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 thanks. I think you argue in bad faith.
Yikes! Article I, Section 8 is a list of what they are allowed to do. Schools aren't here.
Since you haven't ever read the Constitution, here is the list:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;To borrow on the credit of the United States;
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; And
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
This is what the 10th amendment means when it states: "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"
The powers not delegated - meaning, Article I Section 8, also meaning, there is no constitutional requirement for there to be "prohibitions". That's propaganda promoted by progressives. Everything is prohibited unless specifically granted. That's the plain language.
This is simple stuff here.
So, show me that enumeration that excludes establishing schools.
Then, of course, I have already stated countless times in this thread that states established the schools, not the Federal government. See below, from Georgia's Constitution:
ARTICLE VIII.
EDUCATION
SECTION I.
PUBLIC EDUCATION
Paragraph I. Public education; free public education prior to college or postsecondary level; support by taxation. The provision of an adequate public education for the citizens shall be a primary obligation of the State of Georgia. Public education for the citizens prior to the college or postsecondary level shall be free and shall be provided for by taxation. The expense of other public education shall be provided for in such manner and in such amount as may be provided by law.
The Federal Constitution clearly states that each have their own Constitution and government.
See my post #63, where I excerpted the Georgia Constitution. Check your own state's constitution.
Then from your excerpt from the US Constitution:
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution.
From paragraph #1 in your enumeration we see
The Congress shall have Power To ... provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.
An educated public can certainly be intrinsic to the "general welfare" of the Nation. Jefferson dwells on this at length; and, his arguments make sense. It must have made sense to a lot of Congresscritters in the interum.
I saw your post with the Georgia Constitution, I actually applaud that sort of thing. Desperately few conservatives read the state constitutions.
"An educated public can certainly be intrinsic to the "general welfare" of the Nation."
So can food. So can healthcare. So can a basic level of pay.(All things progressives seek to achieve) But the Founders didn't give us an unlimited omnipotent government, that's what they set out to desperately prevent. So they gave us a "general government" with only a limited few items on a short leash. General governments don't really do much, contrary to popular myth.
You claim to have read the United States Constitution, I'm surprised the Constitution's limited culture eluded you. The unlimited culture of the Georgia Constitution couldn't be more obvious. Specific welfares for specific constitutions/governments that have unlimited cultures, and general welfares for the general government with its limited culture.
Then from your excerpt from the US Constitution:"
Quoting that one line out of context is bad faith. The whole enumerated powers as a bloc tells a story of what the Constitution is. They are not grants of omnipotence.
First, I disagree with your notion of "specific welfare", finding that to be mincing words. Thomas Jefferson wrote at length about the importance of an educated population and how that was one of the few things that guaranteed self-governance. He went on to say that there are too many instances of families who could not afford higher education for their children nor had they the time, patience, or faculties to educate their children. He proposed bills numerous times in Virginia in order to establish public schools.
Food does not bring an education, yet an education can certainly bring food. Healthcare will not bring education, but and education will bring healthcare. In keeping with the general welfare, it is prudent to fund whatever provides the best leverage for all people at the lowest cost. Education is an enabler, unlike those you list.
The limited culture of the government did not escape me, I can assure you. Yet, the Constitution does empower Congress to make laws that are not prohibited. If Congress were restricted to making only laws included in the Constitution's enumeration, it would not have seemed necessary to include the Bill of Rights. After all, how could anything in the enumeration of powers affect the possession of firearms or the free exercise of religion? It seems pretty clear to me that lawmaking in general was expected to go outside of the enumerated powers so the phrases I highlighted really are general purpose in nature. (They wrote more compactly in those days.)
I clearly see my viewpoint enumerated in the whole block. You are taking a stance that is similar to the way people want to tie both clauses of the Second Amendment together when they claim it empowers only a national guard.
The Founders did not list at lot of things in the enumeration of powers, just like they omitted quite a lot from the Bill of Rights. There was a great deal of debate about these very things. They finally concluded that nobody would forget the sting of tyranny, and that the states were going to cover everything else anyway. Of course, the states were assumed to be the seat of power when they wrote the Constitution.
Sure enough, schools are established by the Constitutions of all fifty states, not the Federal government.
"Sure enough, schools are established by the Constitutions of all fifty states, not the Federal government."
I fear this use of the word "established" the way you have been deploying it is set up to contain a back door. There isn't an enumeration for schools in the enumerated powers of Article I Section 8. That is simple and clear cut.
But what about a back door technicality, where as long as the states "establish" the schools but then the dictatorship comes in and makes all the rules and does all the heavy lifting and conducts day to day business?
No. This still is not the United States Constitution. There is no such back door. The lack of an enumeration does not just mean that the feds cannot establish schools, it means they have no role whatsoever in the fullest extent that the word whatsoever contains. So then the use of the word "established" as quoted above is unnecessary and perhaps even unwarranted.
As far as the United States Constitution is concerned, coming out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 what we were given is a wall of separation between education and state.
"You are taking a stance that is similar to the way people want to tie both clauses of the Second Amendment together when they claim it empowers only a national guard."
Far from it. The history and the revisions of 2a until it's final wording make it clear that those folks have it wrong. Likewise, Madison's notes make it clear that we were not given a social constitution. The states, do, however have social constitutions. At least partly. The state ratification debates again confirm this.
One of the most remarkable days of the Constitutional Convention in this regard is July 17th, 1787, where you can nearly see a fist fight occur within the pages. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_717.asp The more and more they debate here on the 17th, the more agitated they clearly get. It's impossible to miss. There are other days as well that highlight how the Founders wanted to keep the federal government in a box domestically, but this day remarkably drives the point home.
During the Convention, and again, throughout the Federalist Papers, the vast majority of the time the Founders refer to the new government as a "general" government. Not a centralized government. Not a nationalized government. As they say in July 17th, the Founders did not want the federal government "intermeddling with their police" - that is, whatever it is the states were doing.
During the Convention, there were Founders who wanted to abolish the states and make America "one big nation". They were resoundingly defeated. There was another proposal that the Feds should be able to negate (veto) acts of the states. This also went down in flames.
We do not have a centralized government. We do not have a national government. We have a general government. The fact that it is only a general government and nothing more is incredibly significant.
A national or a central government would be able to do schools. But not a general one of incredibly limited means.
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