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Training Children to be Activists
Our children have already been brainwashed in our schools with the dogma of Leftism, including the hatred of America, its Founders and its values. But the indoctrination has become more extreme than I thought: We are teaching our children to 
be activists.
I’m not just talking only about teenagers; I’m talking about grade school children being taught about social justice, about hating conservatives and about denigrating those who think differently than they do in a formal curriculum. Some people are having doubts about the process:
Yes, I want my children to understand injustice and the mechanisms through which it persists. I want them to be able to identify when they or their friends are being treated with small-mindedness and have the tools to reject it. Most of all, I want them to know that we all share the responsibility of fixing what is broken in our world.
Still, despite all this, and the fact that I’ve spent much of my professional life pushing for change, I’m hesitant about mixing children with activism. My biggest fear? Their certainty. I don’t want them to grow up sure of their righteousness and that if they are the good guys, well, the other guys must be bad. I worry about how tribalistic America is becoming, the degradation of our civil discourse and the us vs. them, zero-sum thinking that has found its way into debates, large and small. I hear toddlers refer to President Donald Trump as a ‘monster,’ and although I’m not a fan of his policies or demeanor, I cringe. I really don’t want to help perpetuate this for another generation.
Many parents have no clue that they’re children are being taught in this way. In some instances, children are repeating the radical language that their friends are using, or they are mimicking their parents.
Have you forgotten the school walk-outs for gun control? Teachers and administrators decided to either sanction these activities or try to downplay them. But they are now essentially encouraging the formation of cults:
The country doesn’t know the worst of the grade-school protest abuse because it takes place in ultra-progressive schools where all parents are of the same mind, and no one blinks an eye at it. In rare occasions when some parents oppose it, they keep quiet or resolve issues on the local level for their kids’ sake. Conformity rules.
And conformity or not, these kids are not ready for the public forum. Their opinions and defenses are not well-formed. We’ve all seen it: ridiculous signs, silly clothes, shanty towns erected on public land. All of it is particularly sad when it involves hapless teens many of whom will either come to regret their sweet innocence splattered all over the webs, or end up having their future ruined by ideology — possibly both.
Black Lives Matter has been active over the last couple of years in placing their curriculum in schools all over the country:
In 2018, school districts in more than 20 major cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle incorporated BLM at School Week into their curricula, and still more participated this year.
Incorporating BLM’s ideas into K-12 school curricula extends beyond one week of each school year. In a letter of support, BLM co-founder Opel Tometi describes the effort as ‘a new uprising for racial justice’ in the nation’s schools.
The editors of Rethinking Schools, a trade publication dedicated to advancing the agenda of the social-justice left in classrooms, declare: ‘We need to transform our schools into sites of resistance to a system that devalues Black lives.’
At one time we might have thought that protests were harmless. But we know now that they can turn violent and hateful in just moments, essentially becoming riots:
A protester is swallowed by the masses, chanting, singing, agitated. He makes acquaintances with friendly strangers, all of them are moved by the same cause. He feels a sense of belonging; the righteousness of a cause is confirmed by the — usually overestimated — size of the crowd, and since the cause is righteous, he feels justified in doing anything he deems necessary to advance it. All of a sudden, he finds himself acting out something only an hour ago he found unconscionable, like chanting an embarrassing ditty, burning a flag or throwing a rock. His self is broken, and he is ecstatic.
There are now online schools at all levels that offer an activist agenda. Social justice is part of their curriculum:
A wide-ranging concept, social justice is concerned with any mistreatment of an individual by society. In the case of student activism, this may relate to student mistreatment by the school administration. Issues span from racism and sexism to access to healthcare or education, and students often join with larger activism groups to amplify their collective voice.
Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? But we know that “amplifying their collective voice” can go beyond the idealistic and collegial.
The Leftist agenda has invaded our schools; it’s difficult to know if there is any way to remove that curricula. But now they are taking indoctrination to the next level which engages students beyond the intellectual and theoretical: our children will be in the streets promoting these Marxist and anarchist ideas. Who knows which protests will become riots?
Have we lost our children completely to the Left’s agenda?
Published in Education
We all have to raise kids against our school system.
You are on the front lines. Best wishes for success.
I’d rather defund the public schools than the police . . .
You know, parents churches and communities actually taught kids before public schools. Public schools were originally made to oppress make Catholics into Protestants if memory serves. Even Marx in one of his few sensible moments opposed public education because he felt it would be used by the government for nefarious ends.
The police do less damage.
Have we lost our children completely to the Left’s agenda?
Yes in any significant numbers, absent a radical change in public schools. We pay them to teach our children to hate us, and are too concerned with being nice when the ship could have been turned. I had hope, but especially after the past 3 months I don’t see this dynamic changing in any significant way. Now Nice = Left = Normal. Traditional = “…ist” = “Far Right” = Fired. The Left own the Elite, the Ruling Classes of the world. They are not going to relinquish that perch until they become fat and lazy, or lose a real fight. At this point it looks to me like we are the French Army behind the Maginot Line, and the Left are the Wehrmacht. Too many would rather blend into the herd than become a target. Too many are unwilling to put up with the unpleasantness, hardship and discomfort needed to over throw the current ruling class.
Especially the kids who are well socialized to school and pleasing their teachers. See also the legend of Pavlik Morozov.
Also consider Horst Wessel, and then this:
If you kill one of ours, it’s time for us to kill one of yours.
Breitbart’s article notes the scimitar, but not the tarboosh.
Man with tarboosh and scimitar at Kenosha rally. Getty Images.
Having returned to college at a Japanese university for a second degree (the first one was in the early 80s), I didn’t expect to see much of the wokeness that I’ve read about in so many US colleges. As it turned out, during the two years I spent taking undergrad classes, I personally observed a few examples of woke behavior among the American exchange students (although I did see quite a few of them dressed rather outlandishly). On the other hand, I heard from a few of the European exchange students that they didn’t like socializing with the American exchange students. I gathered that there was something in their attitude that put them off. At the time, the comments surprised me, but later I realized that the woke attitudes must have been evident to people of the same age.
With the exception of Britain, most Europeans aren’t super woke.
I believe that we have; parents are not welcome to look in on what is being taught – and are mostly too busy to do so.
Even if some of them grow to realize that things they have been taught since kindergarten are lies, the bulk will be socialized to either believe or not make waves.
When a person reaches their golden years, the world looks like lead – that is the way of things. Perhaps I am just another aging doom-monger. But our schools look more like indoctrination camps than places of learning.
This is a key point, @ontheleftcoast. And I’m also surprised that there hasn’t been a mass killing at one of the protests. I fear it’s only a matter of time.
I agree. And I think parents are socialized/intimidated into following along. Sigh.
The worst schools in the west were in New Zealand. The Lange government bought off their left by picking a fight with the us over ship landings . Their left was happy, and being left, were dumb about the real world, so the Lange government then imposed across the board free market reforms including school reform. All people in the school’s administrative overhead were removed, schools were turned over to teachers and parents, making them adminisratively independent of each other, and parents could choose which school to send their kids to. Schools had a basic curricula, but 10% could be what ever the teachers chose, so some schools had more developed music, others science etc. Parents sent their kids to the schools they thought most appropriate for their children. Bad teachers got fired because both parents and other teachers know whose good and who isn’t, and they had to compete for students because the money came with the students. They rose almost overnight to become among the best schools in the world, right behind Singapore.
We’ve turned our schools over to teachers unions not teachers, to administrators and government bureaucrats not parents. Why can’t we stop doing this? We know we’re destroying our children and with it our country. States run by Republicans could change that but either don’t try or don’t care or believe we can do these kinds of revolutionary changes gradually, it’s not working and it can’t. In part it’s because parents who have decent schools paid for them when they bought overpriced homes. We can deal with that, good expensive schools can remain as they are or choose to get better, just allow parents to pay for them rather than through taxes and house prices. Some kids will not compete for academic oriented schools and some from outside the neighborhoods will enter. Some smaller state will just have to do it. Others will learn. Good teachers will benefit and earn more on average, and all but lousy teachers will benefit. Markets work.
When my son was a freshman, he came home with an English assignment titled, “Combating Racism in (our town)”. The task was to make posters, and then the class was going to make a field trip downtown and hang them up. I quickly made an appointment with the teacher. When I arrived, I found she had called in backup. I was confronted by, the teacher, the department director, the vice-principal, and the principal. I wasn’t intimidated. I explained that; 1. I am against racism, but the topic is not the issue. 2. My son was not going to school to combat anything. 3. The teacher is to teach English, and not get my son involved in the politics and issues of today. 4. The teacher’s job is to teach my son the skills he needs so that when he has to deal with issues when he is an adult, he has the skills and knowledge to do so.
The teacher tried to defend her assignment, as did the department head. The principal politely told them to be quiet, and then gave me some political jargon about teaching community service, values, etc. I explained that that was my job, certainly not the job of an English teacher. The meeting ended in a barely civil note. Nothing was accomplished. They didn’t care what I thought, or wanted. They had no reason to care. I am sure I was the topic of discussion in the teacher’s lounge for several days. I am certain I did not make things better for my son.
We need to take our schools away from the government and the teacher’s unions. Parents need to demand more say in what is taught to their children. The system is badly broken.
I don’t think you know how many homeschoolers – including “classically educated Christians – are actually dyed in the wool leftist social-justice adherents. Let me give some examples:
Critical Race Theory is incredibly appealing to Christians because it uses Christian imagery and language – it sounds like Christianity, even though it clearly is not.
We need people like you, @ponyconvertible. You showed great courage. I hope they didn’t make your son’s life more difficult, but hopefully he understand the lessons you were trying to demonstrate.
Can you get more in depth on that? I don’t see it, but I think it would be important to know how that connection can exist.
There’s something else a play that makes the schools massively more difficult to reform than you can imagine: State Constitutions and Court Rulings.
You see most states have it baked into their state constitutions that the state will create, fund, and maintain public schools. In many states this language includes things like “adequately funded” or other terribly vague language. This language mostly dates back to the late 1800s, in the great national fad for public schools set in motion by Thomas Dewey, Horace Mann, and others.
Well, beginning the 70s, and really accelerating in the 90s and 00s many states were sued by various legal groups that they were violating their own constitutions by not funding “fairly”. Of course the lawsuits couldn’t say was “fairly” actually meant, but by gum the lawsuits put the state school systems directly under various courts, and removed a lot of oversight that state and local governments used to have. Effectively this gave the school bureaucracies a lot of independence from parents and voters, and made the schools even harder to reform short of a massive revolt by parents that would have to straddle party lines. And the teachers’ unions have been really quite effective at keeping that from happening.
Well it’s easy.
The problems here are numerous, but the appeals to sin, repentance, and redemption are direct perversions of Christianity, rephrased in racism and Marxian power theory.
Yes they (at least some of them) knew what they were doing and we didn’t, but some smaller state can carry on the fight and show how it can be done. The state must control their own legislature. The alternative isn’t acceptable because we lose, and we lose everything. Centralization of anything in a country as large and diverse as the US can’t work. Even the military and foreign trade which have to be governed centrally drift and get corrupt or inept until there is a crisis. We’re in one now and are changing them. Education is far more difficult because schools have to be decentralized. But we have no choice and this is the most important matter we face as a nation.
God help us.
Maybe I should take my own advice and not even bother having kids. (It won’t be hard: It’s not like I’ve met any non-woke and non-psychotic ladies lately.)
There are lots of good women out there (I’m doing my best to raise 4 more, and Boss Mongo has 3 himself who could probably beat the tar out of you, just to give a couple of examples). But you may have to venture to out of the way places.
Heh. I’d thought that the homeschooling/classical-school world was an out-of-the-way place.
Aaron: “The core problem in education is that parents have very little control over the curriculum and often no opportunity to reject an intolerable school. If schools were not funded and directed by government, there would be plenty of uneducated and miseducated kids; but not more than we witness today with public education. Students would not so easily be made pawns in political games.”
Agreed.
Clifford: “Public schools are controlled by the state and so controlled by the voters. Voters choose to allow all of the abuses. Voters choose not to compel elected officials to impose civil and civic-minded curricula. We did not lose children to the left. We gave them away, and we can fix it any time we actually get motivated to use the power of the ballot box”
I think in Blue States, Blue Cities and many Red States, this thought is only true in theory but not in practice. The fact is that the Teachers Unions overwhelmingly dominate what is taught in school. Their taxpayer enriched mega-funding for their agenda overwhelms by millions of dollars those of us who want to change the direction of the schools.
One of the major problems with our schools is simply the Teachers’ Unions and their iron clad control of curriculum. Public Employee Unions are illegal under the 1935 Labor Relations Act but were allowed by an Executive Order by Kennedy in the early 60’s. Trump could and should abolish Public Employee Unions by an EO for they have totally corrupted not only the schools but our state and local governments. The BLM riots and the Pandemic Lockdowns are also a result of this Union problem.
The second major problem is the refusal of our courts to recognize our Equal Protection Rights in regard to the education of our children. All legitimate points of view held by significant groups in our society need to be heard with respect in our schools, but they are not. Largely only one point of view is heard and that is the one of the Radical Marxist Left. This abominable practice is a ridiculous and outrageous violation of our rights and has caused a radical indoctrination of our children and the political process. This problem needs to be addressed immediately and the millions of government workers who have violated our rights need to be sent to prison. No doubt about it.
Didn’t Jesus treat folks based on the content of their character and deemphasize tribal affiliation?
You mean like Republican voters choose not to compel Republicans at the national level to cooperate for anything other than tweaking the tax code? Is it your choice that your representatives twiddle their thumbs while the republic degrades?
Voting will never be a power equal to economic incentives. It will never be as frequent, as flexible, or as nuanced as the feedback of paying customers. Moving one’s child out of a failing public school will never be as easy as changing private options.
We need to kick government out of the market, not to choose better career administrators once every couple years based on vague promises and financial referendums.
By the way, I think public universities and public loan assistance demonstrate the deleterious effects of subsidizing ostensibly private transactions.
Jesus specifically? I don’t know. He was pretty explicit that he was there for the Jews first… they got first dibs. But he never denied help to those who faithfully humbled themselves and asked.
Paul does, as he links his calling to Jesus’ last words to his followers – go out into the world preaching the gospel to all nations.
Peter is pretty explicit that anyone who doesn’t care for one’s own family is worse than an unbeliever. It appears that Christianity intends for its followers to care primarily for those under their authority / protection and in their abundance or excess, reaching out to others outside their authority in love.
There’s some pretty radical ideas of what counts as abundance that I’m still learning to square with…
I was going to disagree with your original comment. This should not be attractive to anyone who is actually a Christian. But you are correct about the similarity in theme, and about Wokeism being a perversion of those themes.
One point that might be worth mentioning is the ability of immigrant parents to even understand what their children are engaging with in school. Most of my Hispanic students in public school were the 1st generation children of Mexican or Central American parents. I kept in touch with several of them after I left and noticed many of them turn into self-proclaimed “activists”.
The school I had worked for allowed these students to hold walk-outs for causes like gun control stemming from school shootings, and after a veteran teacher made a comment that the students decided was in appropriate, they were allowed to take over the main hallway for a raucous multi-day sit-in. They also participated in the nearly 2 week-long strikes with the teachers last fall. No wonder they declared themselves activists- they had barely done any studying all year.
These students without exception came from working class families that emphasized hard work and education to get ahead, their parents worked multiple jobs and were incredibly busy, and spoke just a few words of English. Their ability to keep tabs on their children and understand the political waters that their kids were veering off into- that would seem to require more time and cultural understanding than some of these parents, with the best of intentions, might have.