate but equal” is an unacceptable half-measure, Diane. It failed here in America as did its counterpart Apartheid in South Africa. We do not need to have non-Whites in close proximity to us to exploit and do our domestic chores. We do them ourselves. Our National Alliance, the sponsor of this online magazine, advocates strict geographic separation of the races with our own White living space, free of non-White and non-White influence. See here: https://natall.com/about/what-is-the-national-alliance/ We address the “school problem” from a White separatist perspective: A New Educational System A new educational system must possess a clear understanding of purpose. A proper educational system serves three purposes: it passes a people’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual heritage from generation to generation; it teaches skills and techniques; and it guides… Read more »