RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/576462-schools-become-crucial-battleground-heading-into-midterms

Schools are emerging as the latest battleground for both parties ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Debates over coronavirus restrictions and curriculum in the classrooms have dominated campaign messaging, forcing candidates to address the issues head-on in key areas like the suburbs.

It’s also left parents and experts concerned that kids are on the front lines of a political battle that has turned highly contentious over the past year.

The battle has also turned highly personal for families and educators debating how much of a role parents should play in their students’ education.

Republican candidates have seized on conservative complaints about issues like critical race theory and LGBTQ issues in school curriculum, while Democrats have zeroed in on the importance of coronavirus restrictions in classrooms.

Both parties are looking to use the education-related issues to appeal to parents on issues that impact their children’s day-to-day lives.

“When it comes to issues like education, you can view that as a quality-of-life issue,” said Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright.

While schools and classrooms have been at the center of some of the country’s most hot-button issues in the past, including racial integration and prayer in the classroom, the coronavirus pandemic has reinvigorated the education debate in 2021.

Republicans say conservative enthusiasm around education reached a fever pitch during the pandemic, when parents became more aware of their children’s curriculum when they were home during lockdown. The party also pushed back against coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions, arguing it negatively affected the learning environment.

Democrats, on the other hand, have argued that coronavirus restrictions are needed in schools to keep children safe and to stop the spread and mutation of the virus.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-15-how-to-be-a-conservative-student-on-a-university-campus-today

It gets harder and harder to be an independent thinker in the midst of one of those indoctrination and groupthink factories known as a university. Step out of line, and at any moment someone can claim to be offended or “triggered” by something completely bland that you may have said. Next thing you know, someone will have tattled on you to the administration. And you know exactly what the administration will do: They will simultaneously mouth platitudes about “free speech” while making every kind of threat, veiled or not, to bring you into line.

Is there any way for you to come out ahead? Within the last few days, a small number of students — one at Yale and two at Arizona State — have given tutorials on how to win at this game. To be fair, these students got a big assist from the fact that the crazy leftists who run these places have gotten so confident of never facing any pushback that they no longer hesitate to engage in conduct that is completely indefensible.

Example number one for today comes from perhaps the looniest of all the loony left schools, the Yale Law School. It all started with plans by the Native American Law Students Association to co-sponsor a Constitution Day (September 17) get-together with the Federalist Society. On the 15th, a second-year law student named Trent Colbert — who is a member of both organizations and, unlike Elizabeth Warren, is actually part Cherokee — sent out this email inviting NALSA members to the event:

Before reading further, see if you can spot what about the email may be offensive to the finely tuned antennae of an uber-woke Yale Law School “diversity” monger.

Aaron Silbarum, writing on October 13 at the Washington Free Beacon, recounts what happened next:

Within minutes, the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term “trap house” indicated a blackface party. “I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough,” the president of the Black Law Students Association wrote in the forum. “Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face.” She also objected to the mixer’s affiliation with the Federalist Society, which she said “has historically supported anti-Black rhetoric.”

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Whether the current Administration is the most corrupt in the history of our nation, I leave to those better qualified to decide. But, as we know from the influence peddling of Hunter Biden and the recent revelations of Merrick Garland’s son-in-law’s business ties to the teaching of critical race theory, there is no question as to its corruption. S.W.

Terry McAuliffe was correct in the sense that it would be impossible for a school to design individual syllabuses for each child. Nevertheless, the input of parents should be sought, not denied. As the NCPIE (quoted above) expressed, when parents do take an active interest in the education of their children they achieve higher grades, gain better social skills and more easily adapt to school.

It was once rare for any American of any political persuasion to deny the importance of parents in the education of their children. As educator and author Dorothy H. Cohen (1915-1979) once observed. “No school can work well for children if parents and teachers do not act in partnership on behalf of the children’s best interests.” Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s weaponization of the Justice Department has put that partnership at risk. In response to a letter to President Biden from the National School Boards Association, which likened parents’ protests to acts of domestic terror, Mr. Garland said he would use the Patriot Act against those parents who have “threatened” school boards for the teaching of critical race theory-type themes, adopting NEA New Business Item 39[1], cancelling history and tradition, distributing sexually explicit curricular materials, and allowing transgender bathrooms.

Violence against any person, including school board members, is a crime, but disallowing dissenting voices of parents is a violation of their First Amendment rights. As for the rights of public schools to teach what they choose, consider Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2011 dissent in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants: “The ‘freedom of speech’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.” To arbitrarily ignore parents’ concerns is what one would expect of a totalitarian regime more interested in indoctrination than education, not from the world’s foremost and oldest constitutional republic.

In America, education flourished when it emphasized the basic elements or reading, writing and arithmetic, and, as students progressed, when it encouraged skepticism, inquiry and empiricism. Unfortunately, public school education today de-emphasizes education in favor of equity, to achieve graduation rates that reflect the racial composition of the student body. Standardized tests have been eliminated. The Regent Exams in New York have been watered down over the years, and in 2019 a commission was established to potentially eliminate the exams as a requirement for high school graduation. In this past year, New York’s Mayor de Blasio ordered the elimination of the city’s gifted and talented programs. In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown signed a bill ending a requirement that high school students prove they are proficient in reading, writing and math before they are granted diplomas.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/school_parents_will_save_america.html

Has the time for normalcy bias passed?  Domestic espionage scandals involving a presidential administration, Marxist race riots, stolen elections, global pandemic, none of these affairs are normal. Normalcy bias is the idea that any number of contemporary abnormalities that we’re experiencing as a society is just another in a series of oddities that will pass and that what life demands most is that we’re comfortable.  Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul often spoke of what it took to drive change in the public. Namely, he suggested that hitting people in their wallets and bellies would demand change. I submit that messing with the children is proving equally effective.

Since COVID-19 hit, the children have been inundated with unending fear of disease that largely doesn’t affect them.  They’ve been locked in their homes and out of the classrooms, muzzled with unscientific face diapers, and isolated away from their peers.  They’ve forgone youth sports and extracurricular activities. They’ve learned over a computer screen that has resulted in significant rates of academic failure, perhaps not seen in the history of our education system.  Perhaps worst of all, according to the CDC suspected youth suicide attempts increased by 31% during the pandemic. 

Not content with merely applying the stressors of a novel pandemic, the schools have been indoctrinating the kids with an onslaught of far-left activism.  From inappropriate and mature themes in children’s reading and television programming material to inappropriate interactions in protected spaces like restrooms and locker rooms, the parents have seemingly had enough.  Around the nation, angry parents are showing up to local school boards and county seats with a laundry list of grievances, and Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned.