Written by Larry Sand

According to data released by Education Week, America’s government-run schools lost almost 1.3 million students this year. (Delaware, Illinois, and North Carolina didn’t supply enrollment statistics, so the true number is probably somewhat higher.) The downtick was due to the Covid pandemic and its overwrought response, including draconian lockdowns and subsequent forced digital learning – mostly occurring in school districts with strong teachers unions.

While undoubtedly some of the “missing” kids will return when schools open their doors in August and September, to be sure many will not. And for those who don’t, increasing numbers will have more choices than ever.

As EdChoice Director of Policy Jason Bedrick notes, 14 states have enacted 18 new or expanded educational choice policies so far this year. Additionally, it’s expected that six additional states will usher in new or expanded choice programs. On a national level, Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee has introduced the Children Have Opportunities in Classrooms Everywhere Act, which would “modernize how, and to whom, we distribute our K-12 resources.” Lee explains that his bill “would allow low-income families with children in grades K-12 to apply for federal education funds that they can choose to put toward the public schools in which their children are enrolled or toward an education savings account, known as a 529 account.” (Education savings accounts (ESAs) allow parents to pull their children from a public school and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted, but multiple, uses.)

Additionally, homeschooling has been booming. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at around 3.3%. But by May 2020, about 5.4% of U.S. households with school-aged children reported they were homeschooling. And by October 2020, the number jumped to 11.1%.

Many polls reflect the fact that the zip-code mandated education system just isn’t cutting it anymore for many Americans. The American Federation for Children reports that 65% of voters support school choice, with 69% of Blacks and 67% of Hispanics in favor, according to just-released survey results. An EdChoice poll, shows that when given a fair description of school choice types, a great majority are in approval. For example, 80% of Black and Hispanic parents support ESAs, and 76% of White parents are in favor.

Even in California, where the private option is nonexistent, things are happening. In a recent poll, voters were asked if they’d approve a ballot initiative establishing ESAs, and a majority said they would. In fact, 54% of voters said they’d vote “yes” if given the chance, while only 34% said they’d vote “no.” Support among Black and Latino voters was even higher, with 71% and 66% respectively in favor. Toward that end, the California School Choice Foundation will be sending an education freedom initiative to Sacramento for title and summary in July.

Not surprisingly, the Education Industrial Complex has taken note of the upheaval. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, big education’s Apologist-in-Chief laments, “The (parental choice) movement’s agenda is clear in the minimal accountability and few protections for students included in these bills.”

Strauss has it backwards. It’s the education establishment that is essentially accountability-free. In reality, a system of choice actually paves the way for higher quality. Citing the results of a study conducted by the University of Arkansas, Patrick Wolf, the college’s Endowed Chair in School Choice, writes, “Our conclusion is that the more a state provides parents with the freedom to choose their child’s school, the better the state’s students score on the National Assessment of Education Outcomes (NAEP). Even controlling for other state-level factors, and focusing on test score gains instead of levels, more freedom equals more achievement.” Competition makes all enterprises better, including education. School choice has also been shown to have a positive effect on taxpayers, ethnic segregation in schools and students’ civic values and practices.

While no one knows for sure what the future will bring, Foundation for Economic Education scholar Kerry McDonald is optimistic. She asserts that there are “4 Signs Parents Won’t Be Sending Their Kids Back to Public School This Fall.” Declining kindergarten enrollment, the major uptick in homeschooling, additional choice options, and divisive public school subjects like Critical Race Theory worming its way into curricula indicate that the move toward parental choice will be ongoing.

If nothing else, the pandemic has drawn back the curtain and exposed the wizard, revealing the truth about public schools. The myth that government duopoly – union bullies and toady school boards – has children as its #1 priority has been shattered. What newly empowered parents do next will be known shortly.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. 

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center.

Here’s an excerpt from a July 7, 2020, blog post titled “The White Man Leading the White Man’s Party—and the White Church” written by Nathan Cartagena, associate professor of philosophy at evangelical flagship Wheaton College:

From his birtherism charges against President Obama, to his threats against “bad hombres,” to his bragging about getting away with sexual assault, candidate Trump signaled that he was going to be a white man’s president, dedicated to tapping into and drawing from the U.S.’s deep white nationalist roots and their accompanying sexism. Since ascending to office, he’s labored to establish Trumpism identity politics for white folks. And the Republican establishment has coddled his efforts, as Senator McConnell’s four-year defense of President Trump makes clear.

President Trump and establishment Republicans like Senator McConnell show no signs of ceasing their strategic gendered racism. Instead, they’re doubling down on it to keep their base. Yes, they’re cunning enough to place white women such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany before reporters. But they know these women will pull all necessary stops to promulgate the Party’s racist, patriarchal agenda. Sanders relentlessly lied. Kayleigh tirelessly defends Trump while claiming “I know who I’m ultimately working for, and it’s the big guy upstairs.”

…

[R]emember that a white man is leading a white party—and the white church is promoting both. What you’re witnessing is a byproduct of the seventies, the latest manifestation of the deplorable linking of Christianity and male-exulting whiteness. … And, to rift [sic] on St. Paul, beware: You may become someone’s enemy if you tell the truth about the Republican Party’s strategic gendered racism. Christian or not, President Trump’s followers prefer their white lies.

Cartagena seems not to remember that Senator McConnell was compelled by the corrupt antics of Democrats to defend former President Trump against a series of lies, including the whopper about Russian collusion paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Apparently Cartagena would have preferred Christians vote for the lying, race-exploiting, abortion cheerleader Hillary Clinton who supports compulsory taxpayer-funding of human slaughter throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy for any or no reason.

Does Cartagena have any problem with those Christians who voted for either the corrupt Hillary Clinton or the equally corrupt Joe Biden, both members of the party that, as black professor Carol Swain wrote for Prager U,

defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Klan, imposed segregation, perpetrated lynchings, and fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s.

In contrast, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party. Its mission was to stop the spread of slavery into the new western territories with the aim of abolishing it entirely. This effort, however, was dealt a major blow by the Supreme Court. In the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the court ruled that slaves aren’t citizens; they’re property. The seven justices who voted in favor of slavery? All Democrats. The two justices who dissented? Both Republicans. …

[A]fter Reconstruction ended, when the federal troops went home, Democrats roared back into power in the South. They quickly reestablished white supremacy across the region with measures like black codes – laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property and run businesses. And they imposed poll taxes and literacy tests, used to subvert the black citizen’s right to vote.

For decades, the Democrat party passed laws and endorsed policies to buy black votes even when those policies destroyed the black family, killed black babies, kept black children in lousy schools, and made urban black communities unlivable. Does Cartagena think those laws and policies are racist?

What about efforts by leftists to defund police which will inevitably result in more black deaths? Are those racist?

Cartagena calls Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar and implies both Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany are female tokens. Well, is Jen Psaki a liar? Did she lie when she blamed the defunding of police on Republicans? Rhetorical questions, obviously.

Cartagena whines about the GOP’s alleged “patriarchal agenda” and “gendered racism” but says nothing about Biden’s gendered racism in deliberately choosing members of his administration based—not on merit, wisdom, knowledge, or experience—but on their skin color and sex. Biden makes no secret about his commitment to tokenism, aka “gendered racism.”

I’m not sure what a “patriarchal agenda” is or why Cartagena opposes it seeing as the Bible has a lot of good stuff to say about patriarchs and patriarchal structures. But coming from a leftist, this term would suggest Cartagena holds women in high esteem. For those who hold women in high esteem, it would seem that Trump would have been the preferred candidate over both Hillary and Biden, since both have made it clear they support the sexual integration of girls’ and women’s private spaces and sports.

Cartagena writes about critical race theory (CRT)—a lot and favorably. Much of his writing is academic in nature, picking apart arguments from scholars critical of CRT—you know, dancing on the heads of pins kind of stuff. He takes particular aim at Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Christopher F. Rufo, who has been influential in exposing the tenets and influence of CRT in academia, the corporate world, and the government—including the military. About Rufo, Cartagena says,

Culture-war agitators such as Rufo aren’t interested in offering a just, charitable understanding of CRT.

As evidence for this claim, Cartagena provides a decontextualized tweet—yes, a tweet. That doesn’t seem all that charitable now, does it?

But while he fusses about whether some critic gets a point wrong or misses a point, Cartagena doesn’t spend much time acknowledging that when scholarly theories wend their way down the sewage pipe from sullied Ivory Towers, academic theories morph. Big theories pass through filters that strain out the minutiae scholars love to debate. Large chunks of excrement remain to pollute culture. Right now, ideas derived from Marxism, critical theory, and CRT are stinkin’ up the joint.

In addition to CRT theorists Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Cartagena cites Paulo Freire—a lot and favorably—calling him a “Brazilian Christian.” Since “Christian” means many things to many people, a bit more information from Cartagena about Freire’s Christianity might be helpful to Cartagena’s readers, particularly students.

Freire was a Brazilian Marxist/Christian socialist, heavily influenced by liberation theology. Other  thinkers who influenced him include “Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács.”

Freire wrote the well-known book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which former City-Journal writer Sol Stern critiqued in an article titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” (subtitled, “Another reason U.S. ed schools are so awful: the ongoing influence of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire”). Stern describes Freire’s polemic as a “derivative, unscholarly book about oppression, class struggle, the depredations of capitalism, and the need for revolution.”

Cartagena wants the church and all of America to study CRT as intensely as leftist scholars study it, and unless they do, any criticism of CRT is, in Cartagena’s view, illegitimate:

Because marginalization and oppression in pigmentocracies operate along racialized lines, Christians should share the common interests of critical race theorists. And they should recognize that assessments of those scholar’s conclusions must be robust and nuanced. An endorsement or rejection of CRT requires examining a lot of U.S. history—especially U.S. legal history—political philosophy, sociology, and theology. … We must repent of our shoddy, unjust presentations of CRT. We must labor to understand and evaluate CRT in light of history, political philosophy, sociology, and theology and the movement’s internal diversity. This is what neighborly love demands.

I’m not sure that “neighborly love” demands the kind of lucubration of an academic theory Cartagena demands.  Does neighborly love demand such laborious study of other academic theories? If so, which ones?

His assertion seems a clever way to use Scripture to force Christians either to spend inordinate amounts of time studying CRT or remain silent. His tricksy reasoning is based on the biblical truth that God commands us to love our neighbors. Then he asserts—with no biblical warrant—that “neighborly love demands” that Christians “labor to understand and evaluate CRT in light of history, political philosophy, sociology, and theology and the movement’s internal diversity.”

I haven’t read everything the Cartagena, prolific devotee of CRT,  has written on CRT (or “whiteness“) but so far I haven’t read anything suggesting he believes neighborly love demands the same kind of in depth study accompanied by “robust and nuanced” assessments of criticism of CRT.

No word about whether all teaching of CRT principles and tenets should be banned in public schools unless and until teachers prove they have studied CRT and its critics deeply.

And no word about whether public school teachers should advocate for CRT or present it without bias or favor.

I first wrote about Cartagena in May in an article about Wheaton’s RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY, which followed close on the heels of Wheaton’s controversial decision to cancel a plaque honoring slain missionaries, replacing it with one more palatable to Wheaton wokesters—one that removes references to the savagery of the killers who happened to be indigenous people.

With Wheaton awash in wokery, the following letter from Wheaton College president Philip Ryken to the Wheaton College community in the fall of 2020—just after the spring and summer destructive, violent BLM/Antifa insurrections—shouldn’t surprise anyone. Disappoint? Yes. Surprise? Not so much.

Dear Campus Community,

We all are witnesses to the egregious and senseless violence that recently claimed the lives of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Their deaths speak to the enduring presence of systemic and institutional racism within our society. As a community, we are deeply distressed by violent acts that have persisted in our country for more than four centuries.

As Christ followers, we denounce systemic racism and police brutality against any racial or ethnic group. Today especially our hearts are filled with pain for the inhumane treatment of our brothers and sisters in the African American community. We stand united with African American students, faculty, and staff who are all deeply affected by these ongoing acts of racial violence and other sinful injustices, often on a daily basis.

…

[W]e are also committed to identifying and addressing policies and systems in our own institution that hinder access and success of members who belong to marginalized and oppressed groups. In order to have the impact on the world that God is calling us to have, we are resolved to think and act in ways that create a more loving, equitable, and just community.

Wheaton College pursues a biblical commitment to respect and love all people as equal image-bearers of Jesus Christ. This is mandated by Scripture, promised in our Community Covenant, and detailed in our Christ-Centered Diversity Commitment.

…

To the members of our community belonging to the African diaspora, please know that you have our love, support, and concern.

Disabuse yourselves of any fanciful notion that Cartagena is the only wokester at Wheaton. He’s not. Parents considering paying boatloads of money to send their kids to Wheaton College might want to consider other, less woke Christian colleges. And Wheaton donors might want to reconsider how they steward their donations.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Wildly-Woke-Wheaton-College-Professor-Nathan-Cartagena.mp3

“Train up a child the way he should go;
even when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6

Many parents these days find themselves asking a simple, yet important, question: What’s the point in sending my child to a Christian school when public school is far cheaper? I have often asked my parents this very question, since I have gone to a Christian school my whole life. However, as I have grown older and observed the world around me, I now see why they wanted me to attend a Christian school for all these years.

As I have witnessed my friends growing up, I have noticed them begin to stray away from the love of God and into the secular worldview that public schools push upon their students. These are lifelong friends that come from Christian families, yet they still buy into the lies propagated by public schools, as the tactics they use to lure people away from God are powerful and manipulative. There is a myriad of reasons to send your child to a Christian school, but the following reasons are the most important, in my opinion, since they are what I see affecting my friends and other children in this country the most.

Health Class

When I was in fifth grade, my school had “the talk” which consisted of teaching us about puberty and what to expect when growing up. They taught us the absolute basics and taught it from a Christian point of view. In freshman year, they taught us about the birds and the bees, respect, and abstinence, which most of us already knew from our parents anyway. Our teachers made sure to emphasize that abstinence was the best approach since the risks of sex would be completely gone and, most importantly, it is what the Bible commands us to do. This was a great way to introduce students to such a sensitive topic; however, public schools do not teach students about these topics nearly as well.

While my Christian school emphasized abstinence, many public schools may acknowledge it, but they do not emphasize it nearly as much. Most public schools have the mindset that “kids will do it anyway,” so they might as well be safe while engaging in sexual acts. I have been told by my friends that some notable lessons included one where they each had to do an oral presentation on STDs, and one where they were required to practice putting a condom on a banana (no, this is not a joke). Christian schools know better than to think this way. They know that everyone has free will in whether they will sin, and that everyone has the capability to resist sin. As a result, public schools’ methods of teaching sex education to children downplay how major sex is and make it seem as if it is no big deal. This desensitizes children to a sensitive and important issue. You may believe your child will not fall into such traps because your child is not weak in his or her faith and you have raised them well.

The truth is that the tactics public schools use to desensitize children to things of a sexual nature are powerful and manipulative. When you talk about a topic frequently, and talk about it casually, people will become desensitized to it. This desensitization is exactly what is happening now in public schools. More recently, the radical LGBTQ agenda has made its way into health class as well, opening up a whole new can of worms. 

Teachers and Overall Culture at School

Another issue with public schools is the culture and sometimes, but not always, the teachers. While there are some good teachers at public schools, often they are not the best. We know that due to powerful teachers unions, it is nearly impossible to fire a teacher, even if they are not doing their job well. In contrast, at a Christian school, teachers can be removed at any time if they are not doing a good job. As a result, this incentivizes teachers to try hard in their job. The other major difference between Christian and public school teachers is that the teachers in a Christian school usually care more about their job. Teachers in Christian schools get paid far less than teachers in the public school system, and this monetary sacrifice proves their commitment to a higher calling. If they were doing it simply for money, they would have chosen to teach at a public school; however, they chose to teach at a Christian school because they genuinely care about teaching from a Christian point of view, whether in science or even math. Another difference between public and Christian school teachers is that public school teachers may not share the parents and students’ values in life, but the Christian teacher will almost always have the same values as the students and families, and they will express those values to the children in their classroom. This is because, in Christian schools, teachers understand that teaching young people is a high calling from God and a vocation versus a job.

Another factor to consider when choosing between a public or Christian school is what the culture of the school will be like. While every school has a different culture, the Christian school is obviously going to have a more Christian culture. For example, in a public school, students may think that you are the “weird Christian kid” who goes to church, while at a Christian school being a Christian is the default and going to church is looked at as a normal practice. Although this is not always the case, Christian schools will most likely have more well-behaved students since people are paying to go there, and there usually is an interview or background check before admittance. But most importantly, most of the students at a Christian school, if not all the students, are Christian and this means that they will more likely follow the morals of Christianity and be good influences on one another. The culture of a school is important because it is the culture in which your child will spend a lot of their time, and that culture will influence how they act, for better or for worse.

Final Thoughts

There are numerous other issues with public schools that I did not mention, such as Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ history classes, that would be problematic for Christian families. Since I cannot address them all in this article, I picked the reasons that I think are the most important and the issues that I have seen affect my friends. I know it can be difficult financially to send a child to a Christian school, but if you are able, it is something you should consider. It saddens me to think that nearly a whole generation of children are being brainwashed by what they are taught at school. Public schools are leading students away from the faith, but this is no reason to lose hope. There are things that can be done to change this, such as sending students to Christian schools, homeschooling, and maybe even running for a position on a local school board. However, the longer we wait, the harder it will be to implement change, until, perhaps, it becomes too late.

Evan O’Bryan is a high school senior and aspiring political influencer who has been raised in the faith and Christian education since preschool. He is a staunch supporter of Christianity, the MAGA movement, and Conservative ideology. He enjoys challenging the mainstream liberal narrative with those who haven’t yet reached the truth.

Written by Sandy Glenn

The pleas for Christian parents to pull their kids out of public schools are growing louder and more fervent every day. And, while many parents agree that the time for exodus has come for their family, some feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. They know they need to leave but they don’t know where to go!

If this sounds like you, I’ve got great news. You do have options! But here’s the catch. You’ll need to take more than just a passing glance at the alternatives. It’s all too easy to make quick, sweeping judgements such as “we can’t afford private school” or “I could never homeschool” without really giving those alternatives a fair chance.

About ten years ago, when God first put homeschooling on my heart and in my mind, I was armed with all kinds of excuses as to why it wouldn’t work. I’m not a teacher. I don’t remember calculus. We’re not homesteaders. I hate bugs; how will I teach about bugs? We can’t afford for me not to work; what about my career? How will my kids make friends? The list went on and on.

If I’d given more thoughtful consideration to my list of fear-based objections, I might’ve saved myself years of anxiety. But, over time, God has helped dismantle the stereotypes and misconceptions I once had about home education. As I’ve shed my preconceived notions about what school is “supposed” to look like, my family and I have discovered an amazing lifestyle of learning, togetherness, and blessing.

Sadly, many prospective homeschooling parents do what I did at first. They look into homeschooling briefly and, even if they think the method has some merit, they dismiss it because they feel it’s ineffective, lacking in opportunities, or just not practical.

In reality, it’s often just their mental picture of homeschooling that’s impractical. For example, if someone thinks homeschooling means recreating the entire public school experience in their home or teaching every subject for every grade for every child, then of course they’d feel that it’s an impossible feat. Or, if someone’s idea of homeschooling includes kids who never interact with anyone outside their immediate family, then naturally that person would be skeptical about it.

Thankfully, real homeschooling is nothing like those imagined scenarios. Not only is home education absolutely doable for the average family, it’s also exceedingly efficient and endlessly customizable. In fact, it’s the efficiency and flexibility of home education that makes it so successful for so many different families.

Maybe you feel that this past year of virtual schooling in your home proved that you could never homeschool successfully. Believe me, “pandemic-public-schooling-at-home” and “home education” are not the same thing!  Though their kids may have been at home, the experience many public schooling families endured over the past school year is a far cry from the day-to-day experience of home educators who aren’t tied to public school curricula, schedules, or systems.

If you’re considering educating your kids at home but you’re feeling overwhelmed by the thought of it, take a deep breath (or ten). As I said in my new book Think About Homeschooling: What It Is, What It Isn’t, & Why It Works, homeschooling “is no less practically possible than any other career, educational method, or way of life. The simple fact that it’s less well understood in our culture just makes it seem that way. In actuality, the skill sets you use to adapt and succeed in other areas of life can be the same ones you use to homeschool successfully.”

In Think About Homeschooling, I tackle the five most common categories of misunderstanding surrounding home education as well as its main advantages. With a clearer picture of what homeschooling is and isn’t, parents are then equipped to truly consider homeschooling as a real possibility for their family. Whether or not you end up deciding to home educate, it’s critical that you are basing your decision on accurate information.

As stewards and guardians of the children God has placed in our care, it’s our privilege and responsibility to provide spiritual and academic training and instruction for them. Whether we send them to the public school down the street, the private school in the next town, or the homeschool co-op at our church, we make a choice to delegate some portion of their education to those institutions. It’s critically important that we’re mindful of the training that our kids are receiving in those settings. And it’s equally as important that we’re aware that we have a choice in the matter!

Christian parents, as you consider your schooling options for next year, please give careful and intentional thought to all of your choices. Do your best to research the specific alternative schooling opportunities available to you in your area (private schools, hybrid or co-schools, co-ops, homeschooling, etc.) and pray for clear direction from the Lord. If you feel convicted to find an alternative to public schooling, don’t let fear stand in your way!

For those of you curious or skeptical about home education, or if you’re new at it and need a confidence boost, my book Think About Homeschooling would be a great next step. You can buy it now in ebook or paperback format or find out more here.

Sandy Glenn, MAE, went from “Homeschooling? No way!” to “Homeschooling is awesome!” in just a few short years. After working in the architectural engineering industry for over eleven years, she left the workforce to stay home with her firstborn and she’s been home educating ever since! She and her husband live and learn with their three children in the Chicago suburbs. Sandy’s writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Engineering and The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, and she also provides practical help and encouragement to homeschooling parents on her blog: sensiblehomeschool.com. 

Stop reading for a moment. Go get some popcorn, and then sit back and enjoy two rousing videos of heroes pointing their sharpened spear tips right at the rhythmically contracting cardiac tissue of two government re-education camps (so much better to spear the pulsating cardiac organ of leftist schools than that of humans in their mothers’ wombs).

For those who prefer reading, here is some of what former Pennsbury School Board member Simon Campbell said:

This is my comment, not your comment. I’m quoting to you now from the United States Supreme Court, 1964 case, New York Times versus Sullivan. This is constitutional case law in this country. … The judges wrote that this nation is founded on the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues shall be uninhibited, robust and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” That’s constitutional case law in this nation. I don’t have to be nice to you. Nobody behind me has to be nice to you. If you don’t like living in the United States of America, then you can all move to Russia, Cuba, or China. This is the First Amendment. …

There are emails, public record emails, in which the director of equity is lobbying and advocating for public comment to be censored in this school district. … We’ve got the school board president saying she’ll do better at hitting the mute button in blatant violation of the constitution for her lobbying and her advocacy of unconstitutional censorship. I want you, the school board, to terminate the employment of (director of equity] Dr. Cherrissa Gibson with immediate effect. And after you’ve terminated her employment, I want all of you to tender your resignations for hating on this country. We have a God-given constitutional right to critique you, and we can speak in any lawful tone that we see fit.

I recently wrote about the growing resistance to the usurpation of public schools for leftist ideological purposes. The resistance movement is spreading and growing in both intensity and numbers. For decades there have been spear-wielding soldiers fighting the good fight, but, shamefully, the troops that should have been marshalling behind those on the frontlines did nothing. They didn’t back the courageous men and women on the frontlines. They sat home fearful and semi-embarrassed of their conservative brethren, rationalizing their cowardice as the ideological malignancies metastasized in schools.

Leftists know they can destroy lives and careers when the number of resistors are small. They also know they can’t destroy the lives and careers of armies of resistors, which is why leftists are now in a state of panic. It’s also why conservatives must come out in droves to stop the spread of Critical Race Theory and deviant views of sexuality in public schools.

I have learned the sorry lesson over the past 20 years that adults are as fearful of ostracism and needy for peer approval as the neediest teen, and as a result, many conservative Americans do not treat their conservative beliefs as if they believe they’re true. Many conservatives fear the stink-eye of the cool crowd more than the all-seeing eye of the creator of the universe who has the power to destroy body and soul.

While ideological groomers in government schools affirm homosexuality, cross-sex impersonation, and anal sex to grade schoolers with public money, milquetoasty Christians fret about how to address these evils “winsomely.” There are times and places, however, when evil demands righteous wrath, for which God has given us rhetoric. Properly trained minds and hearts are able to discern which words and tone are appropriate for confronting evil.

Here’s the deal, people are not only cowed by the madding crowd. They can also be inspired by boldness and fearlessness. The willingness to endure the slings and arrows of the cool crowd sets an example for others to emulate. Leaders inspire and galvanize others to walk the hard path.

Career military officer, Purple Heart recipient, attorney, and former Virginia State Senator Dick Black recognizes the evil being done to children, and at a recent Loudon County School Board meeting, Black properly—that is, passionately—expressed what all decent people should be expressing at school board meetings all across the country:

You retaliated against (P.E. teacher) Tanner Cross for addressing a public hearing of this board. The judge ordered you to reinstate Mr. Cross, because if his comments were not protected speech, then free speech does not exist at all. It’s absurd and immoral for teachers to call boys girls and girls boys. You’re making teachers lie to students, and even kids know that it’s wrong. This board has a dark history of suppressing free speech. They caught you red-handed with an enemies list to punish opponents of Critical Race Theory. You’re teaching children to hate others because of their skin color. And you’re forcing them to lie about other kids’ gender. I am disgusted by your bigotry and your depravity.

Immediately after Mr. Black’s comments, the school board shut down public comments and walked out, leaving scores of people unable to make their comments.

Who needs Netflix, when you’ve got warriors with spears poking leftist school board members and backed up by troops who have finally reported for active duty?

Wall Street Journal reporter Abigail Shrier, who wrote the critically important book Irreparable Damage on the staggering explosion in the number of adolescent girls joining the “trans’-cult, recently wrote an article expressing her frustration with the passivity of people who know how damaging “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices are to children and yet say nothing:

[I]f you read my inbox, you’d think I was popular, awash as I am in secret fan mail and “silent supporter” notes. …

Child and adult psychologists and psychiatrists write to say they have witnessed a surge in transgender identification among teen girls who seem to be acting under peer and social media influence. Teachers write to say they believe that the phenomenon is plainly an example of social contagion within their classrooms. Surgeons and pediatricians and endocrinologists write to wonder aloud at what has happened to their profession.

There are lawyers who posit that lawsuits are on the way—brought by others, presumably. Professors who have come to hate their jobs—you can’t discuss your own research without trampling on a young generation’s vast neural network of sensitivities. Journalists at our most storied newspapers, TV networks, and literary magazines, even at NPR, write to tell me they liked my book, they agree with it, and to tut-tut the abuse directed at me. They assure me that the horrible accusations—from child predation to white supremacy and transphobia—accusations that will forever live on the internet, blackening my name, are things no one really believes. …

And so, for over a year, I responded to those silent supporters with thanks and reassurance. You don’t have to speak out, just send me your documents — I will expose it for you. No need to stand up for me publicly, just tell me what you know. For a while, this seemed a decent bargain. …

[I]t is easy to justify our silence. We tell ourselves that we are protecting our families by remaining quiet and in the short-term, and we may be. But we are also handing our children over to a culture in which freedom of conscience and expression are drowned out. We are teaching our children that truth shouldn’t be our primary concern—or at least, that truth is negotiable or subordinate to being agreeable. They are learning that it is more important to remain acceptable to the powerful than to be truly free. …

[T]he inescapable reality is that defeating this ideology will take courage. And courage is not something that can happen in private. Courage requires each one of us to speak up, publicly, for what we believe in. Even when—especially when—it carries costs.

Christians are expected by God to take up our crosses daily, even when doing so carries costs.

The only regret I have when watching these school board meetings during which arrogant and morally vacuous board members are feeling the righteous wrath of community members is that the guiltier parties are getting off scot-free. Faculty activists have been scurrying around like unseen roaches, seeding their false, destructive, and evil ideas in the minds and hearts of other people’s children using taxpayer money to do their dirty work.

And it is dirty.

• It is false, destructive, and evil to teach that girls can be boys.

• It is false, destructive, and evil to teach children that cross-sex hormone-doping and bodily mutilation are healthy and good “treatments” for gender dysphoria.

• It is false, destructive, and evil to teach that in order to be compassionate and inclusive, children must relinquish their privacy and welcome cross-dressing opposite-sex peers into their bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams.

• It is false, destructive, and evil to teach children that commitments to love and respect require that they view homosexuality as favorably as heterosexuality.

• It is destructive and evil to require teachers to refer to students or colleagues who identify as the sex they are not and never can be by opposite-sex pronouns.

• It is destructive and evil to recommend or require students to read plays and novels with obscene language and graphic (usually disordered) sexuality.

• It is destructive and evil to teach children anything about masturbation, anal sex, “gender expansiveness,” homosexuality, or “trans”-cultism, let alone advocate leftist views of these topics as if their views are objective, inarguable facts.

• It is destructive and evil to teach racist, sexist, heterophobic, “cis”-phobic, anti-American, Marxist Critical Race Theory as objectively true and to do so without presenting dissenting views.

Several months ago, conservative Catholic philosopher and Princeton University law professor Robert P. George tweeted this:

I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery and worked tirelessly against it. Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it.

So, I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing: 1) that it would make them unpopular with their peers, (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that they would be abandoned by many of their friends, (4) that they would be called nasty names, and that they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness. In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.

Can you, kind reader, show evidence that you stand up for culturally unpopular causes at great personal cost?

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/School-Boards-Feeling-Some-Righteous-Wrath.mp3

Children and families under siege in Illinois are getting a lifeline! A national organization working to rescue children from the increasingly radical indoctrination and sexualization in public schools recently announced a new partnership with the non-profit Illinois Family Institute (IFI) to help get as many kids out of the system as possible.

The nationwide group, known as Public School Exit (PSE), was formed last year by a team of concerned Christian leaders, attorneys, pastors, educators, and advocates. The goal: Facilitate an exodus of as many children into the safe sanctuary of homeschools and good private schools.

In pursuing that mission, PSE is joining forces with IFI — the state’s premier pro-family organization — to deal with the urgent situation in Illinois. From mandating LGBTQIA indoctrination in government schools to forcing teachers to accept and promote highly controversial “progressive” ideology in the classroom, the state is at the forefront of the escalating educational abuse in America.

“Illinois is one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to imposing anti-American, anti-Christian extremism on captive children in public schools,” said PSE President Dran Reese, a homeschool mom with many years of experience in ministry. “However, even conservative states are moving in that direction, so we hope the lessons we learn in Illinois will help in our nationwide efforts as well.”

As part of the partnership between PSE and IFI, which was formalized in early March with an agreement between the two, the well-respected Illinois organization will utilize PSE materials, its powerful line-up of experts in the field, and its own vast network to encourage pastors and parents to get children out of the deteriorating public schools.

“It’s high time for Christian parents and grandparents to recognize the fact that government schools are undermining and supplanting Judeo-Christian faith,” said IFI Executive Director David E. Smith. “The nonsense and profane values they are teaching students are the antithesis of what the Bible teaches us. Parents and grandparents cannot afford to allow these secular ideologies and destructive philosophies to mislead our children from what is good, honest and virtuous.”

Consider that the government’s own data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) prove conclusively that the overwhelming majority of children in Illinois are not even proficient in core subjects. Meanwhile, the moral values being imposed on children in public schools would shock most parents, IFI and PSE leaders said.

“Taxpayer-funded schools have all but rejected academics as their principal responsibility,” added Smith. “Instead, at the behest of Big LGBTQ Inc, BLM and Planned Parenthood, their focus has shifted toward indoctrinating our children. And children are being taught to hate America.”

Government school systems, Smith continued, are broken. “It’s time for parents and grandparents to take action to protect their children’s spiritual, mental and physical wellbeing,” he said. “It’s time to get our kids out of government schools.”

PSE and IFI leaders point to the Bible, which clearly instructs parents to teach their children Biblical truths “diligently” throughout the day, every day. (Deut. 6:4-9). Parents are also instructed to “train up a child in the way he should go.” “We dare not allow left-wing agents of deception do that training in our government schools,” noted Smith, celebrating the partnership with a well-established national organization to deal with the crisis.

On the church front, IFI and PSE will work together to help pastors and churches understand the problem. Then, they will work together with pastors and churches to help set up Christian schools, homeschool co-operatives led by parents, micro-schools, scholarship programs, independent learning academies, or other options to help protect the children in their congregations. PSE’s list of renown church and education leaders are standing by ready to assist.

“The Bible speaks very clearly to all these issues, and Christians across the nation are starting to realize that something must be done,” explained PSE Chairman Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore (Ret.), a longtime ministry leader who has been promoting a Christian “Exodus” from public schools for decades. “We are so grateful to be able to work with IFI — known as one of the top pro-family groups in America — on this critically important mission. The timing could not be better.”

PSE’s world-class team of advisors includes leading attorneys, educators, pastors, celebrities, and experts who — combined — have all the expertise needed to get the job done, and to do it well. With help from the boots on the ground, depending on the needs of particular communities or churches, PSE and IFI will assemble the necessary expertise to ensure that every parent in a congregation or community has options.

The team even includes, among other stars, Diane Douglas, who served as Arizona’s superintendent of Public Instruction until 2019, when she recognized that the government schools were now rotten to the core and were not safe for children. Now she is working to get victims out as quickly as possible. “Parents must act to protect their children, because public schools are not going to do it,” she explained.

The tide is rapidly shifting on this issue, too. Just in the last year, the number of homeschooling families has doubled from 5 percent to 10 percent of families with school-age children as people flee from government schools in unprecedented numbers. Some school districts have seen more than a 10 percent decline in enrollment as families seek other options.

Top voices are joining in as well. Before he passed away this year, talk-show titan Rush Limbaugh repeatedly urged parents to get their children out of public schools. Responding to LGBT mandates in New Jersey schools, evangelical leader Rev. Franklin Graham urged parents to withdraw from the system, too.

Even former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly urged parents to protect their children from what he described as “failing government schools,” noting that indoctrination in public education was responsible for the “mayhem” in America’s streets last summer.

Christian actress and leading homeschool advocate Sam Sorbo, a fervent campaigner on the issue and a member of PSE’s advisory board, celebrated the new partnership, too. “More and more people are waking up to the tragic state of what we currently call education, but what is, essentially, only schooling. Training. Conditioning,” Sorbo said in a statement about the news. “We welcome partnering with all enlightened organizations!”

Similar arrangements with other state-level pro-family organizations are already being explored. Many millions of families have already made the choice to pursue better education alternatives for their children. And in Illinois, that movement is about to be supercharged.

Special Events: Consider attending one of the eight events being held in different areas of Illinois beginning on June 28th. A complimentary meal will be served. Reservations are required. You can email Kathy HERE or call the IFI office at 708-781-9328. Reservations are due by tomorrow, so don’t hesitate!

More information:

Reasons to Exit Illinois Government Schools

Illinois School Proficiency FAILURE

Did You Know?

How to Rescue Our Children

“Comprehensive” Sex Education

For Parents, Grandparents and Church Leaders

Overcoming Objections

Three recent articles, one on NBC on June 15, one in Vanity Fair on June 16, and one on CNN on June 18, futilely attempt to recast conservative objections to the use of public schools to promote Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a “freakout,” “national panic,” “moral panic,” and “hysteria.” When leftists lack sound arguments, they resort to demagoguery. Any means to the ends of preventing conservatives from being as vocal as leftists in shaping culture are, in the narrow minds of leftists, justified.

This introductory sentence in the Vanity Fair article illuminates much of the problem with leftists when it comes to their use of public schools and funds to promote Critical Race Theory:

The right-wing freakout over critical race theory—or, at least what some Republican politicians and pundits think it is—has been playing out simultaneously in statehouses and TV studios, with lawmakers crafting bills to ban schools from teaching about systemic racism and conservative media figures fanning the flames.

Reading left-wing analyses of anything pertaining to race or sex requires a close look at every term to determine whether and how it’s been redefined. By “freakout” leftist writer Charlotte Klein, who writes for the appropriately named Vanity Fair Hive (lol), means the objections of “Republican politicians, pundits,” and “disgruntled parents” to the use of public schools to promote uncritically CRT and its many manifestations.

CNN’s Nicole Hemmer views opposition (what she calls “hysteria”)  to public school advocacy of assumptions derived from CRT as a red herring used by conservatives to divert attention away from the institutional racism poisoning America:

[A]rguing about critical race theory shifts the conversation away from the continued consequences of structural racism.

That conversation opens up challenging issues about equity, affirmative action, reparations, and government intervention to dismantle racist systems.

Both Klein and Hemmer assume that systemic/structural racism exists. And they assume the objections of conservatives to the promulgation of CRT in government schools are impelled by their desire to stop teaching about racism. In the view of leftists, the only way to think about race and racism is through a CRT-beclouded lens.

Moreover, neither Klein nor Hemmer acknowledges that CRT (and its many incarnations manufactured by racist “antiracism” profiteers) is a theory—a collection of arguable ideas—about race; race relations; oppression; “identity,” American history; equity; and equality (not to mention biological sex, homoerotic attraction, and cross-sex identification).

Leftists don’t want students to study assumptions derived from CRT along with critiques of CRT and resources that offer dissenting views on those topics. Leftists want CRT promoted uncritically and dissenting resources banned.

NBC slyly suggests that schools don’t even teach CRT, so what’s all the brouhaha about:

Virtually all school districts insist they are not teaching critical race theory, but many activists and parents have begun using it as a catch-all term to refer to what schools often call equity programs, teaching about racism or LGBTQ-inclusive policies.

Weeelll, that may be technically true. School administrators are gifted at the art of speaking technical truths with forked tongues. But take a look at the “equity” programs, racism teaching, and “LGBTQ-inclusive” programs. Then go read a primer on CRT. If I were a betting woman, I would bet you’d find some, shall we say, overlap.

NBC writes,

There’s no shortage of free publicity for the cause. The conservative focus on critical race theory is pervading right-wing news publications, like Fox News and Breitbart.

And CNN’s Nicole Hemmer writes that according to Media Matters,

Fox News … has mentioned critical race theory … nearly 1,300 times in the past three-and-a-half months.

What NBC failed to mention is the ample free publicity from the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CNN, Daily Beast, Slate Magazine et al. for the arguable assumptions derived from Critical Race Theory and embedded in government schools, colleges and universities, corporate diversity re-education, and military diversity re-education.

And Hemmer failed to mention the countless times arguable assumptions derived from Critical Race Theory have been uncritically “mentioned” in resources used in classrooms and professional development training throughout the country over the past 30 years. Her failure to acknowledge what can only be described as decades-long CRT advocacy in government schools reveals that she is either profoundly ignorant or indefensibly deceitful.

NBC’s lengthy hit-job describes the epic plague that conservative opposition to CRT has–in the view of leftists–become:

The groups swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students.

Awww, poor wittle school districts having to endure swarms of locust-like conservatives attending board meetings and forcing districts to use valuable indoctrination time to reveal what goes on behind the scenes. Leftists are looking back wistfully at the good old days when conservatives had no idea what resources were used in classrooms and professional development—you know, the days before our re-educated youth looted and burned down our cities in racist, maskless, spittle-fueled insurrections.

NBC’s piece tries to recast long-overdue organized efforts by conservatives as some sort of secret nefarious plot to take over schools. But every strategy and tactic NBC attempts to besmirch has been used by leftists for decades. Leftists want to stop conservatives from doing exactly what leftists have been doing for decades and which enabled them to gain control of government schools. They desperately want to stop conservatives from organizing. They want to smear conservatives for using think tanks, political action groups, non-profits, and legal foundations to aid in the effort to restore pedagogical soundness to government schools.

But here’s what’s remarkable about the high dudgeon of leftists: This is their playbook.

The article mentions school board meetings attended by conservative “local residents, many without children in the district,” implying without asserting that it is illegitimate for local taxpayers without children currently attending schools to object to funding the promulgation of leftist ideas about race and sex.

What the NBC article didn’t mention is that for years leftists without children in district schools have both spoken at and served on school boards. And leftists have spoken at school board meetings who don’t even live in the district whose policies or curricula those leftists were addressing.

In a richly ironic statement cited by NBC, Sonja McKenzie, “a member of the board of directors of the National School Boards Action Center” claims to be “disturbed” by efforts of conservatives to oust leftist school board members:

The thing that disturbs me the most about politicizing school boards is there is no mention of kids. It’s not community centered, it’s centered on political thought and theory and things that don’t connect to education. 

Surely, she jests. Leftists have been colonizing and politicizing school boards, state boards of education, university teacher-training programs, teachers’ unions, the American Library Association, the Modern Language Association, and educational conferences for decades to ensure leftist political thought and theory on race and sexuality shape curricula, policy, practices, and professional development—all of which are intended to “connect” to the “education” of “kids.”

Just curious, how are the efforts of community members to oust leftists on school boards “not community centered”?

Here’s NBC’s objective reporting on two school board meetings in Nevada:

In Nevada, Washoe County’s school board halted in-person meetings in April, after residents filled a large auditorium and lobbed insults and threats of violence during the public comment portion. …

During the most recent meeting, which lasted 11 hours, speakers railed at school board members, calling them Marxists, racists, Nazis and child abusers, among other epithets.

Kristen De Haan, the mother of a senior in a district high school, said she attends the meetings in support of an expanded social justice curriculum and LGBTQ-inclusive sex education.

“I don’t always agree with the board by any stretch of the imagination,” De Haan, who is white, said. “But listening to the anger, and what truly feels like hatred … it’s really hard. I definitely get glares when I go up and speak.

What is notable about this “reporting,” is how different it is from reporting about school board meetings when conservatives who oppose, for example, co-ed locker rooms, obscene novels, or CRT, are routinely called racists and ignorant hateful bigots who support the bullying of children. No anger or hatred in those epithets, no siree. Just love, sweet love.

Notable too is missing context. Why might some community members call school board members Marxists, racists, or child abusers? Could it be that the accused school board members support the use of government funds to teach positively about controversial racist, Marxist CRT-infused ideas? Could it be that some parents view teaching children that their white skin makes them oppressors constitutes child abuse? Could it be that some parents view the sexual integration of children’s private spaces—also supported by CRT-infused organizations like BLM™—as child abuse?

Perhaps nothing better demonstrates both the arrogance and panic of leftists than the title of Charlotte Klein’s article: “The Right-Wing Meltdown Over Critical Race Theory is Spiraling Out of Control.”

To leftists, conservative efforts to stop the heretofore unobstructed ideological rampage of leftists through taxpayer-funded schools must be controlled. The Hive will leave no child’s mind unmolested by leftist dogma.

Leftists have thrown down the gauntlet. Take it up and slap ‘em—hard—figuratively speaking, of course.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/leftistsFreakOut_audio.mp3

Long before California’s infamous “ethnic studies” curriculum made national headlines in March for literally suggesting children chant to the Aztec gods of cannibalism and human sacrifice, the insidious weaponization of “race” and “racism” had already overtaken the nation’s government school system.

The racist effort to divide and conquer Americans by “race,” all under the guise of examining everything through the “lens of racism” and fighting “structural” or “systemic” racism, has come to be known as critical race theory, or CRT.

Just think of it as half-baked pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook aimed at stirring up as much racial hatred, resentment, division, and conflict as possible.

Like cult leaders, the growing overpaid legions of tax-funded “experts” in CRT want the public to believe that this is some complicated and mysterious “epidemic” that only overpaid “experts” can understand. But the reality behind CRT is actually pretty simple.

The premise is basically this: All “white people” are racist oppressors with power and privilege, and all non-white people are oppressed victims.

From that flows the silly premise that America—among the least racist nations on earth, studies show—is a “systemically racist” abomination that must be “decolonized” and dismantled.

In fact, any institutions created by peoples or nations of mostly European heritage are evil and must be pulverized. And any people who lack sufficient melanin must repent for their collective guilt.

If all that sounds evil and unhinged, good—it is.

Unfortunately, it’s also now a staple in the diet of impressionable young victims of government schools across America.

The goal isn’t really fighting racism, as its proponents claim.

In fact, a number of studies show that “diversity training,” an offshoot of CRT aiming to put the cult’s views into practice, “can activate bias or spark a backlash,” the Harvard Business Review warned.

“Many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward,” it said.

Duh!

The same is true for children: When they’re bombarded with racial division and hyper-racial extremism, they not only begin thinking in terms of race, they also begin resenting those supposedly in other “groups” alleged to be in conflict with them.

And that’s precisely the point. In the Soviet Union, like Karl Marx decades earlier, totalitarians divided people by “class,” driving a wedge between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”

Similar divisions were created and exploited by Chairman Mao in communist China.

In America, where the poor live materially better than the rich in many nations, the “class conflict” narrative was not as effective.

And so, as in National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, socialist and communist agents from abroad and homegrown subversives turned to “race” as the key fault line to exploit.

It has been bubbling beneath the surface in America for years—even decades. But in recent months, it has exploded into the national consciousness as increasingly extreme examples of tax-funded CRT indoctrination spark outrage from parents and normal people.

There’s a long history behind this ideology of hate in America.

Part 6 of this series explored the enormous influence of the Marxist Frankfurt School and its “critical theory” schemes on American culture—and particularly in its government-controlled education system. CRT is an outgrowth of this deadly weapon, adapted to the American scene.

A big part of the lie depends on fraudulent history taught to children such as the almost universally discredited “1619 Project” and the debunked diatribes of communist Howard Zinn, as documented in this previous article in this series.

The end result is disaster.

Tax-Funded CRT at School

Naturally, adults of all “races” with even basic critical-thinking skills, common sense, and a rudimentary understanding of history could see right through the CRT propaganda.

But young children in government schools for five days a week? They make for easy victims. After all, mommy and daddy said to listen to the teacher.

That’s why the forces behind CRT are focusing so heavily on targeting children.

What do CRT and the race-mongering look like in practice?

In California, for example, the newly adopted “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” approved by the state Board of Education on March 18, suggests children seek help from pagan Aztec gods for “a revolutionary spirit” in a chant.

“The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression,” writes Christopher F. Rufo.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the nation, has already indicated that it will be requiring “ethnic studies” for graduation starting in 2023. The whole state may eventually follow. And the cancers that begin in California often spread nationwide.

In one of the wealthiest districts in the nation, Silicon Valley’s Cupertino Union School District, third-grade students were reportedly ordered to “deconstruct” their racial, gender, religious, family structure, and sexual identities.

After that, they were told to create an “identity map” and rank themselves based on the “power and privilege” received from the “intersection” of their various “identities.”

“A white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman,” offered the school materials in an example of how to understand the results.

In short, under this twisted worldview, your melanin content makes you either an oppressor to be destroyed, like the bourgeoisie, or a victim who must destroy others, like the proletariat.

This sort of madness is taking place all across “red” states, too.

North Carolina’s largest school district, Wake County, for instance, launched a campaign to eradicate “whiteness in educational spaces.” As part of that, teachers were ordered to “disrupt whiteness” and “override families,” according to Rufo.

It’s not new, either. In 2017, outraged parents fumed at a Rockingham County, North Carolina, Board of Education meeting after learning that a teacher forced children of European heritage to stand in front of the class and apologize for their “white privilege.”

In Ames, Iowa, and other cities and towns across America in recent years, the “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” has been peddling “diversity and globalism,” “the disruption of the Western nuclear family,” “transgender, queer affirming, and collective value,” and more.

To understand just how aggressive the peddlers of this Marxist narrative in schools have become, consider news reports from mid-March about government-school teachers who plotted to “infiltrate” parents’ groups opposed to the indoctrination, use “hackers” to mess with their communications, and even “expose these people publicly” for speaking out.

Similar Tactics in Communist China

Victims of these tactics who have lived through the horrors that stem from them recognize the same schemes clearly.

Prominent Chinese exile Lily Tang-Williams, who grew up under Mao but eventually fled to the United States, remembers those exact tactics being used in Mao’s government-indoctrination centers for children, masquerading as “public schools.”

“It creates hatred, guilt, and division in our country,” she said about CRT being peddled on children in school. “It is a tool used by the radical left to divide and conquer.”

Having grown up during Mao’s reign and experienced the entire 10-year Cultural Revolution, Williams sounded the alarm about what’s happening in America today.

“Let me tell you, this racist theory is nothing more than a tactic to separate citizens into ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ classes, and it is something I have heard before,” said Williams, who recently testified before the New Hampshire legislature on this issue.

Mao’s regime sought to destroy the “four olds,” she claimed, referring to the mass-murdering communist Chinese tyrant’s campaign to eradicate China’s old ideas, culture, habits, and customs.

“He and his regime used identity politics to divide people into 10 classes: five red and five black,” she explained. “The red classes included poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary cadres, and revolutionary martyrs. The black classes were landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad-influencers, and rightists.”

Every member of the “black classes” was considered guilty by association, simply for having been born into a family, and was said to have been “born black.”

“Mao urged Red Guards to publicly shame the black classes by raising their fists, making them do self-criticism, confess and denounce themselves, or they would get beat up, locked up in a room to write about their ‘blackness,’ apologize for their families or themselves, and be sent to re-education camps to do hard labor,” Williams continued, adding that some young members of the families would do anything to escape the shame and association, including reporting their own relatives to the Chinese Communist Party.

Tens of millions of Chinese died amid the Cultural Revolution “due to those murderous policies,” said Williams, who serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education along with this writer and others in the field.

“What is happening in America today with CRT, in our schools, in our workplaces and governmental agencies, really reminds me of what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” she added.

Bad for Children

Aside from being destructive to society, the CRT madness is going to harm children of all types, too, experts say.

“It is horrendous and utterly harmful psychology to tell people, especially young children and teens, who do not believe that they are racists, and may actively despise racism, that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racists,” explained Doctor of Clinical Psychology Gary Thompson with the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center.

“Woke Supremacy is just as psychologically destructive on people as White Supremacy,” added Thompson, who happens to be a black American.

Thompson claims that many public schools are now teaching children as young as second and third grade that “whiteness is synonymous with evil, that the police systematically hunt down and murder black men deliberately, and all these other highly charged political convictions that they’re teaching as if they’re uncontested fact.”

How to Fight Back

Parents across the nation are scrambling for ways to fight back and protect their children.

Thompson, who also serves on the advisory board of U.S. Parents Involved in Education, said his personal opinion is that attempts by average parents to eliminate CRT from their children’s public school would be “futile.”

“If CRT does not fit your family values, the option of leaving public schools may be a viable option for parents,” he said, echoing a growing sentiment in America as enrollment in public schools continues to plummet.

Partly in response to CRT propaganda, millions of parents have fled government schools over the last year for homeschooling and private schools.

Unfortunately, the CRT madness is no longer confined just to government schools. Even many “woke” elite and self-styled “Christian” schools have been jumping on the bandwagon, so parents must do their due diligence.

Ignoring the voices of some of America’s most prominent black Christian leaders—Voddie Baucham and Bishop E.W. Jackson, for instance—many liberal churches and seminaries have taken the plunge, too.

Some critics have argued that indoctrinating children with CRT at taxpayer expense is already against the law.

Wu Wenyuan, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, has been fighting the battle in California and beyond for years. She argues that CRT in the classroom is “illegal and unconstitutional.”

“Teaching CRT that’s predicated on racial divisions and a social dichotomy of victim versus oppressor fundamentally violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which guarantees equal protection of the laws—Title VI/VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, California’s constitutional principle of equal treatment, and a plethora of anti-discrimination laws,” she warned.

In Florida, top officials are taking action. In fact, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis just promised the ideology would not be included in his state’s public schools.

“Let me be clear there is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory, teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” DeSantis said.

“They’re trying to make people view each other based on race, I want to do the opposite. I want to treat people as individuals,” he added. “I want to treat people based on character.”

But of course, dividing people is the goal—not an unintended side effect—and the constant appeals to “white supremacy” are simply a red herring designed to force critics to remain silent.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

CRT’s leaders and cult-like adherents have labeled virtually everything the far-left and Marxists hate as “white supremacy”: the U.S. Constitution, Christianity, math, the rule of law, punctuality, individualism, Western civilization, the nuclear family, objective truth, and more.

Nothing and nobody is safe.

Adults largely recognize the evil and idiocy of this. However, America’s children—like children in other nations who have been indoctrinated to hate their parents and their compatriots before committing ghastly atrocities—do not know better.

It will be up to parents to protect their own children, and thereby the nation and its freedoms.

This article as originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

If you have been receiving IFI’s email alerts for any length of time, you know that the brainwashing taking place in Illinois’ public schools has escalated to what we now believe is a crisis. They are making our students disciples of a new religion some call “wokeism.”

Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ indoctrination,
sexualization of children beginning in kindergarten! And the list goes on…

Isn’t it time to rescue our children!? We have a plan!

We want to introduce your church to several options for families who want Christ-centered education for their children.

Please join us at one of the special Rescue the Children events during the week of June 28^th to July 2^nd.

All we ask is your commitment to share the information you receive with your church leadership.

We believe that the godless indoctrination, already well underway in our public schools, is one of the reasons we see so many of our children leaving the faith.

Thousands contacted the Joint Committee of Administrative Rules in opposition to the revision of the Illinois Teaching Standards, and yet they were approved. The Illinois teacher certification program will in turn subject prospective teachers to Marxist ideology, ultimately filtering into the classroom.

An article entitled U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time paints a very bleak picture of the health of the Church:

“U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century.”  Using data from Gallup polls, the article states that only 47% of Americans now say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, which is down from 50% in 2018, and 70% in 1999.

Because a meal will be served, we ask that you RSVP to Kathy HERE by each site’s deadline.

• June 28 – Tuscany Falls 9425 W 191st St, Mokena, IL 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM – RSVP by June 21

• June 29 – Stockholm Inn 2420 Charles St, Rockford, IL 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM – RSVP by June 22

• June 29 – Blossom Café 8349 W Lawrence Ave, Norridge, IL 12 noon – 2:00 PM – RSVP by June 22

• June 30 – Enticing Cuisine 1117 N Washington Ave, Batavia, IL 8:00 AM – 10:30 AM – RSVP by June 23

• June 30 – Five Points 360 N Wilmor Rd, Washington, IL 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM – RSVP by June 23

• July 1 -Thelma Keller Convention Ctr 1202 N Keller Drive, Effingham, IL 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM – RSVP by June 23

• July 1 – Crown Plaza 3000 S Dirksen Pkwy, Springfield, IL 8:00 AM – 10:30 AM – RSVP by June 23

• July 2 – Gateway Convention Center One Gateway Drive, Collinsville, IL 8:00 AM – 10:30 AM – RSVP by June 23

 Any Questions?  Call Kathy at (708) 781-9328 during normal business hours or click HERE  to send an email.

June 28th through July 2ndRSVPs are required no later than June 23rd

The poisonous effects of the promulgation of Critical Race Theory (CRT)in both leftist-controlled public schools and private schools—including even Christian private schools—are seen daily. We see the effects in graduation ceremonies ruined, employees fired, and scores of BLM/Antifa “insurrections” that resulted in the destruction of government property and injuries to police officers.

At last, however, the justified and overdue resistance to CRT and its diverse manifestations are burbling up all over the country. For those of us who have labored for well over a decade to warn Americans about the destructive work of leftist change agents, the burbling of righteous rage is a welcome sight.  But far more work is needed and that will require organization, courage, and perseverance.

Laws are being passed to stop the flow of socially constructed leftist theories on race and sex, including CRT, and in many districts around the country, conservatives are organizing to restore ethical and pedagogical sanity to school boards. Many school boards are feeling the wrath of those who have been ill-served by their embrace of CRT, of which many board members remain ignorant even as they embrace it.

While the 2020 BLM/Antifa insurrections should have been sufficient evidence of the destructive effects of CRT in schools and universities, there’s plenty more evidence, including testimonies from those who have escaped tyrannical regimes around the world and see the ideological similarities between CRT and other authoritarian regimes.

In Loudon County, Virginia, a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution chastised the board for allowing CRT into the classroom, pointing out the tactical and ideological similarities between Mao’s Communist beliefs and those of CRT that divide society and teach children to “loathe” their country:

An impassioned black mother in Loudon County let the partisan board have it in a barn burner of a comment:

CRT is not an honest dialogue. It is a tactic that was used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan on slaves many years ago to dumb down my ancestors, so we could not think for ourselves. CRT is racist. It is abusive. It discriminates against one’s color. … Today … we want action and a backbone for what we ask for: to ban CRT. We don’t want your political advertisement to divide our children or belittle them. Think twice before you indoctrinate [with] such racist theories. You cannot tell me what is or is not racist. Look at me! I had to come down here today to tell you to your face that we are coming together, and we are strong. This will not be the last greet and meet, respectfully.

In Douglas County, Colorado, a mother of two decried CRT to her local school board, pointing out the difference between equality of opportunity and “equity,” which demands children be treated differently in order to socially construct identical outcomes.

She further illuminated the damage done by telling children that some of them are oppressors by virtue of their skin color and others are oppressed victims, a false idea that robs them of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their actions.

Perhaps most important, she exposed the fact that the district was usurping the right of parents to control their children’s education. She exposed that district training in CRT referred to parents as “dissenters” and excluded parents from those deemed “stakeholders.”

Several Arizona parents opposed CRT, arguing that it divides society—including children—based on attributes wholly unrelated to character. One mother shared the pain of having her children ostracized by former friends because they—her children—are white and their father a police officer.

A father attributed the destructive 2020 riots to the public educational system inculcating them with divisive identity politics that foster mistrust. And he asserted—rightly—that while CRT-infused curricula teach children that America is racist and sexist, it is not.

A third woman discussed growing up on welfare in Chicago in a situation that no child should experience but one which reinforced the American idea that from such struggles can come important lessons about overcoming adversity. In contrast, she argued, CRT,

promotes taking from one group in order to compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history.

Many school board members have neither read nor thought deeply about CRT. Few if any have read critiques of CRT. Many school board members demonstrate the same kind of lemming-like ideological incuriosity of teachers and the same absence of the ability to critically think about ideas. Remember that as you form coalitions to challenge the absence of diversity in curricula and professional development on the issues of race, race relations, and sexuality–all of which are central to CRT.

Ask school board members to define CRT.

Ask them if they believe the assumptions of CRT are disputable theories or objective inarguable facts.

Ask them if when students or staff are taught ideas integral to CRT, they should be taught that these ideas are, in fact, theoretical and disputed.

Ask school board members if when students and staff are required to read and discuss materials that espouse ideas integral to CRT, they should be required to read and discuss materials that critique and challenge CRT.

Leftist change agents/proselytes of CRT will tell parents they want parents to be “advocates” for their own children. Don’t believe them. They want parents to be advocates if and only if parents affirm leftist beliefs on race and sexuality.

Leftist change agents claim there is no truth and that they value diversity and tolerance. Don’t believe them. They believe not only that absolute truth exists but also that they have a corner on it. And they think all dissenting views are unworthy of tolerance. Worse still, in their overweening presumptuousness, they believe it’s their right and responsibility to turn other people’s children into leftist activists even if that entails leading them to reject their parents’ beliefs and their parents.

Make your school board feel the heat.

Listen

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/The-poisonous-effects-of-CRT.mp3

Americans educated by government today are, for the most part, hopelessly ignorant of their own nation’s history—and that’s no accident. They’re beyond ignorant when it comes to civics, too. On the history of the rest of the world, or the history of communism, Americans are generally clueless as well. This was all by design, of course.

After generations of flying under the radar, the ongoing corruption of history education in public schools is now suddenly the topic du jour. With the spread of The New York Times’ discredited 1619 Project aiming to “reframe” history through the lens of slavery, which even The New York Times’ own fact-checker called out, Americans everywhere are suddenly paying attention to what’s being taught to impressionable children at taxpayer expense.

Last year, President Donald Trump blamed the escalating mayhem in the streets on indoctrination by schools and the media. In September, he blasted the “toxic propaganda” being peddled as “history” in American classrooms. To deal with it, the president signed an executive order to “promote patriotic education.”

The reason why history is being rewritten is hardly a mystery. In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the totalitarian ruling Party’s motto explaining its strategy is “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And it’s very true—whoever controls the historical narrative will be able to shape the future. Liberty-minded Americans and truth are currently losing the battle—big time.

Totalitarians have long understood the power of historical narratives. Consider Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in communist China. Under the guise of purging remnants of the old ways of capitalism and tradition, Mao’s communist storm troopers did their best to destroy the records and evidences of thousands of years of Chinese history. Books were burned and monuments destroyed in an orgy of destruction.

After true history was erased and disfigured, the Chinese Communist Party was able to rewrite history on a blank slate to suit its own agenda. Especially important to that effort was the indoctrination of children in government schools. Everything ancient and traditional was portrayed as primitive or even evil, while the new party line surrounding the supposed glories and progress of communism was force-fed to China’s youth.

America’s ongoing cultural revolution hasn’t been quite as dramatic, violent, or thorough—so far. But if left unchecked, the results of this long-term operation may turn out to be just as deadly. And there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the effectiveness of the effort to rewrite the history of the United States, Western civilization, and even the world.

Consider the data. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the “nation’s report card,” just 15 percent of American students were at or above the “proficient” level in history. When it comes to civics, less than 1 in 4 U.S. eighth-grade students performed at or above “proficient” in 2018 on the NAEP, the latest year for which scores are available.

Keeping in mind the wild bias of the Education Department (some 99.7 percent of the bureaucrats’ contributions to a presidential candidate in the 2016 election went to Hillary Clinton), even those numbers probably drastically overstate the true level of historical and civic understanding of U.S. students.

Contrast the dismal scores with previous generations. There was a time when Americans were the best-educated people on the planet—especially when it came to history and civics. According to prominent French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the early-to-mid 1800s and recorded his observations in two volumes before government hijacked education, “every citizen … is … taught the doctrines and evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of the Constitution.”

Some areas on the Western frontier and the deep South weren’t quite as advanced educationally. However, in the more populous and developed areas, “it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon,” de Tocqueville continued.

Today, it’s just the opposite: Finding a person who understands the history of America or the leading features of its Constitution is a sort of phenomenon.

The Rewriting of History in America

The process of rewriting history was a long one. Unlike Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took about a decade, those seeking to erase and distort America’s incredible and unique history were forced to proceed slowly, working over decades and generations rather than accomplishing it all in one fell swoop. But concrete evidence of this deliberate plot has surfaced periodically since at least the 1940s.

In the early 1950s, Congress became suspicious about the scheming of the major tax-exempt foundations, a subject covered extensively in part 7 of this series on education. To deal with the issue, lawmakers formed the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, sometimes referred to as the “Reece Committee” after its chairman.

What investigators found should have shocked America to the core. In its final report, the select committee reported that the major foundations of the day, which still exist, had “supported a conscious distortion of history.” The foundations also sought to hijack education for the purpose of undermining American constitutional principles and liberty, investigators found.

One of the expert witnesses who testified during the select committee’s investigation, attorney and investigator Aaron Sargent, an expert in subversion through education, put it clearly. “They sought to create a blackout of history by slanting and distorting historical facts,” Sargent testified about the goals of the major tax-exempt foundations in the education field. “They introduced a new and revolutionary philosophy—one based on the teachings of John Dewey.”

By the time of the congressional probe, the situation was so serious that Norman Dodd, the chief investigator for the committee, said the foundations had orchestrated a “revolution” in the United States. The revolution “could not have occurred peacefully or with the consent of the majority unless education in the United States had prepared in advance to endorse it,” Dodd told lawmakers in his sworn testimony. The attack on real history in school was a crucial element of that.

Of course, the situation only got worse from there. By 1980, pseudo-historian Howard Zinn, a radical exposed in declassified FBI documents as a Communist Party member, had published his book “A People’s History of the United States.” It’s a favorite in public schools. More than 3 million copies have been sold so far, shaping the minds and attitudes of countless millions of Americans while turning them against their own nation and their own political institutions that guaranteed individual liberty for so long.

The propaganda “history” book was full of obvious lies, as exposed most recently by scholar Mary Grabar in her book “Debunking Howard Zinn.” The deception was strategic, too, and powerful. The lies begin right at the start of the book, portraying Columbus as a genocidal monster, and continue onward from there.

“We were really no better than the Nazis in the way Zinn presents it,” she said.

It was carefully calculated. “Rewriting history is what communists do,” continued Grabar, who also serves as a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. “They don’t want people to know about any other form of government or to remember a time when there was freedom and abundance. Like Zinn, the Marxists of today want young people to be so disgusted with their own country that they become inspired to overthrow it.”

While demonizing the United States and Western civilization more broadly, Zinn and other communists work hard to conceal the history of communism—“the horrors of starvation, gulags, repression, and mass murder,” Grabar said. Interestingly, there were clear parallels between Zinn’s fake history and a history written by Communist Party USA chief William Z. Foster published in 1951 dubbed “Outline Political History of the Americas.” Foster wrote openly about how crucial hijacking education would be for the Soviet-style communist regime he envisioned for America.

When starting the project, Grabar said she already knew Zinn’s book was biased. “But even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied,” she said, urging students, parents, and community members to use her book to refute the propaganda with facts.

More recently, The New York Times released its 1619 Project, the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Like Zinn’s book, it’s essentially fake history, as historians from across the political spectrum—and even The New York Times’ own fact-checker—publicly confirmed. Like Zinn’s book, it seeks to “reframe” America’s history as one based on oppression, slavery, and racism rather than liberty. And like Zinn’s fake history, the 1619 Project is now being used in public schools across America.

Perhaps most alarming about Hannah-Jones’s false narrative is the notion that racism and evil are embedded “in the very DNA” of America. In other words, there’s nothing short of the complete annihilation of the United States’ very foundations and essence that could possibly resolve the real and imagined shortcomings. The message of the project was obvious and clear: Death to America!

In reality, the truth about American history is almost exactly the opposite of what the project presents. The principles upon which the nation was founded—“all men are created equal,” for instance, and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—paved the way for abolishing slavery worldwide while facilitating the greatest expansion of human freedom and prosperity in world history.

Despite the obvious lies and deception, Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. Ironically, though, New York Times writer Walter Duranty also won a Pulitzer Prize for peddling lies and communist propaganda. In Duranty’s case, he infamously parroted Stalin’s obvious propaganda and covered up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine that killed by some estimates up to 10 million people.

Effects of Fake History

This strategic rewriting of history in public schools across America has led to dramatic shifts in Americans’ attitudes, values, beliefs, and worldview. For example, national pride among Americans, who arguably live in the richest and freest nation in human history, has reached historic lows, according to a Gallup poll released last summer. Among younger Americans, just 1 in 5 are extremely proud to be American, while among those 65 and older, just over half are extremely proud.

But the real dangers are becoming clear, too. A 2019 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 7 in 10 millennials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. Fully 36 percent of millennials support communism, the survey found. And just 57 percent of them believe the Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom and equality better than the Communist Manifesto. A generation ago, these numbers would have been inconceivable.

“When we don’t educate our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, we shouldn’t be surprised at their willingness to embrace Marxist ideas,” explained Victims of Communism (VOC) Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith.

“We need to redouble our efforts to educate America’s youth about the history of communist regimes and the dangers of socialism today.”

VOC Director of Academic Programs Murray Bessette explained that American public schools simply don’t teach the true history of communism. Part of the reason for that, he said, is the “ideological character of many involved in developing and delivering curricula for American schools.” Parents must insist on a full account of history, and teachers must seek out programs and materials that teach the whole truth, added Bessette.

The effects of these false narratives pushed on children in government schools are becoming more and more obvious. Just think of the brainwashed armies of young Americans rampaging through the streets rioting, looting, killing, protesting, and destroying. Funded by rich and powerful individuals, companies, and foundations, their goal is to “fundamentally transform” what they view as an evil America. And because they don’t know the truth about their own nation or its history, many genuinely believe in what they’re doing.

Speaking at an Independence Day celebration last summer, the president of the United States hit the nail on the head. “The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump explained. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that they were villains.”

Their goal, the president correctly observed, is not to improve America, but to destroy it.

Fortunately, now that the problem has been identified, steps are being taken to address it. And at the core of that process will be ensuring that young Americans understand the truth about their own nation’s history. During remarks made on Constitution Day, Trump blasted the left’s distortion of American history with lies and deception.

“There is no better example than The New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project,” said Trump, calling it “toxic” propaganda that would “destroy” America. “This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

In reality, as Trump correctly pointed out, “nothing could be further from the truth.”

“America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history,” the president declared.

Trump also promised action to reverse the progress of the history destroyers and rewriters. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” he said. “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

To accomplish that, grants are being awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to help develop a pro-American curriculum that “celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” Trump said. He also said he would soon sign an executive order to create a national “1776 Commission” that will promote patriotic education that will “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.”

Whether the rot and corruption that has taken over the teaching of history and civics in America’s government schools can be reversed remains to be seen. But diagnosing an illness is the first step to treating and curing it. Now that Americans are starting to understand what’s killing their nation, serious efforts can be made to stop the bleeding. Teaching children the truth about U.S. history will be a good first step.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave an outstanding speech a couple of weeks ago covering several key points on education and religious freedom. Barr raises the thought-provoking question asking if today’s public schools have become religious schools promoting the orthodoxy of secularism.

I would strongly encourage you to watch and consider this 24-minute speech in response to an award given to him by Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the nation’s premier religious liberty organizations.

Barr also does a very good job of succinctly addressing Critical Race Theory, one of the hottest topics across America today.

In the speech, Barr quickly lays out five points about Critical Race Theory as repackaged Marxism. He states:

But the progressive gender and sexuality agenda only begins to scratch the surface of what is now being taught in government-run schools.

In recent years, public schools across the country have rushed to embrace the so-called “Critical Race Theory.” CRT is nothing more than the materialist philosophy of Marxism substituting racial antagonism for class antagonism.

It postulates all the same things as traditional Marxism:

1.) That there are meta-historical forces at work.

2.) That social pathologies are due to societal conventions and power structures that have to be destroyed.

3.) That conflict between the oppressed and the oppressors provides the dynamic and progressive movement of history.

4.) And that individual morality is determined by where one fits in with the impersonal movement of these historical forces.

5.) Just as everyone, from the Catholic Church on, has observed traditional Marxism, this philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. It posits a view of man and his relation to society and to other individuals that is antithetical to the Christian view.

Please watch/listen and share this great video:

This article was originally published by our friends at AFA of Indiana.

We are proud to share this great resource from our fiends over at Citizens for Renewing America.

Dear Parents, Grandparents, Pastors and Church Leaders,

I’m sure that you would agree that our children are part of a massive mission field – a mission field that has been neglected. They demand our utmost attention and our highest priority. Too many children in our families, in our churches and in our communities are being discipled in ways that are contrary to what the Bible teaches. This cannot continue.

Our Lord and Savior gave us clear instructions in Matthew 28:19-20 to “make disciples of all the nations… teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” While international missionary support is necessary, we simply cannot ignore the growing great need here at home with our own children. (Mark 8:36; Prov. 17:24)

It is bad enough that children are failing to meet proficiency standards in English Language Arts, Math and Science, but now the focus of school time is on social engineering, humanistic training, sexual immorality, revisionist history and other godless subject matters. Right here in Illinois, a shocking number of kids hear messages about choosing their gender or embracing an LGBTQ lifestyle … and our state lawmakers just mandated “comprehensive sex ed” for kids as young as kindergarten.

Not only are these issues occurring in Illinois and other states, but the federal Equality Act – which the LGBTQ lobby badly wants passed – will use the full power of the federal government to enshrine many of these practices across the nation while eliminating all protections from churches, private schools and religious organizations.

We believe that the godless indoctrination that is already well underway in our public schools (not by every teacher), is one of the reasons we see so many of our children leaving the faith when they are out of high school.

An article titled U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time paints a very bleak picture of the health of the Church. Using data from Gallup polls, the article states that only 47% of Americans now say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque, which is down from 50% in 2018, and 70% in 1999. According to the article,

“U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century.”

There are many variables, but the one that has had the greatest obvious impact on this decline is public education, which has aggressively nurtured our cultural drift away from God. The good news is that we live in a state and nation with amazing individual and religious liberties. There are many good educational choices that would enable parents/grandparents, and church leaders to pass on their faith to their children by teaching them biblical truth and to train them up in the instruction of the Lord.

Sincerely,

Video Presentations:

Alex Newman: Reasons Why to Exit Public Schools

Rev. Ceasar LeFlore: Resources To Get Our Children Out

More information:

Reasons to Exit Illinois Government Schools

Illinois School Proficiency FAILURE

Did You Know?

How to Rescue Our Children

“Comprehensive” Sex Education

For Parents, Grandparents and Church Leaders

Overcoming Objections

Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.

In their place are behavioral psychology and “social and emotional learning” (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.

That is barely happening now, as government data show.

Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments—do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.

They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.

But those “good old days” are largely gone.

Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory “politically correct” value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.

There’s also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers—not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.

SEL: The Mechanism for Transformation

In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad—silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else—at least on the surface.

The education establishment refers to it as “social and emotional learning,” “social-emotional learning,” or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.

And it’s true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.

But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.

Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.

The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, CASEL’s website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it’s not pretty.

Political Extremism and Radical Values

Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, “educators,” and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children’s beliefs and “deconstructing” the values parents seek to instill.

“With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society,” the organization’s website boasts under the headline “SEL as a Lever for Equity,” hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left “social justice” movement.

In other words, one of the purposes of SEL—as its leading promoters admit—is to reform society.

Among the webinars offered there are “SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,” and also a lecture on how to use SEL to “support antiracist practices.” Another webinar outlines how to use policy to “dismantle inequities.”

Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn’t an accident.

Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of “social” and “emotional” learning.

“SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities,” it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to “assess power dynamics” and confront “issues of race and class across different settings.”

The children are also expected to “develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes.”

In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in “systemic” and “structural” racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.

The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along “race” and “class” lines as part of the now-obvious effort to “divide and conquer” America.

Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist “critical theory” rhetoric masquerading as “education.”

It’s extremely dangerous.

In Practice, Educators Shine the Light

A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.

Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.

In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond “helping” children socially and emotionally. And it isn’t difficult to find that out.

In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.

For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.

These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Regardless of one’s views on these subjects, countless parents—especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children’s minds to be objectionable.

Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as “correct” by the forces behind SEL.

More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.

Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports “social and emotional development for children,” wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.

“Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity,” she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the “concept of ‘whiteness.’”

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education.

“One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race,” she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don’t want their children obsessing about “race” or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.

In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts “SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project.”

Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.”

Zinn described himself as “something of a Marxist,” his biographer recounted.

According to EdTech, though, the “SEL-oriented” propaganda from Zinn is supposedly “aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion.”

In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.

And yet under the guise of SEL programs and “nurturing empathy and compassion,” millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.

And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give “insight into students’ online behaviors—both inside and outside the virtual classroom—to enhance SEL.”

One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators “a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps,” Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform “real-time assessments” to “flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress.”

As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track “progress” on adjusting children’s attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of “emotional intelligence.”

The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further “interventions” are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.

And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict “future behavior and interests” of the children.

Educators Speak Out

Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America’s children.

One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.

“The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives,” she told The Epoch Times. “Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home.”

While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, “it is quite the opposite,” McWilliams said.

“Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda,” she said. “From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either.”

SEL also represents the “brainwashing of our children,” McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to “compromise on everything” with no consideration of what is taught in the home.

“These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family,” she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The popular SEL program used in McWilliams’s school, Leader in Me, was designed to “shift the culture of the school to influence children’s morals and values based on progressive social justice standards,” she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.

When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.

“Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children’s lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom,” McWilliams said.

The Occult Origins of SEL

The story behind SEL is even more troubling.

According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term “social and emotional” originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.

One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.

“Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a “transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century.”

According to Brian Wilson’s book “John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age,” Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).

So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her “Great Invocation,” which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as “ascended masters,” Wilson documents in his book.

The Fetzer Institute didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn’t follow up despite multiple requests.

More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey’s bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.

United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers’ manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her “ascended masters.”

The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America’s “progressive” education system.

Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society’s ills.

For at least 12 years—more if they go to college—American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey’s religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.

Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey’s educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.

“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated,” Bailey wrote in her book “Education in the New Age.”

Funding and People

Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.

On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America’s education system.

Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world’s education systems.

Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said “provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning.”

For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography “Memoirs” of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” of globalists, “against the best interests of the United States,” to build a “One World” political and economic system.

Aside from its financiers, CASEL’s leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.

Ayers’s Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group’s leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization’s leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.

Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.

More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL’s website came from that university’s Department of Education and Psychology.

SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.

Vygotsky’s contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).

Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.

Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.

In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike’s “Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology” published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.

Thorndike didn’t bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.

Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet “education” and “psychology” would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.

“It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type,” Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.

“New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man,” he added.

SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this “new type of man”—a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.

Conclusion

Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled “SEL warrior” quoted in an article on the NEA’s website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.

“SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom,” she said. “It’s about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics.”

In a U.S. Department of Education report, a “review” of existing studies called for subjecting “the entire student body” to constant SEL programming “in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways.” Parents should also “reinforce” it at home.

But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America’s youth—and to individual liberty.

The scheme isn’t about helping children at all. Instead, it’s about manipulating and conditioning America’s youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.

Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.

Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation’s children from this dangerous threat.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.