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.

Stand Up, Speak Up

People differ on advice when facing a criminal. Some say, “Let the mugger take your handbag. It’s not worth your life.” Others say “Scream and fight. Bullies are weak and easily scared off.”

Some say, “Don’t fight a rapist and he won’t kill you.” Others say, “Fight with everything you have; if he’s willing to take that from you, he’s willing to kill you, and he’s motivated to, because you can ID him. So you have nothing to lose by fighting and everything to gain.”

Some say, “A burglar is only taking stuff; that’s not worth the death penalty.” Others say, “If he’s willing to come on your property and take your stuff, how do you know that’s all he’s willing to do? He knows you have the right to protect yourself before he risks his life to get your stuff.”

Two approaches. One says, “Submit and be a victim.” The other says, “Fight. You don’t have to be a victim.”

Today’s post is about standing up, refusing to be a victim—against some particular assaults on our freedom and civilization.

A number of stories lately give me hope, because people are standing up. When enough people do that, we start to win, and then those committing the assaults on our freedom and civilization will get scared off—back into the dark corners they crawled out of.

The main type of assault we have examples for today is Critical Race Theory. But the principles apply to the gender agenda, often tied up with CRT because of intersectionality. And it applies to other forms of tyranny as well, which might get a mention at the end.

 

Critical Race Theory Assault Response

Standing Up at School Board meetings—especially when the message gets shared—is having an impact.

Virginia is getting a lot of attention. In this first one, a Fairfax County teacher speaks at a Loudoun County school board meeting.

A teacher speaks against Critical Race Theory
at a Virginia school board meeting.
screenshot from here

·       “Virginia Teacher Eviscerates ‘Woke’ Leftist Critical Race Theory Agenda at School Board Meeting” by David Rufful, Analyzing America, June 10, 2021. 

·       “Teacher Unloads on 'Woke' CRT Agenda During Loudoun County School Board Meeting” by Sister Toldjah for RedState, June 9, 2021. 

Her speech is brief. Here’s the transcript:

I’m a Fairfax County public school teacher, and I’m going to give a message of encouragement to parents and teachers and students who are too afraid to come forward and speak.

Parents, the longer that you wait and you don’t hold your child’s schools accountable gives these guys more time to dictate what’s best for your child’s physical, mental and emotional health. Don’t be afraid to speak out for your kids, because they are voiceless and they rely on you.

You should be afraid of them rooting for socialism by the time they get to middle school.

Teachers, it may seem that our careers have come to a dead end, but I’m here to remind you, we don’t work for the school board. We work to mold the next generation of well-rounded American patriots, so don’t give up because it is up to us.

Students, you are on the front lines of these indoctrination camps. Challenge the staff when you’re presented with a ludicrous statement and do not allow anybody to tell you that you cannot accomplish anything because of your skin color or to hate yourself because of your skin color. Students, it is up to you to be the next generation of victims or victors.

And finally, to the board, this isn’t over and your policies are just as [mic was cut off].

This second one is also in Virginia, Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Mao’s cultural revolution, giving us warning:

·       “Survivor Of Mao’s China: Critical Race Theory ‘Is Racist,’ China Used ‘Wokeness’ To Install Communism” Daily Wire News, June 11, 2021. 

·       “Woman who survived Mao's purge compares critical race theory in US schools to China's Cultural Revolution in scathing speech” by Paul Sacca for The Blaze, June 10, 2021. 

·       “Virginia mom who survived Maoist China eviscerates school board's critical race theory push” by Michael Ruiz for Fox News, June 10, 2021. 

This additional Virginia story happened a while ago, but there’s new news:

·       “Judge Reinstates VA Teacher Suspended For Refusing To Affirm Trans Identity For Kids, Calls School Response ‘Vindictive’” by Jon Brown for The Daily Wire, June 8, 2021. 

Tanner Cross, an elementary school PE teacher in Loudoun County, was suspended for speaking at a school board meeting at which the board had requested opinions on the subject of pronoun policy for transgender students. But they didn’t like his opinion, so they suspended him. They had additionally restricted him from any school property, taking away any opportunity for further public comment. A judge has called them out as being vindictive.

Here’s part of Cross’s statement:

I love all of my students, but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences. I’m a teacher, but I serve God first and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa, because it’s against my religion. It’s lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it’s sinning against our God.

 

Here's one from New York:

·       “New York Mother unleashes on school board: 'You're emotionally abusing our children'” by Thomas McDonald, Independent Chronicle, June 10, 2021.  

Tatiana Ibrahim, the NY mom, told them,

You’re emotionally abusing our children and mentally abusing them. You’re demoralizing them by teaching them communist values. This is still America, ma’am. And as long as I’m standing here on this good ground Earth of God, I will fight. This is not the last of me you will see. I’m retired; I’ve got nothing else better to do.

Tatiana Ibrahim speaks at a Carmel, NY, school board meeting.
screenshot from here

This was an intense 11 minutes. At one point a school board member tried to get her to stop, because this wasn’t a “peaceful discussion.” Ibrahim responded, “No, that's your opinion. See, here we go again. This is peaceful; to me, this is peaceful. I'm not burning, looting, and murdering.” She told them she had proof that their teachers were supporting those types of behaviors, including encouraging murder of police. The board looked nonplussed. But the people there—and the people who have watched the video—are glad to see someone standing up against the misguided authority figures.

 

This one is from Bloomington, Illinois:

·       “Mother unloads on school board over young children being taught about masturbation, anal sex, transgenderism” by Phil Shiver for The Blaze, June 14, 2021.

Becky Swan confronts Illinois school board with text containing
explicit content being presented to young children.
screenshot from here

 

At the school board meeting, Becky Swan mentions that introducing sexualizing topics to young children is grooming behavior. She’s right about that. http://sphericalmodel.blogspot.com/2019/05/its-called-grooming.html  Making children suffer through these uncomfortable topics is a form of sexual harassment. Also true. After listing the explicit content topics being forced upon children at different levels (all inappropriate), Swan held up a book and said that if the content is too sensitive to be brought up at that meeting, it was too sensitive to be taught to young children.

 

Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas stood up to a school board in yet another way, to find out what CRT and gender curriculum was going to be taught to her kindergartener.

·       “Kindergartner's mom files 200 records requests on CRT, gender curriculum to force school district to respond. Board claims she's using intimidation tactics” by Sarah Taylor for The Blaze, June 4, 2021.  

·       “Mom fights anti-White training in daughter’s kindergarten class: ‘They reduce everything down’ to skin color” by Angelica Stabile for Fox News, June 3, 2021. 

Nicole Solas speaks with Tucker Carlson about getting
information on what her kindergartener would be taught.
screenshot from here

What started out as “several” records requests—the method for getting the information that the school district directed her to use—grew to 200 records requests, because she couldn’t get a straight answer from the school district about what they were going to teach her daughter.

The school board felt the heat. They threatened to sue her, accusing her of intimidating them in order to get rid of that heinous curriculum they wanted to use. At a public hearing, they shouted at her and called her racist—just as you’d expect from a bully. But she has stood firm.

Solas uses APRA, the Access to Public Records Act, which is essentially a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request. There’s a good explanation and sample request letter here. 

 

Some good things happened in Colorado. Parents spoke up, and the school board changed their minds:

·       “Colorado Mother Rebukes Critical Race Theory As ‘Nightmare’ That Needs To ‘End Now’” by Chrissy Clark for The Daily Wire, June 2, 2021. 

·       “These Parents Successfully Pressured Their School Board To Ditch Divisive Equity Training” by Georgia Howe for The Daily Wire, June 3, 2021.  This is in Douglas County, Colorado.

 

Here's an example from Florida:

·       “Black Mom Torches Critical Race Theory: It’s ‘Racist,’ It’s ‘Teaching Hate,’ Will Destroy America” Daily Wire News, June 11, 2021. 

Keisha King speaks to Florida State Board of Education.
screenshot from here

Keisha King, a Duval County parent supporting school choice and opposing divisive CRT curriculum, says,

I don’t know about you, but telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are black is racist, and saying that white people are automatically above me, my children or any child is racist as well.

 

State Actions

By the way, the State of Florida has now banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory.

·         “Florida bans use of critical race theory, ‘1619Project’ in teaching history” by Jeffrey S. Solochek for the Miami Herald, June 10 (updated June 11), 2021.  

The “1619 Project,” was a badly non-historical rewriting of American history put forth by the New York Times. President Trump banned it in September 2020 and replaced it with the “1776 Unites Curriculum,” and put in place the “1776 Commission.” But Biden switched back toward Critical Race Theory and its Marxist dogma on his first day in office. 

Florida is not the only state banning these ideas. Here are stories about Iowa, Idaho, and Oklahoma:

·       “Iowa Bans Critical Race Theory: Schools Should ‘Promote Learning, Not Discriminatory Indoctrination’” by Tim Pearce for The Daily Wire, June 9, 2021. 

·       “Red States Against Critical Race Theory/Idaho and Oklahoma pass legislation banning state-sanctioned racism in public schools.” by Christopher F. Rufo, May 3, 2021.

This next one covers Florida and others, and lists the following as considering such bans in their legislatures: Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, Arizona, Kentucky, Utah and New Hampshire.

·         “Critical Race Theory Is Banned in These States” by Chris Dutton for Newsweek, June 11, 2021. 

While Texas was on that list, the Texas legislature finished its legislative session May 31^st. Before close of session, it passed HB 3979 requiring that civics teaching must include the moral, political, and educational foundations of America and must not include CRT ideas; the bill has been sent to the Governor for signature. He has until Tuesday, June 15^th, to sign or veto the bill, or else it automatically becomes law.

Even though these states have banned the teaching of CRT, we’ve seen this before, with Common Core. They retitle and put it in anyway. Some of the laws are specific enough to specify what curriculum must include or exclude. But that doesn’t mean local districts won’t use other materials that they might not call curriculum. So parents better be vigilant about holding their local school districts accountable.

By the way, for local friends, we have a Cy-Fair Independent School District board meeting Monday, June 21, at 6:00 PM. Info here. You might want to mention that they sent out CRT materials to teachers just this past month, and we need a solemn promise that such propaganda will have no way into our schools ever again. I wrote about this here. 

Some Outcome Effects

We need to know we’re not alone in our opinions. We have a right to speak them. And things get better when we do.

Here’s an example of what outcome this damaging indoctrination has led to—but the employer isn’t giving the wokes a win:

·       “Employer says he has stopped hiring Ivy League grads: They're too 'woke,' too 'self-important,' or have been trained to stay silent when it matters” by Phil Shiver for The Blaze, June 9, 2021.

In this next story, Matt Walsh offers this opinion: 

Do you want to know why conservatives are losing the culture? Nickelodeon put out two videos in a week of a drag queen pushing gay pride on children and still most conservative parents will allow their children to watch shows on the network. That’s it. That’s why we lose.

Nickelodeon should be bankrupted. They’ve made their agenda clear. They’ve made it plain that they hate us. And if we all stopped giving them our money, they’d collapse. That’s what should happen but it won’t.

I did hear elsewhere today that Nickelodeon’s viewership is 1/3 of what it was 4 years ago. “Since July of 2017, Nickelodeon’s viewership has dropped from 1.3 million average viewers per week to a June of 2021 average of only 372,000.”  It looks like bankruptcy may be looming after all. If that happens, it will be because parents spoke by tuning out.

 

Learn Then Speak

While collecting things for this post, I learned about investigative reporter/filmmaker Christopher Rufo (he wrote the piece about Idaho and Oklahoma above). It was his investigative journalism that led President Trump to ban CRT in the federal government. He has put out some resources.

·       This “Critical Race Theory” explanatory video, which includes CRT history, what’s happening in institutions, and how to fight back. 

·       This Critical Race Theory Briefing Book.  I especially like a section called “Winning the Language War.” This free online “book” also includes links to examples, and info about passing legislation.

·       This 11-part series “Critical Race Theory in Education” in the Articles section of Rufo’s website.  Every example is jaw-dropping. These things shouldn’t be happening.

·         This transcription of Rufo's Atlantic interview on CRT. 

Rufo also wrote these two informative pieces:

·       “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It” for Hillsdale’s Imprimis, from a lecture he gave March 30, 2021. 

·       “Critical Race Theory Would Not Solve Racial Inequality: It Would Deepen It” by Christopher Rufo for the Heritage Foundation, March 23, 2021. 

 

Here’s another guide to stopping CRT in schools:

·       “Conservative think tank creates 'A to Z guide' for stopping critical race theory in schools/Former Trump official Russ Vought leads effort to train anti-CRT parents” by Matt Leach for Fox News, June 8, 2021. This includes a free 18-page downloadable booklet by Vought on what CRT is and how to stop it.  

And, because terminology changes whenever a term becomes negative, here is Vought's list of terminology that often accompanies CRT ideas:

·       “List: Critical Race Theory Terms” from the Center for Renewing America, a Russ Vought website. 

 

Additional Stand Taking

What is giving me hope right now is the accumulation of people standing up and speaking up. CRT and the LGBTQ agenda are worth standing up against—even though you get maligned and cancelled. It’s beginning to make a difference.

Here are some other examples of people standing up against the tyranny we’re facing—from CRT and other arenas of tyranny.

·       “Houston Hospital Nurses Stage Walkout Over Vaccine Mandate” by Holly Hansen for The Texan, June 8, 2021. 

·       “117 employees sue Houston Methodist overCOVID-19 vaccine requirement” KHOU-11 News, May 28, 2021. 

·       “Breaking News: Harris County Voter Applied for a Ballot by Mail—29 Years After Her Death” by Colleen Vera for Texas Trash Talk, June 12, 2021. Colleen, a friend of mine, keeps finding these examples. One FOIA request at a time. She has given the state AG’s office quite a lot of work to do. 

·       “‘We Are Going To Expose You’: Vets Crenshaw, Cotton Create Whistleblower Doc To Combat ‘Woke’ Efforts In U.S. Military” by Hank Berrien for The Daily Wire, May 30, 2021. 

·       “Cotton Reveals Military Whistleblower Complaints On Woke Training, Biden’s SecDef Insists, ‘Diversity, Equity And Inclusion Is Important To This Military’” by Hank Berrien for The Daily Wire, June 11, 2021. 

·       Dan Crenshaw has this Whistleblower Form for military to report complaints on Woke Training.  He posted about it on Facebook here. 

·       “How Critical Race Theory is Sabotaging Our Schools” Rep. Dan Crenshaw on his Hold These Truths podcast interviews Dr. Richard Johnson of Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Booker T. Washington Initiative. 

 

Think of information as your ammo. Your voice is your weapon. Use it carefully and wisely. But use it.

The Parental Right to Educate

We’ve been covering education topics for a few posts now, mostly in preparation for current related news. Last Friday’s post presented the concept of the parental right and responsibility to educate their children. Monday’s post covered definitions of curriculum and textbooks, to take away some of the mystique of the experts. Wednesday’s post covered more skepticism of centralized control, revealing the lack of connection between accreditation and educational outcomes.



The Romeike family in 2010
photo from NY Times story

Today I want to cover a particular case. I mentioned this case back in October 2011. A German family, the Romeikes, an Evangelical Christian family with six children, found that the German public schools did not meet their family’s educational needs. They found that local private schools (which, in Germany, are required to teach the government dictated curriculum used in public schools) were an even worse environment. They came slowly to look into homeschooling, which is illegal in Germany, and has been since long before WWII. A few people do it undercover. (I actually know an American homeschooling family who worked in Germany for a year, that managed to stay under the radar during their stay.) The Romeikes finally saw it as their best option, believing that, if caught, the outcome would be fines they were willing to pay.

It turned out the fines were onerous, and the government threatened to take the children away from the parents, and possibly imprison the parents as well.

They did the legal thing; they went through the legal system in Germany first. Failing there, and with the threat of family dissolution looming, they came to the United States in 2008 and requested asylum. That was granted in 2010, by a judge in Tennessee, who spoke strongly in favor of their parental rights.

There was reason to rejoice, but it didn’t last long. The Department of Homeland Security (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under DHS) stepped up to insist the judge had ruled incorrectly, and that the family should not be granted asylum.

There are some specific guidelines for qualifying for asylum. Being persecuted for religious reasons is one; so is being part of a specific targeted social group, which it is argued homeschoolers are. The judge in his ruling spelled out why the family qualified, so he was following the law, even though circumstances were unusual.

The case comes up for appeal before the Sixth Circuit Court on April 23^rd. It’s unclear to me how the case is set up. The Romeikes won the original case, so no need for appeal. So the government must have stepped in to insist on appeal, forcing the family to re-defend their position.

If this were simply a question of asylum, there might be some conceivable reason for pressing the question. If we allowed just anyone feeling unhappy in their home country to come here, we would be hard-pressed to accommodate the rush. But this family has been here since 2008. During the two years it took to get the ruling in their favor, they were productive and contributing members of society. During the additional three years, they have continued their noble behavior—and there has not been a sudden increase in similar requests for asylum based on homeschooling prejudices (or even religious prejudices) from Germany or elsewhere.

So the administration has stepped in, pretty much out of the blue, targeting a clearly harmless family for deportation—when the known outcome will be termination of custody of their own children, plus hefty fines and prison terms. Not only will they lose the right to educate their children as they see fit, they will lose the right to have a relationship with their children, and will have their lives essentially ruined and livelihood ended. That may not be a death threat, as with many asylum cases, but it’s pretty severe.

This is an administration that just set free a large number of illegal aliens who had been incarcerated. They have sued the state of Arizona for even asking people taken into custody for other infractions whether they have legal status. “Everyone is welcome, and we hope you’ll be voting for us soon,” is practically the announced immigration policy.

So why go to so much trouble to expel this particular family that came here legally?

I’ve wondered if there was pressure from Germany, which is an ally, and would appear somewhat embarrassed by the accusation of oppression that the request for asylum implies. There may be something behind the scenes, but there’s no mention of a request for extradition or any such thing in the stories I’ve read. And it seems unlikely there would be such a request. Germany’s stated purpose for the anti-homeschooling law is that they want to discourage factions and separateness within the country; having the family leave means problem solved.

Whether there’s some backroom discussion with Germany or not, this prosecution by the federal government clearly exposes this administration’s belief: there is no parental to right to see to the care, control, and upbringing of children, nor is this administration willing to protect any so-called parental rights.

Not all natural rights are spelled out in the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The reason even those are amendments is that natural rights were understood and accepted, so much so they didn’t need to be mentioned. It was fear that people might someday become corrupt enough not to understand and accept the natural God-given rights that led to the addition of the Bill of Rights. But it was so far from their thinking that anyone would come to believe someone other than parents owned the responsibility for raising the next generation that they didn’t even think to spell it out. Parents choosing how to best raise their children is simply part of a person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Only in severe cases of abuse and neglect would society (or government) have a role to step in to protect the child.

But this administration is more corrupt than the founders imagined. The insistence on challenging the Romeike decision is a way to codify the administration’s belief that parents do not have rights concerning raising their children—the government wants to make it clear that they believe they have the right to control, to indoctrinate.

Inalienable rights cannot be given up. But just as people can lose their freedom to slavery, any inalienable right can succumb to usurpers if people do not stand strong against the tyrannists. Usually the loss happens little by little. “Free” public schools have been used for the incremental usurpation of parental rights. This administration is testing how far they have already come toward the tyrannist plan to dictate what and how children are taught.

When this federal government puts forth a curriculum (as it has with Common Core), claiming it is best for all our children, it doesn’t matter what is in the curriculum and whether it could be effective as a teaching tool. Such curriculum must be rejected, because the issue is parental rights—and we know that any curriculum they provide comes from the worldview that parents do not have rights.

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* You can learn more on the Romeike case at these links: this story from 2010, this story from The Blaze March 15th, and this video with HSLDA, who are helping to defend the Romeikes.