Florida’s legislation barring classroom instruction on sexual and gender issues for kindergarten through third graders, the one dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by critics, is the latest victory for parents in the fight against woke schooling.
Parents are fighting back everywhere. They started 2022 with a landslide recall vote against three liberal school board members in, of all places, San Francisco. And they continue to marshal forces in the fight against childhood indoctrination.
Parents’ concerns go far beyond activist instruction on gender and sexual topics. For years, school curriculum has shifted toward an all-out assault on American ideals and Judeo-Christian principles. Critical race theory, for one, is not only designed to make students feel guilt over a racial past they did not cause, but also to peddle a fundamentally anti-American and antisemitic worldview. It teaches that white people — all white people — are inherently racist and privileged. It dismisses millennia of hate suffered by Jews. This antisemitism is furthered in textbooks by the glaring omission of the contributions Jews have made to America, rampant anti-Israel propaganda, and other not-so-subtle attacks on Jewish Americans.
The 1619 Project, which is proudly taught to children as young as elementary school, preaches a similar disdain. By centering U.S. history on slavery, it encourages children as young as elementary school to feel resentful toward their country. Establishment publishers are eagerly piling on. McGraw Hill’s 2019 American Democracy Now textbook makes the patently false claim that the U.S. Constitution “endorsed the unequal and discriminatory treatment of African Americans.”
But all this political indoctrination is backfiring on the Left. One pollster found that parents in both parties are “alarmed over anything that seems to be deterministic about race, such as telling children their skin color will shape their future.” They are also increasingly “uncomfortable with anything that feels like it is separating children by race” or religion.
It should surprise no one that this focus has come at the expense of actual education. For 13-year-old students, test scores in reading and math are declining for the first time in a half-century. Liberal-driven school closures are only partly to blame. Data show that the trend began before the pandemic and is likely to continue afterward.
It all begs the fundamental question: Should parents be in charge of the education of their children, or should that fall to activists and teachers unions?
Parents are answering. Some are pulling their children out of public schools — enrollment fell by an average of 2.6% across 41 states last fall. But most parents can’t afford private or homeschooling, so a major movement has been born. Parents of all political persuasions are organizing, voting, and urging their elected representatives to end the indoctrination.
For conservatives like me who have been fighting for our children for years, the stakes in November are high. While it may be tempting to dismiss wokeism as a temporary trend, even temporary trends can have lasting effects when they play out in the minds of our next generation. As our children go, so goes our future. Or as Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of one generation will be the government of the next.”
For all concerned parents, the midterm elections cannot come soon enough.
Laurie Cardoza-Moore is the founder and president of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, an organization dedicated to advocating for schoolchildren and combating anti-American and antisemitic ideologies wherever they arise.
