Here’s the union that represents ‘educators’ responsible for teaching 600,000 Los Angeles kids, celebrating May Day in collaboration with Students for Justice in Palestine and other Left-oriented groups.
Here’s a ‘Model Curriculum’ for second grade and below:
And here are Girl Scouts in St Louis, teaching kids to chant ‘Free Palestine’ like zombies. Video.
Will it be any surprise if the kids who are subject to this kind of indoctrination turn out to behave like these ‘protestors’?
And/or this UPenn crowd reacting to raw footage of the Oct 7 massacre with cries of “liar liar colonizer”? Video
Conquest’s Second Law, also called O’Sullivan’s Law, is that every organisation that is not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing. The old examples given were the Episcopal Church, the Ford Foundation, and Habitat for Humanity. Even then, in the 90s when I read it in National Review, the Girl Scouts were already listed among that group.
Like the song says, you must carefully teach the children to hate.
Looking at that May Day poster… what is it with the radical leftists and COVID masks? It’s not for hiding identity. So what specific mental illness is driving this?
As far as the kids. Over the past 4 years we’ve had in our schools CRT/Woke, Queer and Transgender, an overall slathering of Malthusian and Green New Deal cant so why not “settler colonial” historical revisionism? Oh and I forgot teaching pre-school kids about sexuality.
At this point we should assume that any lefty intellectual trend is going to make it into kids education. There is a solid core of teachers, administrators, and intellectuals who see themselves as modern-day Jesuits in normalizing all the radical creeds among the young and as means of transforming society – and on our tax dollar. We can play whack-a-mole in ridding curriculum of this stuff but as long as we have that core of revolutionaries in teaching professions, unions, bureaucracy, and in the teacher colleges this is going to be an ongoing problem.
It’s important to fight them through the school boards and state levels, but until we both eliminate that core of say (to throw out a number) of 10,000 radicals in this is just keep coming back. Eliminate the core/cadre, eliminate the perception of the radicals as the strong horse, and it all collapses.
The good news is that there has been solid moves toward this. Grass-roots organizations like Moms for Liberty. Red state legislation to ban certain curriculum (which makes for a good holding action) and longer-tern moves like school choice (vouchers, charter schools) and alternate certification pathways that bypass the radicalized teach colleges
As an information warfare campaign that everyone can get behind, I would start with Randi Weingarten. What a pathetic figure. Hold her up to well-deserved ridicule as bait and then go after those who defend her.
Public education is unlikely to remove these radical ideological efforts, as well as the lack of accountability for student lack of learning without school choice (including home schooling) and elimination of the Department of Education/national funding to states for this rot. My wish list includes striping the “teacher” unions’ power.
Death6
Sometimes I wonder if Conquest’s Law was enabled by the right’s embrace of libertarianism and “wanting to be left alone”. If you don’t participate in these organizations, what do you expect to happen?
It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the “public schools” stopped being about educating the students or best interests of the students for a long time. If the long standing pathological aversion to any accountability in relation to student performance wasn’t a clue, the hysteria surrounding the covidiocy and reopening the schools long after it was perfectly clear that no one under the age of about 40 had anything more than a cold to deal with.
Whenever the complete failure nevertheless becomes evident, the answer is always more money. More and fancier buildings, smaller class sizes with more teachers and aids to carry the crippling workload and most especially, more money for “educators”. The massive failures in school system after school system are in spite of the fact that most now require advanced degrees for all their teachers. For all the Dr. Jills out there, PhD stands for; “piled higher and deeper” and nowhere is this more true than education.
The answer to the garbage that David shows is; first completely eliminate the teachers unions. Better yet, eliminate the public schools, let the parents procure whatever education they feel is necessary. Those that choose none will not be doing worse than those depending on the present schools.
@ mishu – I think that is at least partly correct. Not just with libertarianism, but with frustrations in general, the Right is at least somewhat more likely to bail quickly and go elsewhere. Liberals stay in the denomination and try to get a little more change next year. Their confidence that they are on “the right side of history” may drive this more than we ordinarily credit. There are reasons – and not just violence and repression, that communism held on so long even when it was failing. (We forget that the falling oil prices gave us a big assist in the late 80s on undermining Russia. Had they weathered that, who knows how much longer they would have lasted?) Communists had a vision of the New Socialist Man, the better world just over the horizon, comrade. Conservatives are by definition trying to hang on to things and keep them from going away. It’s a different vision.
WRT the schools, I do take heart in the fact that I didn’t absorb the values my teachers were trying to put into me in the 60s and 70s, and today’s students aren’t likely to either. The broader culture and its fashions are a bigger draw.
I think K-12 education is one of those decisive forces in social change. The school experience has large impact, even indirectly, just given the sheer amount of time children spend there in the presence of those who are nominally authority figures. That impact is reinforced by other influences such as social media and entertainment.
Social change is cohort replacement, when you see changing social attitudes it is usually (almost always) due to new generations entering rather than people changing their minds in a significant way. You say this in the radical change among Gen-Z attitudes toward and identification with LGBT as factor in changing societal views; it’s not so much because of changing attitudes among Boomers and Gen-X.
Values and attitudes are impressed on people at an early age and while those values and attitudes may shift over time, there usually is a tether to the past. There will (probably) by a lessening in those LGBT attitudes as Gen Z ages, but you will not get them “back” but will remain to same extend a weakening in traditional American culture.
That’s how the revolutionary Left thinks and why its capture of K-12 is so important. Not only is each generation of students as a whole more radical, but it is permanently less inclined to traditional values as there is little of an emotional frame of reference to return. The Jesuits have operated the same way for more than 500 years. The revolutionary Left also has the traditional Marxist view of society, where all elements of culture, education, law etc…. mutually reinforce a given view.
The Left holds a dominant position among all the cultural influences and even those young people who don’t buy into the dogmatic tripe understand where the power is and so shut up. Part of the “far right” and MAGA epithet is to show who the undesirable element and where the power lies, so you go along to get along. Think of Bin Laden’s reference to the “strong horse” and how power reinforces. A few years ago there was a student walkout among several northern Virginia high schools to protest policies regarding mandatory parental notification of children’s gender preferences. Nearly 5,000 kids participated and while several commentators asked how many supported the protest and how many just wanted to get out of class, the point was everyone knew what the appropriate stance was; nobody was going to be a social outcast for supporting the walkout. As for opposing it?
Mike, yes.
Leftism is a religion, a very successful one.
Even with the reforms conservatives envision for educational and other institutions, any mass movement favoring individual rights and the American open society would probably be a work of generations. Young Americans emerging from such a movement might have significantly different beliefs on public issues than Boomer/X conservatives do.
One trend that may not be widely enough appreciated is the growth of traditional religious communities. Orthodox Jews, LDS and other religious subgroups tend to have large families. A US population divided among a mostly secular majority, and significant minorities of culturally confident, politically and socially conservative religious subgroups, might be much different than the US population that those of us who grew up in the 20th Century think of as normal.
It’s not that the schools aren’t teaching anything, they just aren’t teaching what we thought we wanted them to.:
https://nypost.com/2024/05/11/us-news/nyc-female-public-school-teacher-allegedly-performed-oral-sex-on-a-student-still-teaches/