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
any Columbia professor is by definition an American enemy
Public schools would be in competition for tax dollars that will follow the student. Are you arguing for an end of FedX and UPS because they provide competition to the government postal service? Public schools will have to up their game, they have been providing poor education for decades.
The public schools, as currently constituted, are really seminaries of fundamentalist progressivism.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/
“In a soft reset, we leave the current structure of government the same, except that we apply the 20th-century First Amendment to all forms of instruction, theistic or “secular.” In other words, our policy is separation of education and state. In a free country, the government should not be programming its citizens. It should not care at all what people think. It only needs to care what they do. The issue has nothing to do with theism. It is a basic matter of personal freedom.
You cannot have official education without official truth, i.e., pravda. Most—in fact, I’d say almost all—of our pravda is indeed true. Call it 99.9%. The remaining 0.1% is creepy enough. The Third Reich used the wonderful word Aufklärung, meaning enlightenment or literally “clearing-up.” Every time I see a piece of public education designed to improve the world by improving my character, I think of Aufklärung. But of course, a good Nazi education imparted many true truths as well.”
Jefferson was thinking of LOCAL schools, supported by LOCAL taxes, and controlled by LOCALLY elected officials.
The feds grant taxpayer money to school districts which do as the feds say, and have the power to deny federal funds to school districts who defy federal mandates.
That is the very DEFINITION of "establish" (as used in the First Amendment's "establishment of religion" clause).
I read the article. I don’t believe much of it is correct. Also, the article merely states beliefs without substantiation.
That is correct. His idea was not adopted for valid reasons: Poor counties, isolated regions, areas of reduced population, so on.
The constitution was not designed this way. This is propaganda promoted by progressives.
There is no "schools" in the enumerated powers. The end.
East Asians, Chicoms and Indians do not care.
Iirc, Japanese are year round students. They don’t care, either.
2+2=4, not 5.
That requires honest elections.
Try reading the letters that passed between the Founders before, during, and after the compilation and ratification of the Constitution. You will discover your error.
There is no "enumerated powers" in the Constitution. There are enumerated Rights, but not powers. The "powers" are invested in the Congress, which can make laws that do not conflict with rights. Schools simply do not conflict with the Bill of Rights.
No end. You are free to continue this discussion. Please do so with facts, not personal declarations.
While your statement is true, it is not germane to the discussion.
What made you a month late to the discussion?
It’s a distinction without a difference. Schools aren’t on the list, then they aren’t on the list. Article I, Section 8 is not very long.
The Bill of Rights is irrelevant here, it’s the rest of the Constitution that’s at issue. Schools are something that belongs not even to the states, but to the people and families. There’s no need for government of any kind in this business. There’s no benefit to welcoming poisonous government into the mix, you have done this purely voluntary.
It's a Free Republic tradition! LOL
There is no list of what they are allowed to do. There is only a list of what they cannot do. If you think otherwise, please post appropriate reference material that supports your view. Otherwise, you are just voicing an opinion; and, opinions are not actionable.
Depends on what is meant by “public school.”
The one-room schoolhouse was a public school. Community paid the teacher.
Leaders of some countries are tasked with elevating their people. In those countries, schooling is roigorous.
Leaders of other countries, in partular those countries with great weath and a high standard of living, are tasked with lowering the expectations and standard of living. The object of all this is to level the field globally.
Crappy education in the US is not by accident, it is by design and by intent.
Please post appropriate reference material, or links thereto, that supports your view.
The history is pretty clear on this question. The constitution, at least in the mind of its creators and ratifying powers, viewed it as creating a government of limited and enumerated powers. Enumerated powers is, according to most people's definition, a list of what the government is allowed to do.
Now, I suppose some rhetorical trick or clever sophistry can convert enumerated powers into "a list of what they cannot do." Based on your posts on this thread, I expect a naked disagreement with no supporting argument.
Brief history at History of the Bill of Rights.
Federalists believed a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because they believed that the Constitution only gave the government limited powers that were specifically listed. The government had no power to do things it was not entitled to in the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton believed that the people were not giving up any rights by accepting the Constitution. Therefore, in his view, it was not necessary to protect something which was not taken away from them with a Bill of Rights.The Federalists also believed, though, that adding a Bill of Rights could be very dangerous. If specific rights to be retained by the people were listed in the Constitution, they believed it would imply that any rights not listed were not protected and that the government would gradually encroach upon these rights.
The Anti-Federalists remained unpersuaded. They wanted guarantees for such things as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to petition the government and many others, specifically listed in the Constitution.
Constitution Article VI, paragraph 2 states
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Now, I just finished reading the entire Constitution again; and, I still didn't see anything at all that would lead me to believe that schools cannot be created by the either the state or federal government. If you think such is the case, please quote it so that we can discuss it. I am ready, willing, and able to discuss this objectively. Are you?
On the other hand, I can exhibit: Jefferson's Bill https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-12-02-0095. This bill was for his state, but it didn't pass. Another form passed later.
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