RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/04/the-year-of-the-parent/

Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, my parents could send me off to school and assume I would be taught by people who shared their values. As the recent Virginia election demonstrated, however, those days are long gone. To be sure, most educators today work hard, and do their best to give kids a balanced education. But there are too many who don’t, and parents, who are rightly worried, are now speaking out. In fact, according to a Fox News survey, 80 percent of parents are “extremely” or “very” concerned about what our public schools are teaching. Whether it is the sexualization of six-year-olds, white kids being told they are oppressors, or children being forced to chant Aztec prayers, many parents are fed up. A few recent examples:

In Broward County, Florida, a teacher took her elementary school students to a gay bar as a way to learn about the homosexual community.

In eastern Kentucky, students gave lap dances to the staff as part of Hazard High School’s homecoming week festivities.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, a high school boy wearing a dress has been accused of raping a girl in the women’s bathroom, the second time he has been accused. Neither case was pursued by the district superintendent, who, when asked about why he didn’t act, incoherently blamed Donald Trump’s rejiggering of Title IX regulations. One particularly insightful student put things into perspective: “If you can make a child stay home for refusing to wear a mask, you can also make a child stay home for raping another student.”

With parents now awakening, there is a campaign afoot to diminish their input on what children are learning in school. After the National School Boards Association sent a well-publicized letter to Joe Biden on September 29, in which the organization contended that there is a serious threat to our “schools and its [sic] education leaders” due to a “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation (at school board meetings) occurring across the country,” the organization was rightly excoriated for it, and on October 22 issued an apology. It seems that the communiqué was the work of NSBA CEO Chip Slaven and president Viola Garcia, with no board input. But apparently, there’s more to the story.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/teachers-unions-are-serpent-cradle-americas-jim-mccoy-and-lloyd-pettegrew/

Abraham Lincoln once warned us that “The philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of politics, government and life in the next.” It is no secret that the founding fathers had grave concerns about the new emerging federal government becoming too large and intrusive in the lives of our nation’s citizens. In fact, over-reach by those serving and administering in the central government almost seemed to be a predictable outcome.  As a result, the founding fathers took very specific steps to limit the powers of the new federal government. The Supremacy Clause of our Constitution is found in Article VI, Section 2, specifying which powers the federal government has and which powers are retained by the state and local governments.

President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first Department of Education in 1867. Its main purpose was to collect information and statistics about the nation’s schools. However, due to concern that the Department would exercise too much control over local schools, the new Department was demoted to an Office of Education in 1868. Until 1979, the organization and administration of education in America was solely in the hands of each state government and its local communities. With this model, America’s public education system became the envy of the world…until October 1979, under the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88), amalgamating offices of several federal agencies, and creating our present serpent in the cradle—the DOE in May 1980. This has become the mindless federal bureaucracy beholden to national teacher unions.

A true political democracy in America requires an educational system and processes that are free from overt political pressures and prejudices. As Thomas Sowell recently pointed out, the social and political institutions and traditions need to be objectively taught, along with science, mathematics and the language arts. Screed like Marxism and CRT have no place in state-sponsored schools. An example of the teacher union mindset comes from New York School Talk that pushes the educational union point of view. They say, ”Every adult in a school building gets a union. Most are members of the United Federation of Teachers, and together they are incredibly powerful and effective. They negotiate all the rules. They can influence hiring and firing procedures, and everything about teaching.” Absent in their “objective” talk line is anything about students’ and parents’ educational interests.