The Patriot Post® · Parents Must Fight Educational Indoctrination

For two decades, this writer has sounded the alarm about the progressive dogma being disseminated in America’s classrooms. Dogma presented as irrefutable fact and defended with a single strategy: If you dare to challenge any aspect of that dogma, you’re racist, transphobic, or — as President Joe Biden’s inauguration speech and its laughably hollow call for “unity” made clear — a potential “domestic terrorist.”

Thus in Cupertino, California, a class of third graders was forced to “deconstruct” their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” “Based on whistleblower documents and parents familiar with the session, a third-grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School began the lesson on ‘social identities’ during a math class,” columnist Christopher Rufo reveals. “The teacher asked all students to create an ‘identity map,’ listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics. The teacher explained that the students live in a ‘dominant culture’ of ‘white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s],’ who, according to the lesson, ‘created and maintained’ this culture in order ‘to hold power and stay in power.’”

It gets worse. A book titled This Book Is Antiracist teaches students that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” Moreover, based on the principle of intersectionality, “there are parts of us that hold some power and other parts that are oppressed,” even within a single person.

In Illinois, “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” is a blatant attempt to turn students into de facto community organizers for leftist causes. It has already been approved by the Illinois State Board of Education and awaits final approval by The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules of the Illinois General Assembly. As columnist Stanley Kurtz warns, if it gets the green light, teachers will be mandated to make self-assessments regarding their racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc., with the possibility of being required to attend white fragility training sessions the committee characterizes as an effort to get teachers to “move past their whiteness.”

To where? To an educational system poisoned by blatant racism sold as anti-racism. To a system, like so many others across the nation, wholly debauched and distorted by Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project with one overarching agenda in mind: To teach American children that their own nation is a fatally flawed construct unworthy of preservation. To teach American children that the content of their character is completely subservient to their color, their gender, and their ethnicity. To teach half of American children they are permanent victims with no ability to make a life for themselves, or permanent oppressors who should be forever ashamed of their “privilege.”

The transgender dogma — just re-approved by our “unity” president — is equally contemptible. “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” Biden asserts. Translation: Boys who self-identify as girls will be given access to women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams. Any school that refuses to kowtow will be denied federal funding. Biological women who object? “TERF is an acronym for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ and is considered a slur against people who espouse feminist beliefs and distinguish biological women from trans women,” columnist Ebony Bowden explains.

In other words, you’re the radical if you believe in biological and chromosomal reality, dislike the idea of boys having unfettered access to girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, or believe that the evisceration of women’s sports in service to a bankrupt political ideology is a bad thing.

And just in case one might be wondering whether there might be any pushback, Biden also signed an executive order rescinding the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission that focused on the “ideals of the American Founding as well as the centuries-long quest to live up to them,” as commission member and esteemed historian Victor Davis Hanson explained.

What undoubtedly pushed progressives to dismiss it? “The commission was no more sympathetic to the current popularity of identity politics or reparatory racial discrimination,” Hanson adds. “It argues that using race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and gender to define who we are — rather than seeing these traits as incidental when compared with our natural and shared humanity — will lead to a dangerous fragmentation of American society.”

For leftists and the corporate oligarchy that supports them at every turn, that’s a feature, not a bug. Millions of automatons taught what to think, not how to think, are more easily ruled by those who brook no dissent whatsoever to their despicable agenda.

Yet there is hope. “As American primary and secondary education’s dysfunction became painfully apparent, parents of all races have fled the public schools as fast as they could,” explains columnist Angelo Codevilla. At R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School, parents fought back and forced the school to suspend the program. The effort was led in part by Asian parents, one of whom likened it to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first lawsuit of what is hopefully the beginning of an avalanche of them has been filed by a black American mother who does not want her biracial son to be forced to attend mandated classes teaching “anti-white” race theories.

In other words, parents are the key here. They must understand they can no longer simply send their children to school and assume what they’re learning is OK. There must be pushback not just against school officials but against the feckless politicians who enact state laws prohibiting parents from opting out of these progressive indoctrination sessions.

Moreover, they need to become familiar with cases such as West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette and Tinker v. Des Moines School District. In the former, the Supreme Court ruled that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” In the latter case, the Court made it clear that students do not surrender their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door, unless such speech “significantly disrupts school discipline or invades the rights of others.”

Thus, no school in the nation should be able to force a student to “confess” their support for progressive dogma that is presented as unassailable. And while there are limits to how students can respond, it is clear that polite, respectful rebuttal of such dogma is permitted.

Yet again, nothing meaningful will be accomplished without parental involvement. They must view the cancerous ideology being disseminated to their children with the same alarm as they would a drug dealer standing at the schoolyard gate. What’s going on inside those gates is far more alarming and damaging.

The ball is in your corner, parents. Don’t let your children be taught to hate America. Or themselves.