Submitted to a Candid World

Time for a break from the election!! Also, [bpsdb]

I’ve often had the chance to laugh at, ridicule, and criticize Conservapedia: so often, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that the site is, tragically, much more than a near-parody of internet conservatism.  In fact, Conservapedia is affirmatively dangerous. Founder Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly, bills himself as a homeschooling organizer and tutor to high schoolers, which is fine in the abstract. I entertain the belief, until very firmly rebutted, that even my fiercest ideological opponents are, at heart, good people who just want to do their best by their fellow man. So in the abstract, I can believe that, when it comes to teaching the next generation of American minds, Andy drops his bigoted, hateful, racist, sexist, neo-crusader rhetoric and actually does his best to teach kids right. As it turns out, this presumption of good faith is not deserved. In practice, Andy is much, much worse than you’d imagine him.

Since Conservapedia’s founding, Andy has sought to “harness the power of Conservapedia” and utilize it as a way of disseminating homeschooling materials, partially for students he knows in person, and partially for web registrants.¹ This split implementation allows us a chance to observe the inner workings of his classes, insofar as the material is online, and the verdict has been, until this point, fairly tame.  Though few of his courses have ever really taken off, those that have (World History & American Government) were, apart from a noticeable theo-conservative bent, historically inoffensive and moderate enough.

The “American History” lectures, and their implementation (which have seen the largest “enrollment” from online users yet - allegedly, 56), change all that.

Standards

First, and most visibly, the class has shockingly low standards, fostered by Andy’s open disregard for any modicum of academic integrity, and disregard for the world beyond his narrow ideology. While Andy bills his American History class as preparation for the Advanced Placement exam, he has never sought accreditation, nor does he intend to because, in his mind, requiring educators to be accredited is censorship foisted upon us by overpaid liberals. Seriously. Though it’s the least of his problems, caveat emptor.

Aside from misleading students about the value of the return on the time they’re investing in the course, standardless education has a way of “trickling down.” In assessing student progress, Andy provides no feedback and, unsurprisingly, awards every ideologically compliant student with grades in the 95-100% range… even for truly abyssmal, barely-comprehensible work (questions).² I took an AP American History class. This isn’t anything like it. Utterly absent is any semblance of an attempt at stimulating critical thinking, or anything above mindless regurgitation of information.³ The best that can be said of Andy’s course, then, is that it’s a waste of time.

Sexism

It’s downhill from there, though. Andy’s course has a way of reinforcing sexist stereotypes. It started with a fairly innocuous “code of chivalry” for those students taking the class in-person. Consider it a borderline antifeminist way of saying “play nice.” Meh. Not so interesting. What ought to be worrisome, though, is the “midterm exam,” a 20 minute affair (talk about a standards problem), featuring 33 questions for boys… and 28 questions for girls.

It goes without saying that “separate but unequal” midterm exams create a sexist double-standard and subtly reinforce invidious stereotypes about women in academia (”women aren’t as smart as men,” etc.), lies propagated by Andy’s mother, and now instilled into the next generation as self-fulfilling prophecies. Andy’s defense - that separate testing is a measure aimed at defusing competition - is no answer. Slipshod academic standards is one thing; toying with the self-image of young women is something else entirely. By teaching young women to limit their potential, Andy’s “education” begins to verge on child abuse.

Heinous in theory, this sexist practice became, yesterday, painful in fact. One of his female students rightly had the courage to stand up for equality in education, and for her fellow students:

I am completely against structuring the test so that boys have a different test than girls. Healthy competition is good, Mr. Schlafly. With all due respect, it actually gives the student more incentive to do well on the test and study harder. And the harder they study, the more they will learn. Changing the test also eliminates the student’s right to be proud….

A minor uprising that Andy momentarily validated before brushing it aside…

Thanks for your enlightening comment. I’m a big supporter of competition and its powerful benefits. But we have plenty of that within the subgroups of boys and girls. It adds nothing, and actually detracts a great deal, to add competition ”between” boys and girls

Eliciting a painful concession:

Well, you’re the teacher, you make the decisions; I will submit.

Submit. In Andy’s America, women learn to follow that rule early on. In this anecdote alone, Andy Schlafly’s class crosses the line from “innocuously worthless” to “affirmatively psychologically damaging.” If there were, at law, such a claim as “educational malpractice,” Andy’s homeschooling class, by reinforcing notions of inferiority and supplementing them with a bad education, would present the paradigmatic example. This man should not be trusted with children. Not his own, much less someone else’s.

Brainwashing

Unfortunately for us, cultivating sexism and misrepresenting the value of his “education” is nowhere near rock-bottom for Andy. While none of his previous Conservapedia-hosted “courses” could wholly escape the bias and conservative propaganda latent in the site, Andy’s American History course recently set a new record for indoctrination in education by attempting to equate the oppressive effects of slavery with the “harm” presented by gay rights activism in America. Andy asks his students to draw the parallel in a prompt from homework four:

H5: How did slavery begin to affect other constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech? Do you see an issue today causing a similar infringement of the right to free speech?

Unless one understands the finer points of far-right, hyper-conservative, theocratic ideology, the implied linkage between slavery and gay rights is easy to miss. I’ll fill in: the argument is that abolitionists first, and Union soldiers second, were persecuted and died for the ideal of freedom. True enough; here comes the leap, though. Today, Schlafly and company argue that modern Christians are “censored” by liberals pushing beliefs like “political correctness,” “compassion,” and “tolerance,” which teach that fundamentalist hatred of gays is wrong. Schlafly takes this disagreement and push-back on ideas and spins it as censorship (where’s the state action?) before proceeding to equate it to the martyrdom of American abolitionists. Of course, under this logic, Fred Phelps is a regular Frederick Douglass.⁴

Thus the homework “prompt” suggests the answer, but buries it. The implication is pretty tenuous and subtle… but not so subtle that Andy’s students didn’t pick up on it:

Elijah Lovejoy was an antislavery publisher who spoke out freely against slavery and was murdered by a proslavery mob. He died for his freedom of speech and became the first white martyr for abolitionist movement…. Christians are persecuted for being outright against gay marriage, abortion, and many other ‘touchy’ subjects. It’s our rite [sic] to say what we believe, but that won’t stop people from calling us judgmental, hypocritical, and uptight. It also won’t keep people from taking it to an even physical level. Although we have said ‘freedom of speech’ by our constitutional rites, it really isn’t free.

The parroting of this Anne Coulter-esque talking point is not an isolated incident. The argument is echoed by two, three, four, and five students as of publication, a uniformity that clearly suggests that this is what Andy is teaching his kids.  He’s attempting to weaponize a perverted misunderstanding of history as a justification for homophobia… and he’s teaching it to kids.

Conclusion

The lesson of books like God’s Harvard is that, at a certain point, a compromise between education and indoctrination no longer becomes tenable, and for students to function in the real world, indoctrination has to go. But with every element of this program - its substandard instruction, its warped social values, and the perverted philosophy latent in its academic conclusions - this education will function to isolate and limit its victims. At best it perpetuates a failed, intellectually stunted ideology in the minds of intellectually stunted adherents. I’ve seen the products of this type of education, and it’s not pretty. He’s doing no favors for his students. But then again, for the girls - at least educationally - that might be half of the point.

This will only end in tears.

1. Nota bene: For the purpose of this post, I assume that the “courses” take place exactly as Andy imagines it: new users sign up, take the classes, learn, and leave. Of course there’s the possibility that there’s massive “sockpuppet” inflitration, making Andy’s “classes” little more than an exercise of talking to a wall… a wall that tries to subvert you at every step… the possibility that the classes are dominated by parodists et al is remote and, in any event, would not affect Andy’s mens rea or culpability in what he believes is a splendid indoctrination scheme. In any event, circumstantial evidence from RationalWiki, the leading internet platform for Conservapedia-watching, suggests that “sockpuppet inflitration” is small or nonexistent. [↩]
2. Students’ answers are public-domain information reprinted in a public website; no legitimate expectation of privacy can be had, and commentary on the same is a risk assumed by students in being duped into participating in, and being evaluated based upon, an open wikiproject. [↩]
3. I do not intend to insult the students. I lay the blame for poor learning wholly at the feet of Andy Schlafly, for his poor instruction and lack of guidance. [↩]
4. I won’t further dignify the argument with a rebuttal. [↩]