The Reduction of Public Schools to Propaganda Camps

(by George Neumayr | The American Spectator) – Propaganda masquerading as education lies at the center of the Left’s drive to radicalize America. Not a week passes without some new controversy exposing the depth of that propaganda in America’s public schools. To take one of innumerable examples, California public school teachers feel entitled to recruit children to join LGBTQ clubs without the knowledge of their parents.

In October, writes Abigail Shrier, the “California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.”

The title of the conference was “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities.” One workshop focused on “Queering the Middle,” which taught teachers how to dupe parents of middle schoolers, according to Shrier:

“Because we are not official — we have no club rosters, we keep no records,” Buena Vista Middle School teacher and LGBTQ-club leader, Lori Caldeira, states on an audio clip sent to me by a conference attendee. “In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming? We’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they came?’ You know, we would never want a kid to get in trouble for attending if their parents are upset.”

Separating children from their parents is central to every tyrannical form of government. America’s public schools are increasingly just propaganda camps designed to produce servile and mindless citizens for the Left’s fundamentally “transformed” America. Liberals used to make some effort to conceal this ruthless agenda. Now many of them don’t even bother. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe famously said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Last weekend, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times reporter responsible for the “1619 Project,” defended McAuliffe’s comment. “He was panned for that, but that’s just the fact,” she said. “This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool, because these are the professional educators who have the expertise to teach social studies, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature, and I think we should leave that to the educators.”

Her comment is outrageous on multiple levels. First of all, the “professional educators” have failed to educate. They preside over an academically bankrupt public school system. She disdains homeschooling, but homeschooled students test far better than public school students do. She ignores that the glaring academic and moral defects of the public school system made the expansion of homeschooling inevitable. One can only hope that that movement continues to flourish and grow. It is one of America’s best hopes for avoiding tyranny.

A conception of the state that treats it as the primary educator of children is tyrannical from the start. Human beings, after all, form governments not to forfeit natural rights but to protect them. That parents are the primary educators of their own children is chief among those rights. But the Left’s view of the state is fundamentally unnatural and limitless. Left to their own devices, the statists would outlaw homeschooling and private education and herd all children into public schools. Read Full Article >