A usually astute and beneficent friend of long-standing posted that on Facebook recently.
I’d love to know what Marxist Ethics Corrupter wrote it, so I can hold him or her up to the derision, contempt and shunning such a sinister argument deserves. The obvious smoking gun in the statement is “what society needs to know.”
Who determines what society needs to know? Current public schools, administrators and teachers have concluded that society needs to know that the United States was based on slavery, that its Founders were villains, that U.S. is currently a racist nation that citizens “of color” cannot succeed in without special assistance, that sexual identify is fluid and that socialism is the only morally defensible form of government.
None of that belongs in a public school curriculum. Public school exists to teach skills and critical thinking: it should no more be teaching political cant than religion. The totalitarian who issued that poison above is advocating indoctrination, and worse, indoctrination by people who I don’t know, trust, or believe have the education, perspective or intelligence to decide what “society needs to know.”
Parents, the community and schools can agree that productive and responsible members of a free society need to acquire a core knowledge of history, science, mathematics, literature, culture, geography, civics, logic and ethics, and must learn to communicate them through the written and spoken word. When education crosses into ideological indoctrination, however, beyond a basic acceptance of the values of the nation in which they live, parents have not only a right but a duty to oppose it, stop it, and cauterize the corruption so it never grows back.
Parents pay taxes that support public schools. They have, again, a right and obligation to ensure that these supposed educational institutions are not undermining their children’s values, perspective and character to achieve political agendas.
Are there professionals more arrogant, irresponsible and unjustly convinced of their own wisdom and virtue that educators? Journalists, obviously, but not more—I’d rate their failings and those of educators as a dead heat. Both are doing terrible damage to American society. It is also difficult to say which is currently more destructive, but both are corrupt and dangerous, and getting worse.
Ethics Alarms 
Well said, Jack. What’s wrong with modern education? When educators teach something about the United States, they prefer niche history ~ the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans. The idea of e pluribus unum is anathema to them. Teaching American history ~ our common story ~ as opposed to group-identity history, is rejected as ethnocentric and jingoistic by today’s educators.
Thomas Jefferson, who greatly valued education said, “If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.”
He could not envision what education has degraded to today.
The problem this person faces is that public education is carried out by the state. As a result, it is inherently political because the state is political. As long as school boards are elected bodies, they are subject to political forces. That means that children are taught what society thinks they need to know. But, what society thinks they need to know is driven quite a bit from what parents think they need to know, because parents are part of the political body that determines the goals of public education.
The retort to this statement would be: if you want to control what children are taught, open a private school. Ironically, this was the exact suggestion by the original poster.
In other words, if you think you can exclude parents from the content of public education, you have to take democracy out of the educational system. But, you can really only do that by setting up an entirely undemocratic state.
-Jut
This exemplifies the problems that have led my wife and I (well, mostly my wife) to homeschool. The parents have a say in what schools teach because parents are the primary educators of their children. That a vast swath of parents have abdicated their responsibility does not invalidate this. We have watched as the state has continue to push itself in between children and parents for fifty years if not longer, and the results have been dreadful when we look at how well educated our children are. But the path has been insidious: make public school free, then make it compulsory, then push parents further and further out. Tag team this with the breakdown of the family that has come out of the sexual revolution, so-called feminine liberation, no-fault divorce, policies disguised as aid to single mothers that incentivize keeping fathers away, and we have a scenario where families depend on the schools to keep their children supervised. The rich can afford to send children to private schools, but many middle class families, especially if they have three or more children, can’t afford private schools without scholarships and subsidies. (This is why vouchers are so enticing to families that would like to send children outside the public schools.) While I won’t say the government deliberately created the situations that have led to the family breakdown, the government has shown no interest in helping the family, and the dependency on the public schools is definitely an outcome the government has liked.
My father and I have been reading up on Catholic Social Teaching, and it is remarkable what Pope Leo XIII had to say on these topics back in late 19th century. His analysis of the state interjecting itself between parents and children and teaching children perverse things without parental approval or knowledge were prescient. I mention this to acknowledge that my understanding of these problems being only 50 years old is very limited. It seems to be the pattern for more than a century before then, and has only deeply infected the United States slightly more recently. The answer has to be parents reclaiming their natural rights to be primary educators of their children. This doesn’t mean homeschooling, but I don’t see a more economical means unless parents get themselves onto school boards, get the school district to accept loss of federal funds for not toe-ing the line with the government, and return the public schools to the classical liberal education that made the bulwark of education from the founding of the country to the mid-twentieth century.
My brother and I benefitted from being educated in Catholic schools from K through 12. My parents paid our tuition, scant though it likely was by contemporary standards. I’ve always thought the idea of a group setting up and running their own schools separate and apart from the government was a great way to ensure the group’s children were properly educated. I went to a private college that had its beginnings as a church run school for Indians. Also, Catholic law school. I’ve long thought the Irish Catholic tradition of a fairly rigorous education was one of the great traditions.
The statement above is most likely the attitude of the vast majority of people in the public education industrial complex. They’re Commies, and they’re vicious.
“The answer has to be parents reclaiming their natural rights to be primary educators of their children. ”
To a degree I agree with you, Ryan. COVID lockdowns provided parents with a look into the materials and programs taught in schools, which was eye-opening.
But, the issue is bigger than parents on school boards. There are effectively two major school textbook publishing companies, the biggest in California. Textbooks are geared toward the biggest school systems, which would be California and New York. The materials included in the textbooks, then, reflect the interests of those systems. Smaller schools don’t have the political or economic clout to provide alternative textbooks (perhaps that will change with the advent and increased use of ebooks but the result remains to be seen). So, when a system like Texas purchases its textbooks, it only has a limited choice available and has to adapt its curriculum to those materials. The Catholic school system should have clout but oftentimes the private or parochial schools in say, Texas, are bound to a degree by state rules and regulations.
jvb
There are effectively two major school textbook publishing companies, the biggest in California. Textbooks are geared toward the biggest school systems, which would be California and New York. The materials included in the textbooks, then, reflect the interests of those systems.
Truer words were never spoken.
I believe text books are one reason people cannot reason. Students rely on text books as fonts of truth. For the most part textbooks are a collection of consensus opinions on certain issues. When the consensus changes by virtue of changing political winds then everything winds up bastardized.
I too have have been guilty of succumbing to consensus thought when I taught Economics. Tariffs were always considered something that would backfire. However, the consensus required the assumption that we have a perfectly competitive market place and that all goods are equally substitutable. In that perfect world tariffs will backfire but we do not live in that perfect world and thus using tariffs as a bargaining tool can make sense. They do not make sense as a primary source of revenue.
I now rely on primary data and competing opinions on matters. I will not assume that “my guy” knows what is right and “your guy” is either an idiot or a liar. We lament the quality of the end product of our public schools. Perhaps part of the problem is the reliance on text books instead of primary sources.
Spot on analysis and commentary, like always, Chris.
As for tariffs, Brett Baier asked Harris about them leading to the talking point that the consumer pays the costs associated with tariffs, while at the same arguing that we need to soak multinationals, corporations, and the top 1% with crushi . . . erm . . . confiscato . . . erm . . . their fair share of taxes to assist consumers with their monthly payments. It is clear that economics is not our Veep’s strong suit.
jvb
As Tom Cruise’s convict brother (David Strathairn) in “The Firm” asks Holly Hunter when she replies to his compliment about her “crooked little mouth” by saying, “Well, it’s not my best feature”: “Well, what is????”
when you realize tariffs are an easily avoidable tax by both producer and consumers then the idea that consumers will bear the cost is arguable.
Complicated further by the fact that parents are required by law to send the children to school. With legal penalties attached. Theoretically, private and homeschooling options are equally valid options, but oddly enough, the administrators and bureaucrats who run the public schools are… resistant to accommodating competition. When the government mandates that you educate your kids, but you have a say in what they learn, there is balance. When they mandate that you educate your kids, AND that they have total control over the curriculum, there is tyranny.
The mandate of the education system, in whatever form, arises out of the child’s need to be educated, and the concomitant duty to meet that need.
So, whose duty is it? For pretty much the whole history of Western Civilization, the duty to see that a child’s needs are met falls primarily on parents. It is on them to decide what needs to be provided and when, and how best to provide it. A parent’s judgement is not absolute, however. Society writ large sets forth certain minimum standards that must be met, but as a rule only intervenes if parents fall well short of those standards.
Applying these principles to education, we find that:
Well, are parents’ part of society?
Yes.
Do members of society have a right to petition the government for redress of grievances?
Yes.
So how does it follow that parents have no say in what society teaches in public school?
humina, humina, humina
I’m going to be contrary! It’s my job now.
“Who determines what society needs to know?” is a useless question, unless posed literally and seeking an answer.
Parents cannot possibly a la carte what their children are going to learn unless they are prepared to homeschool. I have nothing against homeschooling, in fact, aside from some socialization problems later, it’s probably a better option that most public schools. But relatively few people have the resources to make it happen.
Which means that your kids will most likely be sharing a room with other kids, in a setting where, ostensibly, there are minimum standards and an approved curriculum. Who manages those standards and decides those curriculums? Who decides what people operating in society needs to know? I don’t know. toss a busted pool cue in a circle of nerds vying for the job and see who comes out alive, I don’t care… Someone has to do it.
And in most cases, the people tasked with those decisions are your local school board… Which is an elected body, and proof positive that local elections will effect you and your family orders of magnitude more than federal ones.
If you and your likeminded friends can put forward someone with values in line with yours, and garner enough votes to elect them, then Mazel Tov, you did a democracy, and it worked. If not, then sympathies, but you did a democracy, and it worked. Push for school choice.
Could THIS be where that quote originated? (Michigan democrat party, early 2022, later retracted after pushback)
My niece is on a school board in Connecticut, and is appalled at how little power and control they actually have. So much of curriculum is driven by the states and the feds, with money (strings) attached. They and the parents can only nibble around the edges, but can at least prevent certain things, like sex education for kindergartners and pornography in the libraries.
Catholic schools are certainly a better choice at the elementary and secondary levels, but look what has happened to Notre Dame – it might be better than Harvard, but is still a liberal stronghold. I cannot help wondering why so many Catholics and Jews are still Democrats.
Grandma Lisa