From New York to D.C. to L.A., with lots of Loudoun Counties in between, large school districts are openly embracing a very specific and very radical religion. George Soros-influenced school boards and untethered left-wing teachers trained at far-left teachers’ colleges have abandoned the pretense of neutrality and are explicitly proselytizing their worldview and ideology.
In this view of the world, the individual is a god, having the ability and even the duty to completely define the self. Anything that in any way interferes with this radical self-determination is oppression.
The one communal undertaking is the “dismantling of systems of oppression,” which requires destroying and erasing customs, traditions, and much of the past. The greatest sin is discrimination. This is an original sin, inborn in people with certain races and sexualities, and it can never be wiped clean.
Somehow, the news media and Democratic politicians have the gall to object when conservative states or localities inject conservatism or anything that sniffs of traditional morality or Abrahamic religions into their public schools. That the Left would reject a competing moral framework is natural, but they somehow object on the grounds that “public schools should be value-neutral!” Indeed, that’s one of the biggest objections to school choice: “Public funds for religious institutions violates the separation of church and state!”
But we should ignore these objections to school choice, or even to conservative state curricula, as obviously disingenuous, coming from anyone who defends a Black Lives Matter flag in the hallways or “state your pronoun” sessions in the classroom.
Public schools are and always have been infused with values, religions, and particular views of human nature.
Sure, in the 1990s, when my generation was in school, there was a brief dalliance with total relativism. Nothing is either good or bad in itself, it’s up to you to decide. But relativism is always an unstable equilibrium. It never lasts. The effect of public school relativism in the U.S. was to clear away traditional morality and Judeo-Christian views of humanity, thus leaving a fallow field where wokeism could be planted.
Lest you think the relativism of the late 20th century is the proper or natural state of public schools, check out Stephanie Slade’s brief
history
of public education. Specifically, Slade focuses on the KKK’s early advocacy for compulsory public school attendance.
Slade explains:
Most private schools at the time were associated with the Catholic Church, while most public schools were openly, if unofficially, Protestant. By requiring all children to attend the latter institutions, Klan members thought they could strip Catholic parishes of an income source, reduce the Catholic hierarchy’s ability to indoctrinate the next generation, and secure their own right to inculcate values instead. … In 1922, Oregon passed a law requiring every child to attend a local public school. Supporters including the KKK admitted the aim was to drive all private schools in the state out of business. But before the law went into effect, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional.
The Klan also lobbied for a federal Department of Education in order to create uniform education across the country:
“We will be a homogeneous people,” [KKK leader Hiram] Evans told a friendly audience in 1923. “We will grind out Americans like meat out of a grinder.” Or as an early Progressive education reformer chillingly put it in 1902, “The nation has a right to demand intelligence and virtue of every citizen, and to obtain these by force if necessary.”
Conservatives battling a woke and ideological public sometimes make the mistake of saying public schools should stick to teaching math and leave values out of it. But that’s impossible. Part of
educating a child is forming his character
.
Obviously, public schools can be pluralistic, particularly on certain religious dogmas. But on morality, and on the understanding of mankind, values will always be part of education. The only question is, whose values will it be?
