In 2021, the whirlwind election of Governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia over the anointed Democrat Terry McAuliffe told the entire United States indefatigably that the role of parents in our children’s education is a MAJOR national issue now. Better late than never.
With the concepts behind Critical Race Theory implemented as what academics are calling: “Critical Race Praxis”, in combination with the concept of “Community Education” exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village”, the damage already done is daunting. It is in this political environment that positively damning footage has re-emerged from 2013 of “Progressive” (read as: Democrat-Socialist) commentator Melissa Harris-Perry explaining,
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had a kind of private notion of children. ‘Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.’ We have’t had a very collective notion of ‘these are our children’. So part of it is:
We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families. And recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
"We have to break through this idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families".
— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) January 20, 2022
Parents Vs. The State Isn’t New, We’ve Been Fighting For Over A Century
In 1973, Robert W. Clawson, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kent State, wrote about “Political Socialization of Children in The USSR” in Political Science Quarterly He described the same “collective notion” that Harris-Perry did.
“For Marx and Engels, the traditional bourgeois child-rearing family was doomed. Following the successful proletarian revolution, children would be housed, socialized, and educated by public organizations.”
Today this concept has become manifest in the United States in a way that Marx and Engels couldn’t have dreamt of. In October Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire wrote a blood-boiling piece in The Washington Post stating matter-of-factly that “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” They assert in a realm of absolute fantasy that rather than their position of the government holding near-absolute authority over our children’s education: “what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed.” Apparently, they’ve forgotten that the US Department of Education as we know it didn’t exist up until 1979… another gift from Jimmy Carter.
Prior to then, the USDoE was merely a part of the larger Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare founded in 1953, which was itself born as The Federal Security Agency’s Office of Education in 1939… yeah, the Federal Security Agency… are you getting it yet?
If we go back far enough to its first incarnation under President Andrew Jackson in 1867, the Department of Education was initially created and then quickly demoted down to the “Office of Education” in 1868 due to prophetic concerns that it would exert too much control over local schools. Its purpose was then limited to “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several State and Territories, and of diffusing such information respecting the organization and management of schools and school systems, and methods of teaching, as shall aid the people of the United States in the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems, and otherwise promote the cause of education throughout the country.” It was a pretty strong yank back on the leash.
Long story short (too late) this “collective notion” of education would not only be utterly repugnant to America going all the way back to the founding of our nation and remained so until as recently as at least the days of the New Deal, but have been actively fought against again and again, being defeated and then again rearing its ugly head for over a century.
Democrat chosen-one for The Virginia Governor’s mansion Terry McAuliffe said the quiet part loud on September 28th, 2021 during a debate that likely sealed his defeat.
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said over what should be taught in schools. The former governor later added, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
The shark has officially been jumped, that’s why Melissa Harris-Perry’s clip has come back to the fore. It’s an illustration of what the leftists have always said and believed: that our children are not the responsibility of their parents and families but of the American people and that the State is the ultimate authority when it comes to their education and well-being. It is as disgusting and disturbing a notion today as it was in 1868 and is now as it was then: completely incompatible with everything it means to be American.
