The Patriot Post® · Schools Issue Religious Opt-Outs in Response to SCOTUS, but What Is the Real Deal?

By Michael Bedar

Public schools such as those in San Rafael, Marin County, California, have joined schools nationwide in announcing religion-based get-out-of-class passes.

Under the new policies, a family’s sincere religious convictions will excuse students from religiously objectionable “syllabus items or activities.” The district superintendent announced that school principals will “arrange for the students’ exit” and see to it that a suitable and valuable alternative scholastic activity will be provided to the students, and that no record of the faith-based absences will be kept.

The Marin County schools, like those in Texas, Maryland, and elsewhere, cite the 2025 Mahmoud v. Taylor U.S. Supreme Court decision, which recognizes the rights of families to protect themselves and their children from content that goes against their religion. Mahmoud involved parents who objected to LGBT-themed books in their child’s class, and the Court ruled that parents can withdraw their children from such lessons.

While these school policies expand protections for the freedom of religion, historical concerns remain over repressive conditions against students of faith and traditional values. Board of Education members who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s had influences often from the heyday of the baby boom, such as educational psychologist Samuel Flowerman, who published in The New York Times Magazine:

We must learn how to select better teachers and to train them better; we must see them as engineers of human relations instead of instructors of arithmetic and spelling.

Following decades of “human relations” indoctrination in schools, families started rebelling, years before Mahmoud, increasingly putting knowledge and learning before the systemic re-”engineering” of society. By partaking in school choice movements, rising homeschooling, and scrutinizing shortcomings versus opportunities in educational and career training paths, parents and students reasserted what kinds of learning and relations fit their lives.

The low-enrollment crisis at public schools and colleges has multiple causes, including falling childbirth rates, dependence on illegal immigration (which is being stemmed) for lucrative per-student attendance dollars, and competition from private realms where educational programs leave ideological inculcation to families. Keeping students choiceless is at last meeting its match in dozens of school-choice states, yet one of the most interesting parts of the educational system’s crisis is the long slog through school-centered intellectual indoctrination that American learners have endured.

Well into the 1960s, work by psychological and social theorists including Flowerman, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodore Adorno, Marie Jahoda, Bruno Bettelheim, Phyllis Katz, Kurt Lewin, William Kreml, Herbert Blumer, Gordon Allport, and Morris Janowitz, many born abroad, focused on changing the American mind. Some of their criticisms targeted young American students as being potential “superpatriots,” while Adorno and others selectively described the proud American citizen as “authoritarian” for preferring American “conventional” life or showing “toughness” in its defense.

By the 1970s, civics courses would be largely replaced by “social studies.” The 1980s saw “market shakeups” in the textbook industry, and between 1989 and 1991, the textual content of America’s history and social studies textbooks underwent major revisions that were driven by a 1987 resolution by the California State Commission on Education. The Commission’s terms required the removal of religion from history books altogether, and simultaneously called for textual revisions to lead with diversity. The required textbook changes were accommodating to the border confusion and popular resentment that began to grow in the wake of the 1986 migrant amnesty.

In 1987, Robert Maxwell had tried to acquire Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich, the largest textbook publisher. Then in 1988, Maxwell, who reportedly was also a foreign intelligence asset, was successful at financing the takeover of McGraw-Hill, the second-largest textbook publisher, merging it with his holdings of Macmillan Inc. and Pergamon Press. Pergamon had published writings by Marcuse, Katz, Kreml, Janowitz and others.

At Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, personnel of Maxwell’s companies oversaw the California-motivated textual revamping, at a broad scale. The newly issued textbooks in 1990 implemented, in place of American pride and assertiveness of what is right, a pronounced vision of the country as a “salad bowl” where rival victim groups climb up the grievances hierarchy. By 1997, Education Week questioned the “codified” fifth-grade history textbooks from Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin as “dumbed down,” “ideological,” and “politically correct.”

The lessons taught to American pupils about their history and society were drastically shifted by a handful of large state bureaucrats and a few publishers, including a British-Israeli mogul allegedly acting for outside intelligence agencies. There had been little room for impactful input about textbook changes from parents and students, and no citizens’ vote.

In 1991, after Maxwell’s death on his yacht, he was found to have embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars out of his own employees’ pension funds. The Maxwell family would lose their web of companies due to the senior Maxwell’s global scandals, and Maxwell would be linked in history via his daughter Gislaine Maxwell’s long-term affiliation and crimes with Jeffrey Epstein, a convict for degenerate crimes against minors who is further suspected of extorting political, financial, and academic leaders.

The damage to public school learning has never been fundamentally undone, notwithstanding the industry’s and the academy’s critiques of the politically charged revised textbooks. Today, under ownership decoupled from Maxwell, McGraw-Hill and other educational publishing companies focus on AI to personalize and deepen teaching their curricula, amid some schools’ curricula remaining so politically extreme that the Supreme Court, by a 6–3 plurality, shored up the right of parents to remove their children from religiously objectionable class materials.

Families are increasingly aware that an inheritance of civilizational, cultural, spiritual, and moral knowledge has been taken away from students by a sordid tale of indoctrination by public school boards, state commissions, and multinational publishers. Yet, as Carmen Diaz Ghysels, the San Rafael School District superintendent, indicated on August 25, even a policy as basic as informing parents when anti-faith items are on the calendar, in order to allow families the freedom to stay far away from it, continues to be still “a work in progress.”

Vice president of the Marin County School Board, Mark Koerner, asked if the district is “in good earnestness saying there’s an opt-out” or “just doing the bare minimum?”

“That’s the fine line we’re walking,” said Diaz Ghysels.

“We are not allowed to keep this information,” she further said of religion-based absences. “We don’t track year-to-year, because the curriculum can change, activities can change.”

John Carroll, the Marin County superintendent of schools, said there is no requirement for districts to update policies, and the Supreme Court did not provide a mandatory process. He said there has been a “range of responses” in his county and beyond.

“Everyone’s addressing it in one way or the other,” he said. “San Rafael is right in the middle.”

Could this lukewarm mentality and slow-to-emerge policy be why families are expelling the schools from their lives?