Matthews, North Carolina, is a bedroom community about 12 miles southeast of Charlotte. Most people seem to choose Matthews for its relatively easy commute into the city; the perks of an urban setting without all the hassles. The Matthews town website pitches, “Historic charm, a bustling downtown, that small town feel.” It sounds idyllic. It sounds like an all-America town – not the kind of place you would expect middle school students to come home with an assignment titled, “How Should Wealth Be Divided?”
Not whether wealth should be divided, but how.
Granted, this is one assignment, by one teacher, in one school, in one district. But it is a small sample of what is going on in public school classrooms and exemplifies how indoctrination is the singular focus of public education at the expense of knowledge. It also highlights the lengths to which progressive teachers will go to advance a political agenda in the classroom.
The teacher who originally created the assignment is an admitted Socialist Democrat, which explains why the definition of capitalism provided to students was taken from an opinion piece in Teen Vogue:
Capitalism is defined as an economic system in which a country’s trade, industry, and profits are controlled by private companies, instead of by the people whose time and labor powers those companies. (Emphasis added).
The quotation was immediately followed by:
Capitalism takes the position that “greed is good,” which its supporters say is a positive thing – greed drives profits and profits drive innovation and product development, which means there are more choices available for those who can afford them. Its opponents say that capitalism is, by nature, exploitative, and leads to a brutally divided society that tramples the working class in favor of fattening the rich’s wallets. (Emphasis added).
Fair and balanced? Unbiased? Hardly. Indoctrination? By all means.
A graphic included with the quotation from the Teen Vogue article included the raised fist of the Occupy movement. The same raised, clenched fist that has long been symbolic of Communist and Marxist-inspired activists.
The author, Kim Kelly, is the Labor columnist at Teen Vogue. Her bio describes her as an anarchist based in New York City and an organizer with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC). The MACC is “…an anarchist organization…” whose goals include abolishing capitalism, advancing the anarchist movement, and building political and economic structures supportive of anarchist ideas.
Kim Kelly gained notoriety for tweeting support of Willem Van Spronsen, an Antifa member who was shot and killed by police in Tacoma, Washington, in 2019,after he attacked an ICE detention center, referring to him as a “heroic comrade.” The tweet ultimately got her fired from NPR.
Trevor Loudon, a conservative speaker, author, and fellow at the American Freedom Alliance, who has spent the majority of his career researching radical left, Marxist movements, referred to Teen Vogue as “…one of the most insidious communist propaganda outlets in the country.”
To support the teacher’s anti-Capitalist sentiments, the lesson included false and emotionally charged material: a photo of the Mathare slums in Kenya juxtaposed with a 35 million dollar Beverly Hills mansion (owned, ironically, by a citizen of Communist China); an image of a Palestinian child collecting rocks as an example of capitalism’s exploitation of child labor; Sweden as an example of successful socialism, despite the fact that Sweden is not a socialist nation.
Michael Munger, a Professor of Economics at Duke University and Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research, wrote, “I often participate in debates on capitalism vs. socialism, and students often give Sweden as an example of how socialism “works.” Well, yes, Sweden works, that’s true. But it works because it is one of the most capitalist nations in the world! It became capitalist after trying socialism, and reaching the (correct) conclusion that socialism just doesn’t work.”
The trending distaste for the American way of life and economic system is alarming. Public education, the most fertile of all soil for anti-American sentiment, is holding court with a new and malleable generation of young minds.
South Charlotte Middle School isn’t the first school to fill classrooms with teachers who heavily inject propaganda into lesson plans, alter facts, and cherry pick information to fit their agenda, nor will it be the last. The internet is full of examples of schools and teachers peddling bias, half-truths, and left-wing propaganda.
The end result is a new crop of indignant, America-hating, social justice warriors who will be sent off to public universities, where they will continue to consume a steady diet of leftist disinformation. They’ll be taught to shout down anyone with different beliefs, and then they’ll graduate primed to fundamentally change America. Most of them, however, won’t be able to explain why they want to fundamentally change America. They’ve just been told they should.
As they say, garbage in, garbage out.