Parents are still being treated like terrorists – spiked
Educators continue to push lessons that claim to be anti-racist but in fact entrench racial categories, telling kids that who they are and what they can achieve is entirely based on their race. As C Bradley Thompson recently catalogued, the evidence of racialist lessons in US schools is overwhelming. And as a recent report notes, Democrat-leaning states such as California and New York are planning to use Covid-relief funds to train staff in implicit bias and pursue other race-based programmes in schools.
School-board elections, which used to be quiet affairs, have taken on a new edge this year, with slates of concerned parents challenging board incumbents. Opposition to critical race theory is their central message. So far, the results have been mixed. Some challenges, as in red-state Texas, have been quite successful, while others, like in blue-state New York, have been less so. And when school boards have refused to back down, some parents have taken to the courts to try to block schools from pursuing an ideological race-based agenda, again with varied success.
It’s all about centralization. School boards would not be such a problem if you just kept your schools independent. If you didn’t want your child turned into a little woke-monster, you could just send him or her to a different school. I know, easier said than done, but in principle, this seems to me the obvious answer. The current set up was just asking to be captured by the teachers, and the administrators, rather than the parents. The natural constituency of the administrators is not the parents, or the teachers for that matter. It’s the administrators. There are general principles at work here. Something along the lines of self-interest, entropy and decay. But with parents, you get a fresh batch every year. School stays young at heart. I wish I had known this obvious fact from the beginning.