The battle for the minds of America's children

Excellent essay. Major portion below.

The family is the most exclusive private association known to man, and, as Plato knew, it is the single greatest obstacle to collectivism. Families are inward looking units that resist government-imposed homogenization, and they are an inherently conservative cultural force that seek to preserve the private manners and mores of each and every particular family. Worse: families are the origin of private property, the division of labor, inequality, and gender roles. The family is a naturally occurring social unit that has always stood against the State in its attempt to collectivize the community for either reactionary or progressive ends. Figuratively speaking, every family is protected by a virtual “No Trespassing” sign barring entry.

The success of government schooling and its ultimate goals therefore require the families ties between parent and child be weakened if not broken. In the Communist Manifesto, made known his disgust of the bourgeois family, with all of its “clap-trap” about the “hallowed co-relation of parents and child.”[1] The bond must be broken, and children must be brought up and educated as wards of the State. The problem is that parents selfishly care too much about their children. Parents erroneously think, according to government schoolers, that they have an unalienable, fundamental, human right to determine their children’s values. The proponents of government-run schooling think otherwise.

Only when we understand why America’s government schools were founded in the first place can we understand the utterly perverse relationship that exists today between parents and the Education Establishment that runs America’s government schools. Over the course of the last twelve months parents have seen how and why the Education Deep State has sought to take full control over the what their children think in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago.

Let’s fast forward now to the recent past to see how the original goals of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century proponents of government schooling have panned out in practice in twenty-first America? How do government educators today view the three-way relationship between parents, children, and the schools? How and why is government schooling by and for the State? How exactly does that work?

Government Schooling as Indoctrination

Let’s begin with the obvious facts.

All three levels of government in the United States—federal, state, and local—play a role in running the so-called “public” school system. Local, state, and federal governments in this country are democratically elected, although the education bureaucracies that actually run the schools are not. Those who actually determine what is being taught to children and how are directly or indirectly appointed by the politicians. Because the education of children is so important to both parents and politicians, groups of individuals with shared moral-political values often compete with one another politically to gain power in order to control what ideas are being taught to children.

One obvious consequence of a system in which government schools push State-sanctioned ideas and values on children is that the system invites ideological rent-seeking in which various social-religious-ideological-political factions pursue political power in order to force their particular beliefs or interests on the community, the state, or the nation as a whole. As James Madison intimated in Federalist No. 10, ideological-political factions will always compete against and fight with one another for control of the State apparatus that controls the schools and therewith the education of all children. Government schooling enables those who control the State (e.g., the majority and their surrogates) to force their political views on those who do not. That is an iron law of politics, particularly democratic politics.

This is why in the context of twenty-first century America, secular liberals in Kansas rightly fear that religious conservatives in power will use the government education system to support a right-wing agenda, and religious conservatives in Massachusetts rightly fear that secular liberals in power will use the schools to promote a leftist agenda. Parents who want their kids to get a good education in math, science, history, and literature rightly fear both—they no more want their six-year-olds being forced to memorize the Ten Commandments in school than they want them being forced to read Heather Has Two Mommies.[2] Parents, of course, are properly free to introduce their children to such subjects, but the government has no business pushing religious or sexual preferences on students.

It is clearly a violation of rights for the government to force secular parents to send their children to schools that teach them the world was made in seven days, that snakes can talk, that a virgin gave birth, that a man walked on water, or the like. And it is likewise a violation of rights for the government to force religious parents to send their children to schools that teach them to worship mother earth; to put condoms on cucumbers; to believe that boys can become girls and vice versa; to reject the Bible but enjoy the Koran; and to regard American society as inherently racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic.

The problem here is not that schools are teaching values. No form of education—whether it is government, private, parochial, or home schooling—can escape the teaching of values. The problem is that the values being taught in government schools are chosen not by parents but by the State or what I call the Education Deep State (i.e., federal and state departments of education, teachers’ colleges, teachers’ unions, school boards, curriculum designers and textbook publishers). Parents are excluded entirely from this process. But that’s always been the goal of government schooling.