You don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it.

Social awareness is de rigeur in classrooms. The need to make what they learn be all-inclusive (or at least appear to be) may have undermined education because it grew to become a new ideology merely replacing the old one.

Who knew what fires could be started by "intellectual progress?"