Education Wars

The War on Children is real and intensifying. We can interconnect many culture war fronts with the War on Children. The LGBTQ agenda including grooming and transgender activism; education wars, including Critical Race Theory, the false history of the 1619 Project, leftist teachers; undermining parental rights; and the sexualization of our children, including pedophilia.

The first post in this series looked at the history of the war on children, defined it and the objectives of this attack on our children, identified the aggressors, and introduced the battlefronts in this war.

In this post, we will take a closer look at how the war on children is being waged in education, primarily in our public schools. Welcome to the Education Wars.

Woke Educators and Woke Schools

Educators, who buy into the woke ideology and create woke schools, wage the education wars (administrators, teachers, and school boards).

So, what does it mean to be “woke”?

In her book, Awake, Not Woke, Noelle Mering provides a useful definition:

The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society. While it originated specifically with regard to racism, it has since broadened to include all areas of social oppression commonly considered to be along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality. Specific acts of injustice are used to serve the larger goal of furthering the ideology that sees all of human interaction as a power contest. Growth for the woke movement is measured by fracturing. Indeed, it is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collision course with Christianity. [i]

Mering points to additional reasons “woke” ideology is dangerous and harmful:

It is not only destructive, but incoherent. It is a war of words against the Word. It is a revolution which elevates will over reason, the group over the person, and human power over higher authority. What is rejected—reason, the person, and authority—are the three characteristics of the Logos himself. The Logos is the mind of God, communicated in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the author of, and authority over, all. Whether explicitly or not, he is the ultimate target of the woke revolt.[ii]

While woke ideology appears as a benevolent fight for justice, it is far from that. It lures us in with an appeal to our better natures, then replaces intelligible principles with distorted ones, resulting in incoherence and chaos.[iii]

Read the above quotations again. This is the ideology influencing the thinking of those who are teaching our children in many of America’s public schools.

To add a bit more fuel to this fire, former Attorney General and Christian thinker William Barr, in an address titled “Public Schools are So Hostile to Christians, They’re Unconstitutional,” said:

Banning Christianity from education created a moral vacuum that has ultimately been filled badly with political leftism. This has not only increasingly turned younger American generations against their own faith, families, and country, it has turned public schools into indoctrination camps.

Education Wars – Woke Curriculum 

Now that you’ve been introduced to the thinking of our woke educators it is time to delve into their curriculum.

No, it’s not the 3 R’s — reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.

Rather, it is what I call the 4 S’:

Socialist inspired Critical Race Theory (CRT)

Scarce (mostly absent) History of the 1619 Project (1619

Social Emotional Learning (SEL

 Sex Education Woke Style

Critical Race Theory 

What is this theory being taught to our children? 

CRT is a movement of admitted far-left scholars who wish to challenge power structures represented in the American legal culture and society with respect to “the rule of law” and “equal protection.” Their belief is that whereas our laws are ostensibly “neutral” and “objective,” they are neither — and never could have been objective in the first place because of the racial dynamic that has been exercised legally and ideologically over the course of American history. Thus, they call for “race-consciousness” in a reexamination of race and racism, which they believe was essentially discarded when the ideas of integration, assimilation, and color-blindness became the official norms. While these ideas are not necessarily bad things in and of themselves, CRT theorists believe current laws continue to promote racial domination and subjugation of people of color in both a systemic and institutional manner, and that legal remediation for past injustices is warranted.

Spend some time on the internet searching for CRT and Critical Race Theory and you soon learn that is being taught in many of our public schools. Also, battles are raging where parents alerted to the threat are pushing back. In some states, legislation to eliminate the teaching of CRT is being debated.

Why is CRT Dangerous?

Here are quotes from a reliable source that make this point:

CRT, I believe, is being specifically promoted in K-12 curriculums to layer on top of CT to form an outright Marxist approach, which seeks to transform and undermine traditional American values.

The last thing children need is to be told they and their classmates are either oppressors or oppressed based simply on the color of their skin. Indeed, children should be taught the full truth of our history, including the many times we have failed to live up to our ideals. But that is not the project of CRT, which due to its nuances and complexity as a recent and decidedly immature race-based legal theory, is highly inappropriate for K-12 students. In short, the theory has limited pedagogic value and is enormously difficult to understand (let alone teach) by instructors not versed in legal theory and civil rights legislation.

The 1619 Project 

The 1619 Project began as a long form essay in the New York Times Magazine by Nikole Hannah-Jones and other writers, and later expanded into book form.

It is a rewriting of history that asserts that the first slaves arrived in North America in 1619 and that it was on the backs of slaves that America everything grew that made America exceptional.

Reputable historians easily debunked this thesis. Most notably, Mary Grabar, in her book Debunking the 1619 Project.

This quote from her book sums up how teaching this false history is an attack on children:

We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting out of our public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools. It is in furtherance of that endeavor that this book is offered to the American public. [iv]

Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

SEL is a recently introduced weapon in the war on children. It purports to improve children’s social and emotional skills. So far, “27 states so far have adopted K-12 SEL competencies, and all 50 states have adopted SEL competencies for pre-K students.”

But the real aim of SEL is to prepare children to support at world government that manages energy resources and implements a large-scale distribution of wealth.

In UNESCO’s view, the endgame of SEL is not to meet the social and emotional needs of each child, but to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society by adhering to the sustainable development goals.

The goals will also create dissonance in people because of the monumental sacrifices that may be necessary to achieve them — giving up fossil fuels, family values, and control of one’s own property, to name a few. Therefore, proponents say it is necessary to reduce children’s emotional resistance to the goals through systemic SEL in the classroom: “Since dissonance is an unpleasant emotive state, subjects of dissonance require emotion-regulatory capabilities (emotional resilience) to navigate the behaviors and prerequisite antecedents to attain [the] SDGs.” The article says, “Dissonance can be caused by beliefs, attitudes, values, and feelings,” and that “interventions to reduce dissonance are required to address … the intensity of emotional response.” In short, they believe interventions by way of SEL programs are necessary to influence young people’s “beliefs, attitudes, values, and feelings” so they will more readily think like global citizens and cooperate with the goals UNESCO has set for the world.

In short, SEL aims to program children to cast off traditional values such as the centrality of family and the freedom of conscience in favor of a atheistic, socialist world government.

War on Children—Sexualization 

In this post, I will point the reader to three examples of how our children are being sexualized in many public schools, since much of this happens in this venue. I will address the sexualization of our children in more detail in a future post.

A significant area where people are being forced against their will is in the area of sexualizing children. When a sexually deviant cultural movement shapes kids as well as curriculum, they are clearly in the crosshairs.

Although there are some incredible leaders within school districts, what many are doing is nothing short of child abuse. Let that sink in! There is no reason anyone needs to help kids as young as three with their “gender journey.” I don’t have words strong enough to condemn this type of illicit perversion.

The Gender Unicorn 

The Gender Unicorn is a tool used by teachers to expose even young children to radical gender theory and influence their thinking and behavior. To learn more see “15 Seven Reasons the Gender Unicorn Should NOT Be Taught in Schools.”

Wisconsin School District’s Sex-Ed Program Goes All-In on Gender Fluidity 

This is an example of a typical sex-education program found in woke schools. Note that the “education” begins in kindergarten and continues through high school. You have to admit that the purveyors of this filth are thorough.

Maryland Middle School Assigns Book About Child Gender Transition, Asexuality, Drag Queens 

If you going to middle-school in Montgomery County, Maryland this is your summer reading assignment.

This book even provides a glossary to help you understand woke sexual perversion.

They were then presented with a “glossary of terms” covering different genders and an online game about “gender identity terms” covering what it means to be trans, genderqueer, pronouns, genderfluid, asexual, and bisexual. It also defined crossdressers and drag queens.

Conclusion 

Not all public-school systems and educators have succumbed to the woke agenda. In many places, parents are taking a stand and pushing back. Many excellent teachers are refusing to go along with woke mandates and lesson plans. We need to pray and support them in any way we can.

In a later post, I will detail ways we can respond to the war on children, including the education wars. Until then, here are some ways to join the fight:

Pay attention to what your kids are being taught. If you don’t like it, speak out. Let the teachers know you disagree and why.

Share what you have learned with other parents and get them to join with you in peaceful protest.

Take your concerns to the school board. When voting for school board members, know where they stand and work for those who reject the woke ideology.

If capable, consider home schooling or sending your children to a private school.

 Related Reading: 

Public School Teachers Told to Indoctrinate Kids as Young as Three in Radical LGBT Theory 

 

New Title IX Rule Creates Federal Dictatorship Over America’s Public Schools 

 

Kansas Middle School Agrees to Pay Teacher $95k for Forcing Her to ‘Conceal’ Gender Identity of Student 

 

Public School Teachers Told to Indoctrinate Kids as Young as Three in Radical LGBT Theory 

 

The National Association of Scholars Takes on the Marxists in Education 

 

Why the Education War Matters 

 

This Leftwing Network Is Spreading ‘Progressive Education’ Nationwide 

 

Schools Push Radical Ideology Under Guise of ‘Social-Emotional Learning,’ Parents Warn 

 

How Progressive Politics Entered American Education 

 

Please comment and let me know what you think about the War on Children.

³ For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. ⁴ For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. ⁵ We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 ESV).

[i] Noelle Mering, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (TAN Books, 2021), loc. 165 Kindle Edition.

[ii] Mering, loc. 169 Kindle Edition.

[iii] Mering, loc. 177 Kindle Edition.

[iv] Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America (Regnery History, 2021), loc. 185 Kinlde Edition.