Posted on 10/26/2021 12:05:03 PM PDT by DeweyCA
Smearing parents fed up with their kids’ schools as “domestic terrorists” seems to be a wild, incendiary charge with little basis in reality. Yet it’s the basis on which the U.S. attorney general has convened an FBI task force to surveil and intimidate parents who object to what their children are being taught, and how they are being treated, with public tax dollars. The organization that colluded with the Justice Department to create the pretext for chilling voters’ speech has backed down, but the FBI threat remains.
School lockdowns have clarified and accelerated the deep, irreconcilable differences among American parents and citizens about how to educate children. Americans want completely different things from their kids’ schools, often opposite things. It’s simply impossible to teach both that there’s a hierarchy of races and that all humans are created equal, let alone to teach “both sides” of other education flashpoints, such as whether to teach social justice or actual math in math class. Schools have to choose.
K-12 schools are largely choosing the political establishment over the wishes of the people who elect them and provide their children as the pretext for schools’ public funding. The political establishment that benefits from public schools’ monopoly on teaching future voters what to think is being increasingly direct about this arrangement.
In 1996, Hillary Clinton told Americans “it takes a village” to raise a child. That was the soft sell. Today, we’re getting the hard sell: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a September debate.
As Democrats were forcing millions of American children to stay home for yet another school year while their international peers were safely learning in person, a Harvard University conference suggested banning at-home education. One of its organizers, a Harvard Law professor complained that homeschooling is “a realm of near-absolute parental power. . . . inconsistent with a proper understanding of the human rights of children.”
California’s governor, and forthcoming federal coercion, also communicate contempt for parents’ authority by substituting their own in mandating COVID vaccines even though Centers for Disease Control data show these injections pose greater health risks to children than COVID does. Demands for substituting nonparental authority in the place of parents cause even weirder manifestations, such as from this teacher on TikTok.
Contempt for the kind of self-government that starts with families also comes out in the thousands of teachers openly defying — with legal backing from top Democrat Party donors — laws enacted at parents’ behest that seek to ban the teaching of things like critical race theory.
Regardless of how it comes out, all these incidents point to what’s at the real center of today’s virulent debate about public schools: Whether parents or bureaucrats should control what kids learn. This has been at the crux of all the debates about public education going back to when Progressive Era do-gooders started American schools’ path towards nationalization.
Using Schools to Co-Opt Other People’s Kids
Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger goes back to this history in a Friday Wall Street Journal essay explaining why public schools will remain a fierce culture war battleground until lawmakers make them release their grip on America’s kids. “[T]he schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others,” Hamburger writes. “That’s why they are still a source of discord.”
He notes that the steady transference of American K-12 education from private, mostly church-run schools to government agencies was planned to control what the next generation of voters believed. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this manifested through the effort by the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment to convert Catholics by putting their kids in Protestant-ish public schools. That eventually turned into an effort by secularists to convert Christians of all kinds by banning Christianity from public schools. Both succeeded.
“[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,” Hamburger notes.
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 Is Unconstitutional, In Two Ways
Today, public schools don’t merely shift children from one denomination to another but outright replace Christianity with the secular religion most visible as identity politics, as former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr detailed in June. That’s why Barr warned Americans that public schools are “the greatest threat to religious liberty in America today.”
This is backed up by numerous studies. A 2020 scholarly review of research on this topic concludes that “especially increasingly secularized government control of education… can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world.”
“The heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country. In light of this development, we must confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools,” Barr said.
Hamburger complements and extends Barr’s argument that
“The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own,” Hamburger writes. “Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling.”
He notes that this especially disadvantages poorer parents, but it affects everyone by allowing government to decide what future voters believe about its limits and powers. Using public resources to convert children to government-preferred political and religious ideologies is not only unconstitutional, Hamburger observes, but it also inflames social division.
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 a 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.
What Parents Need Is Direct Control of School Dollars
Real political power is measured, not in viral videos on social media, but in winning elections and subsequently making real changes to institutions and the flow of money. What really would put pressure on schools is defunding them and replacing their leaders, either through voting in better leaders or moving kids to a better school.
Voting in better leaders is risky, takes a lot of time, and is subject to reversal in the next election cycle. Our children’s upbringing shouldn’t be so precarious. Instead, legislatures should give parents a way out of spending their children’s entire school careers on battles to the death (or next election) over, to cite just one example, whether to mask and quarantine all the kids.
It’s ultimately not about the masks, or the critical race theory, or letting boys into girls’ bathrooms: it’s that our education system forces people to fight over which faction gets to control people who hate what they believe. That dynamic makes these fights bitter and existential. They don’t have to be.
If schools won’t relinquish their power, they should be made to. It’s not fair for schools to hold children hostage. Parents shouldn’t have to force everyone else aboard to get what they want.
Hamburger offers a fresh avenue to truly ending these zero-sum culture war battles: “asking judges to recognize—at least in declaratory judgments—that the current system is profoundly unconstitutional. Once that is clear, states will be obliged to figure out solutions. Some may choose to offer tax exemptions for dissenting parents; others may provide vouchers. Either way, states cannot deprive parents of their right to educational speech by pushing children into government schools.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Check out her recommended classic Christmas picture books, "The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar," and her bestselling ebook, "Classic Books for Young Children." Sign up here to get early access to her next full-length book, "How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You." A Hillsdale College honors graduate, @JoyPullmann is also the author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Figh
No. I’m arguing for an intelligently operated government.
Yes, indeed!
Imagine the creativity that would be set free.
Imagine the money that would be diverted from the government indoctrination camps and redirected into the free market. Everyone’s standard of living would immediately take a quantum jump.
Go read material on this subject as written by the Founders. They made a lot of sense. Let me give you some samples:
Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
—Thomas Jefferson
I know of no safe repository for the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to increase their discretion by education.
—Thomas Jefferson
If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.
—Thomas Jefferson
The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
—Thomas Jefferson
There are MANY more where these come from. Similar quotes from Franklin, Madison, and others are recorded. This is all fundamental to a prosperous and safe society.
Just outside the bounds of the Constitution.
>> Make them compete for students.
This is also the only way to get back to schools that actually teach their students useful skills, like reading, writing and arithmetic. The whole point of a free market system is creative destruction. You stink at delivering a good product, you go out of business. Our government schools have been divorced from this imperative for generations now, with predictable (bad) results.
Bring on the vouchers!
No sir, it is not. Perhaps you could reference the material that set you to this opinion. I have presented material that I used in the formation of my outlook on this issue; and, that material was written by the Founders of our Nation. If you expect to sway my opinion, you will need to present a logical discourse to that end. Otherwise, you aren’t going to be enlightening.
It is impossible for any school to be religiously, culturally, and politically neutral.
Prove this point with appropriate references and a logical progression of thought. I disagree with the statement, regarding it as false.
You make statements, with no grounds for validity. These are not educated opinions, merely musings of an outsider of society.
10th Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
I understand that amendment. I believe it has no bearing on the topic. If you think it does, please make your point with references and a logical progression of stated thought. Convince me that you aren’t just a parrot.
The states each establish their own school system. The Federal Government does not establish the schools. The DOE assists the states in their education efforts. You see, under the 10th Amendment, the states DO have Constitutional authority to establish the schools and their operational standards; and that is precisely where the originate.
I am busy right now and I don’t have to prove anything to you.
Others see the correctness of my points. The author of the WSJ article agrees with me on the question of government schooling being unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment.
I don't think you can prove anything to me. Your opinions have no basis.
Others see the correctness of my points.
Sure. I am sure there are many people who haven't studied the issues much, yet think the simple act of abolishing schools could possibly help anything. Real long range planners, your lot. You have opinions, but no points.
Re: Abolishing schools
This is a straw man. I have never said abolish schools.
All schooling should be privatized. When government establishes schooling and ( worse) compels attendance and forces taxation, it violates every First Amendment provision.
Government violates the rights of the parents, the child, and the citizen, all of whom are under the threat of **armed** police and court action.
As for schooling, homeschooling is the most natural and healthiest way to rear a child. Of course some children will need institutionalization for their schooling. We need orphanages, too, but no one is arguing that it is the best setting for the child.
Read the posted article. The article plainly explains the argument.
You are justifying the circumvention of the Constitution and promoting an unlimited, lawless government.
First, there are no prohibitions for schools in the Constitution; and, Congress in empowered to solve problems through legislation. If you wish to make this point, please quote the part of the Constitution that makes you think so, and then include supporting interpretations by the Founders or other Constitutional authority. I read the entire Constitution regularly, including the Amendments. I don't see any justification for your stance. On the other hand, I can find a great deal of sensible material related to the establishment of public schools.
Second, public schools are not established by the Federal Constitution. In every single state, schools are created by the state's constitution. The states are guaranteed that power under the terms of the 10th Amendment.
Third, public schools were instituted way back in the 1540s by Queen Elizabeth I. She understood the advantages to society brought about through general literacy, even for those who could not afford private schools. The first public school in North America was established in the early 1600s at Jamestown.
Fourth, private schools would prevent some people from obtaining even the most meager and basic education. Public schools are intended to raise the standard of living of the entire Nation at least to the point that all people can be theoretically self sufficient. A school that is organized for profit will most certainly charge what the market will bear, thus excluding many people from a basic education. How could this possibly escape your attention? Perhaps you prefer to have a serf class.
Good minds have agonized over this issue for centuries. The real problem with our public schools is that they wandered off the reservation, due mostly because of inattention and apathy on the part of conservatives. I guarantee you, private schools would also degrade in quality once parents sue them because their little darlings can't make the grade. Furthermore, degradation of private school curriculum would also occur given the inattention of conservative people.
You repeat yourself rather than rendering an explanation of how you arrive at that conclusion. I don't see this as true. Help me understand.
...homeschooling is the most natural and healthiest way to rear a child...
This should be the case, but it not necessarily true. Some parents couldn't teach much because they don't know much. You are assuming that all parents are like you are even your parents. That is generally untrue. I know there are plenty of parents who would be unable to teach most any subject accurately or fluently.
I think perhaps that you do not agree with the notion that in order to have a situation that promotes decent self-governance we must have high literacy in the masses. People who can do basic arithmetic and read and write are far less likely to become a tax burden than those who do not have such skills. Surely you understand that there are many families who can barely make ends meet, let alone send their children to a private school. That model has been tried before. It encompassed the Ancient Times, The Dark Ages, Medieval Times, all the way to the 1600 and 1700s. Only children of nobility or wealth could experience a formal learning process. Is that how things should be?
Public schools in this Nation started out just fine. Then the liberal/commie creeping crud set in, but only because conservative people failed to monitor the schools, failed to react when they saw trouble, and almost never do anything to combat the dysfunctional changes. The problem with public education can be fixed as long as conservatives reverse their habits with respect to the schools.
If you CAN afford private schools or are able be provide an effective education at home, then it would certainly be best to do so. The rest of us will need some well thought out help.
There are people who don't pay school taxes, and not much income tax. They would not be able to provide any form of education for their children if all schooling was accomplished through private schools. Public schools were actually established with those people in mind. Ponder for a moment and think of the Dark Ages, Medieval Europe, or most any period up to modern times. The only people to receive an education were nobles or the otherwise wealthy. Are you advocating for a return to that situation?
How about we just fix what the liberals screwed up?
This is what’s teaching Critical Race Theory and if you think this hater is a rarity, you are not paying attention.
https://twitter.com/shannon_alter/status/1453698078658252802
Read the article. The explanation is there for all to see.
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