Schools Are Not Families

We’ve already slipped down the slippery slope. How did it happen? A little at a time, and then quickly.

Americans have always been a pretty literate people. Back at the time of the founding, when the Federalist Papers were editorials written in newspapers, the regular farmer or shopkeeper would read them thoroughly, and discuss them with their neighbors. Any ideas you had about widespread illiteracy in that period of time is mostly erroneous.

Almost everyone was homeschooled—which meant women were literate as well, in case you were wondering. Beyond the home, neighborhoods would pool resources and hire a teacher. When a child got a bit older, he’d go into the family business or find an apprenticeship. Homeschooling is a pattern for educating the next generation for some six thousand years.

Public schools were invented in the industrial age, patterned after factories, to remove from the streets uncared-for children of poor factory workers.

Then John Dewey got involved, with the intent of using public schooling as a way to indoctrinate the next generation.

As M.D. Aeschliman put it, in a review[i] of the book John Dewey and Decline of American Education,

Eschewing our existing institutions and what he called the “idolatry of the US Constitution,” Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of “the Great Community,...” Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of [Walt] Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism.

Dewey’s acolytes have been doing it ever since.

If you think free public schooling is your right, remember that “free” things from government are not free; they cost you tax money, your freedom, and sometimes even higher costs.

So, what is it schools are indoctrinating students with? The names keep changing. But the general idea is that kids should not trust their parents; they should not believe in the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization; they should not believe in God; and they should not think for themselves.

Not all teachers buy into this indoctrination plan. Many are not only well-meaning; they are good people who will teach good and useful things regardless of what higher ups tell them.

Many others want to just teach their subject matter and help kids, but they’re tied up in way too many requirements from decisionmakers above them—including in particular the teachers’ unions.

Many teachers—and nearly all today—have gone through indoctrination themselves and may not recognize what should not be inculcated into our children. The language has been corrupted in a way that it takes a clear thinker to slog through—and clear thinking hasn’t been taught in K-12 or universities for quite a while.

Those of you who are older—say, 55+—you might be thinking public schools were good enough for you, so they ought to be good enough for students today. You’d be wrong. Can a student get a decent public school education today? Yes, but not without a bunch of unwanted baggage along the way. So it depends on how much the family counters those things successfully at home—while the schools are subtly undermining trust in parents.

If you need to put so much time and energy into countering the bad influence of school, why not just do the schooling yourself? It’s not rocket science. Before the historically recent invention of public schools, practically everyone learned to read and do basic math at home. Nearly every parent felt capable.

In fact, children are designed to learn in a family setting—so much better than in a factory setting. Children learning at their own rate, among children who are at completely different learning levels, and learning each thing until they’ve mastered it before going on to the next concept, enjoying much one-on-one attention from a parent who loves them and cares about their education—that is ideal for practically every child. When a school looks at ways to improve actual learning for a child, they talk about smaller class sizes, tutoring for those not keeping up, and other ways to mitigate the shortcomings of the factory institution.

If it were only a matter of public schools not doing as well as a family, at least as a society we could talk about tradeoffs, especially for families that can’t afford to dedicate a parent to schooling the kids at home. Unfortunately, this is the least of the problems of public schools.

They haven’t been trying to replicate the teaching style of families. They have been trying to replace families.

Sometimes it sounds like they’re doing this with good reason. Shouldn’t schools teach children good behavior while they have them all those hours? Certainly they should socialize in a way that kids learn not to bully, or not to make fun of kids who are different. But this has metastasized way beyond what we want: good manners and being kind and respectful.

Have you heard the term Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?

A friend here in Texas passed along an attempt at defining it last November. The original post was written by someone named Emily Swanson, whom I know nothing about, but I gather she is from Utah, in the Jordan School District area (the neighboring district to where I grew up and went to school). She says this: 

The SEL standard is set by an organization called Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The CASEL framework (pictured below) is clear. Classrooms—Schools—Families and Caregivers—then Communities—make up a child’s experience, in that order, according to their chart. The curriculum is designed to follow this pattern.

Here is how this shows up in the Second Step Curriculum [an SEL curriculum used in Utah and popular across the country]: When parents are mentioned, it is only as part of the outer support system or as a negative. All examples of families used are negative and elicit negative emotions in the child. All positive examples are of school teachers or staff and elicit positive emotions in the child. Families are mentioned as possible members of the student’s support system alongside friends and the community (as if friends or the community were going to pay for your child’s music or sports or college). The curriculum is systemically designed to get children to rely on the school and not their families.

SEL diagram, found here

The purpose is to supplant the family. Not supplement family, particularly for children whose home situation is less than ideal, but to undermine functional families.

I had been thinking that SEL was just another thing we had to worry about in schools—in addition to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the LGBT agenda that is sexualizing our kids in perverted ways. Now there’s this too. I thought it was using health programs and school counseling to access kids in private ways without parental knowledge.

But last night on Glenn Beck’s special, he talked about it in a different structural way than I had pictured. SEL is the umbrella used to incorporate CRT and CSE—an acronym new to me, meaning Comprehensive Sexuality Education, in other words both the LGBT agenda and the pro-sexualization we’ve been aware of for a while. (See here and here.) Beck drew a triangle with SEL at the top, connecting all three of these acronyms.

Glenn Beck, "Project Groomer"
screenshot from here

As he explains it, the CDC is involved—the Center for Disease Control. They seem to have “discovered” a thing they call ACE—adverse childhood experiences. (Sick of the acronyms yet?) Beck says, “Every kid can be grouped and categorized for something: racism, oppression, gender, whatever they need.” In other words, they discover a right to intervene with your child. Every child. For their good, they would tell you, if they tell you at all. And they have a sort of slogan: “Whole school; whole community; whole child.” They are using the school to raise the child—in a way that not only denies the parent that right but undermines the parent’s ability to do so.

ACEs are the CDC's excuse to intervene. Some, such as discrimination
or community disruption, could encompass just about everyone.
screenshot from here

So they’ll say, “We’re not teaching CRT,” or “We’re not teaching CSE.” Because they’re just wholistically “caring” for the child.

As Swanson says at the end of her post,

Of course we all want kids to learn the tools of goal setting, personal responsibility and problem solving. We need to reframe it, however, with the family at the core of a child’s life and the school and community supporting the family.

When you let the schools do the “caring,” who’s really doing that? Outside organizations such as CASEL—that’s Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. And who are they collaborating with? Planned Parenthood and the CDC. Add in the Department of Education and teachers’ unions, and you’ve got a pretty huge cabal trying to take ownership of your children and claim you should just step back and let the experts handle it their way.

Parents are waking up. But we haven’t been equipped to even understand the enemy. We’ve been fighting only a part of the enemy.

Glenn Beck showed a statement from Austin ISD (independent school district):

“In Austin ISD we believe that Social Emotional Learning is at the heart of equity-centered systems and structures.” Oh, that’s great.

See, SEL ties it all together. And that’s the driver of the “whole school, whole community, whole child” thing. And they admit it in their own curriculum publications. CRT and CSE are just parts of the pie. So, when we’re fighting one, they’re getting away with everything else. The Social Emotional Learning is how they’re getting it all done. We’ve been fighting an incomplete partial battle, focusing just on CRT or sex ed.

SEL is being implemented in Austin ISD, in Texas
screenshot from here

How do you fight the whole comprehensive enemy? With everything you’ve got. Sit in your child’s classroom every day if you have to. Be at every school board meeting. Pressure the legislature to outlaw the concepts underlying all of those acronyms: SEL, CRT, CSE, ACE—and add in DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The whole thing, when you connect the dots, is designed to create a transformed society—to create obedient, non-thinking units that can be forced quite willingly to do whatever the tyrants want them to do. Report parents who disagree? Yes. Report friends who have different opinions? Yes. I’m sure you can think up a few more examples after what we’ve seen during the pandemic, especially if you’ve studied 20^th Century totalitarian regimes.

If you thought math classes were safe from the SEL framework, you were mistaken.
screenshot from here

Glenn Beck titled his report “Project Groomer.” The opposition laughs about that use of the word groomer. It’s hard to convince parents that every child’s teacher is a pedophile. But that’s not what the word really means. Yes, there’s a lot of sexualization going on, especially in the CSE corner. You might think of it as slowly boiling the frog.

Back when we talked (here) to a Houston mother, Kelly Litvak, whose daughter had been trafficked into the sex trade, we learned the steps of grooming:

1.          Befriend—to get the target to see the groomer as someone to trust.

2.          Intoxicate—to cause inability to think clearly combined with causing friction at home.

3.          Alienate—to drive a wedge between target and family and their core values.

4.          Isolate—to separate the target from old friends who held their original core values.

5.          Desensitize—to confuse the target’s moral compass, making the previously unthinkable seem common or even normal.

6.          Capitalize—to take the target into control by the groomer, and subject to sex slavery.

Four of the six are being done by schools. You might add in causing an inability to think clearly, step 2, but without the intoxicants. And the actual sex enslavement, step 6, may not be the goal. But control of that child for life is.

That’s a lot of grooming behavior.

If you found that a family friend had been doing these steps with your child, what would you do? Hopefully you would refrain from murder. You would sever ties, and contact the police to get the perpetrator prosecuted.

You wouldn’t say, “Well, a lot of the time this friend is doing good things with my child; and I sure do appreciate him taking the child off my hands while I work.” You wouldn’t let your children be subject to this dangerous, injurious grooming another day.

The quickest solution is to pull your kids out of public schools. If you feel trapped, then you’ll have to do all the hard things.

Get informed. And get active.

My kids are no longer in school (and we pulled them out to homeschool for ten years). But my grandchildren are in public schools. And I am a taxpayer here. So I’m active where I believe I can do something useful.

This week I contacted my school board members asking them to adopt the new TEA model policy for selecting and removing materials from school libraries. This will increase transparency and better respect parental rights, and will require a district librarian to read all materials before they can be accepted, which currently is not always done. (Read a Texas Scorecard article here.) This issue came up in my school district this month at the school board meeting. (I wrote about it here.)

This morning I got notified of a need related to the upcoming Texas Library Association conference (program here).

Certainly some of it could be useful. But here are some of the highlights:

·       Ibram X Kendi: CRT author, teaching kids to be “anti-racists” (i.e., racists, especially against whites)–keynote speaker.

·       Justin Johnson/Alyssa Edwards: drag queen/performer that coaches KIDS–evening keynote/performer.

·       Jenna Sky: former MissGayUSA–featured speaker.

·       Nadine Strossen: past president of the ACLU and advisor on legislative policy.

·       A speaker from the Dallas Foundation, primary funder of the Dallas Morning News Education Lab, which has published no less than four articles critical of parent concerns over sexually obscene content in libraries. Their research was used by an activist teacher in Austin to target independent school board candidates all around the state and citizens organizing through PACs to fight transparency and accountability issues in Texas schools.      

It may be too late, but you can try calling the school board to squelch plans to send librarians from your district to this indoctrination camp—at your expense.

Something new is likely to show up tomorrow.

Swanson mentioned some places to help get yourself educated:

·        Committee for  Children, Second Step resources (to read them yourself)  

·        Parent toolkit to reject CRT, from Heritage Action 

I’ve had a few others on my list:

·        Christopher Rufo has a Critical Race Theory Briefing Book (online resource) here.

·        Christopher Rufo provides The Anti-CRT Parent Guidebook here.

·        Charles Lehman offers this Toolkit for Concerned Parents.

·        Jim Copland offers Model Legislation.

·        Michael Hartney makes the case for moving off-cycle school board elections to on-cycle, in order to empower parents, in this research paper.

·        Heritage Action has launched a site called SaveOurSchools, to help people fight CRT in their local schools.

o   SaveOurSchools provides a list of Critical Race Theory terms that may be used in our schools, here.

·        Whose Children Are They is a full-length documentary shown in area theaters Monday, March 14. Trailer here. Now available here. 

Whose children they are shouldn’t even be a question; they are the parents’ children, and the parents’ responsibility.

Civilization depends on strong, loving families raising their own children. Any institution trying to supplant the family can only lead away from civilization and into savagery. And that is no longer a vague possibility; that is what our children are experiencing at the hands of the indoctrinators—the groomers.

Schools cannot be families; they cannot replace families. And we’d better force them to get out the way of our families—if it is not already too late.

---

[i] “Permanent Revolution” (Review), by M.D. Aeschliman, review of the book John Dewey and Decline of American Education, by Henry T. Edmondson III, National Review, April 24, 2006, pp. 56-58.