I saw this linked on Steve Sailer’s site and thought it worth a different take. Steve tends to focus on the race angle, which is not unreasonable. For as long as I have been alive, public policy types have been harping about the gap between blacks and whites. Sometimes they take a break and yammer on about the lack of females in science, technology and math fields. They always start with the same premise. The pale penis people have rigged the game and are surreptitiously keeping the black man down and the chicks out of the science lab. For some reason we have let the Jews and Orientals rise to the top, but the beautiful people don’t care about them so they don’t count. In fact they hate Orientals, which is why they are dropping the private school entrance exams in NYC. Too many Chinese kids are winning places in the schools. We have spent tens of billions on every education fad imaginable and the numbers have not budged. In fact, they may have declined.

This first bit from the Teach For America article:

The phrase closing the achievement gap is the cornerstone of TFA’s general philosophy, public-relations messaging, and training sessions. As a member of the 2011 corps, I was told immediately and often that 1) the achievement gap is a pervasive example of inequality in America, and 2) it is our personal responsibility to close the achievement gap within our classrooms, which are microcosms of America’s educational inequality.

Right out of the shoot, you pick up the religious zeal. This is the sort of thing the armies use to bind soldiers to their unit and to their cause. A soldier will die for his buddy and he may die for a cause. He’s not risking his neck for the his king or his flag or some abstract principle. Generals have known this for 5,000 years. TFA is clearly trying to build the same esprit de corps amongst their recruits. Making the mission personal and focused is what well run armies do best. The US military is the best ever at this approach. They don’t want guys who follow orders. They want their men to achieve their goal within the framework of the mission. It is what allows the private to go to his commanding officer with an idea to get the job done better than originally planned.

But, it goes beyond just morale building:

Although TFA seminars and presentations never explicitly accuse educators of either, the implication is strong within the program’s very structure: recruit high-achieving college students, train them over the summer, and send them into America’s lowest-performing schools to make things right. The subtext is clear: Only you can fix what others have screwed up.

This where it starts to get a bit creepy. Youth organization in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany had the same premise. The older folks had made a mess of things. The next generation, the young people, they can start fresh as the new model citizen in the new model army. Ladling on a healthy dollop of “trench socialism” gets you an individual who has given over themselves entirely to the cause. It’s not hard to see how this can get out of hand quickly. Today TFA is helping little black kids read. Tomorrow they are throwing them into ovens because they lower the SAT average.

If you think I’m going too far, consider this bit:

In the weeks between accepting the offer to join TFA and the start of our training, I was told by e-mail that “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset,” I was reminded, “is at the core of our Teach For America—Metro Atlanta Community.”

Anyone familiar with 20th century European history can see what the TFA is doing. It is not quite a cult, but it has the trappings of a mass movement as described by Eric Hoffer. The people running TFA are trying to build something more than a teacher training program. They want an army of true believers infiltrating the schools. Presumably these young fanatics will one day take up positions of authority and run the education system. The fact that every totalitarian movement aims first at the youth is not coincidence here. The political cult we call liberalism in America  is the heir to the secular mass movements of the prior century, communism and fascism. Or, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, the two religions at war over Europe.

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