The harsh reality for conservatives is that there is a battleground we gave up on long ago and now must return: the Schoolroom.
Today’s hottest battleground is for the mind of the American child. Our eyes have been opened to this fight on a national level due to the Covid-19 shutdowns. Parents forced to stay home with their children finally came face to face with what their child is taught.
This is what @TerryMcAuliffe is pushing and trying to preserve in Virginia schools – he is a progressive hack and this is why he doesn't want parents knowing about the Marxist indoctrination now ongoing… https://t.co/9oyXRgR8Qy
— Tony Shaffer (@T_S_P_O_O_K_Y) November 1, 2021
Joy Pullman at the Federalist has done a wonderful job at breaking down this fight in her article, “Columbia Law Professor Explains Why Public Schools Are Tearing America Apart.”
The fight is between the parents and Political Beauracrats. Sadly, Public Teachers more and more teachers, school Boards, Super Independents, and Principles side with the Beauracrats.
Teacher sings about how parents are terrorists pic.twitter.com/uw1UyflDtt
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 21, 2021
Why the Schoolroom Needs Our Attention
Starting in the late 1800s the public schoolroom has a long history of co-opting other people’s children. In a Wall Street Journal Essay Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger breaks down the history of it all.
School changed from mainly church-run organizations to public agencies with a plan to control what the next generation of voters believed. It started in the late 1800s early 1900s when Protestants used the public school system to reach Catholic children. This only opened the door for the secular movement to convert children from Christian backgrounds to an atheist secular ideology. Since the 1960s this has worked far too well.
In Final Election Push, McAuliffe Claims Virginia Has Too Many White Teachershttps://t.co/2pFV6rjt9M
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) November 1, 2021
Hamburger, in his essay, explains the breakdown of the public school system since the late 1800s. “[T]he idea that public education is a central government interest was popularized by anti-Catholic nativists. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they elevated the public school as a key American institution in their campaign against Catholicism,” He wrote.
“…As today, the hope was to liberate children from their parents’ supposedly benighted views and thereby create a different sort of polity. Now as then, this sort of project reeks of prejudice and indoctrination. There is no lawful government interest in displacing the educational speech of parents who don’t hold government-approved views, let alone in altering their children’s identity or creating a government-approved electorate.”
Indoctrination in the Schoolroom is Unconstitutional
Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr warned that public schools are “the greatest threat to religious liberty in America today.” Public Schools today don’t try to shift children from one denomination to another but, instead, they replace Christianity altogether.
Enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has dropped by 10,000 students this year.
This is a HUGE win. Parents are waking up to Leftist indoctrination and tyrannical COVID policies, and it shows.
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) October 30, 2021
Christianity, and the morals and principles birthed by it, has been the foundation of western culture for centuries. It is also the very reason America was birthed in the first place. But now guiding light that has blessed this nation for so long has been wiped out by the teachings of our schoolrooms. Since the early 1900s progressives have had a long-term plan that focused on taking over the educational system. It had a goal to replace Christianity with the secular ideologies of the moment.
The religion of today is social Justice, identity politics, and climate change. Woe to those who do not bend the knee and pray at these alters.
Conservatives As Revolutionaries: How To Fight When You’re An Alien In Your Own Landhttps://t.co/mZJxCHzFBO
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) October 29, 2021
Philip Hamburger writes, “The temptation to indoctrinate the children of others—to impose a common culture by coercion—is an obstacle to working out a genuine common culture. There is no excuse for maintaining the nativist fiction that public schools are the glue that hold the nation together. They have become the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart. However good some public schools may be, the system as a whole, being coercive, is a threat to our ability to find common ground. That is the opposite of compelling government interest. The public school system therefore is unconstitutional, at least as applied to parents who are pressured to abandon their own educational speech choices and instead adopt the government’s.”