Our public schools should stick to teaching just the basics (math, science, language, civics, how to think, how to study, etc.,) needed for a well-rounded education. Only the local school board approved curriculum and lesson plans should be taught to your children.  Every parent should be curious and seek to know what their children are being taught.  If a parent objects to what is being taught, they should be afforded the freedom to choose another teacher or school, and the tax money that supports that education should follow the child.

Today we see the infiltration of more politicized content seeping into our classrooms than ever before.  What is going on here?  In the Federalist Papers # 10, our Founding Fathers warned against the “control and violence of faction(s)”.  A faction (also called a “special interest group”), is a group of people, whether a majority or minority, who seek to impose their common passion, ideology, philosophy and impulse to vex, change, shame, oppress, or dispose of another group that does not agree with them.  We witness today some clever maneuvering by factions on both the left and right politically, such as the New York Times “1619 Project”, or the Woodson Center “1776 Unites”, Black Lives Matter or Proud Boys, and many other competing factions that want to get into your school and influence what is taught about social justice, race, gender, climate change, etc. and how it is taught.  Many of these factions are, or seek to be, well entrenched in our public schools and universities.  

Of course, our students should learn, at the appropriate age, about the historical examples of injustices, such as the Trail of Tears displacement of about 60,000 Native Americans, the Holocaust genocide of European Jews, Debt Slavery in Africa, Legalized Slavery in the U.S, and the Constitutional Amendment to abolish it, Soviet Union Gulags, and Canada’s Expulsion of the French Acadians, to name several. I believe these events can be taught without injecting political positions, race theories, and inflammatory rhetoric into the lesson, but to do so the teacher must provide facts and not opinions, interpretations, or theories.  

But what we should all find intolerable about these progressive curriculums, and “social justice classrooms” popping up in our schools, is that they are totalitarian in their approach.  Let’s take Critical Race Theory (CRT) for example. CRT seeks to enforce its curriculum and theory in all public schools.  In many cases, it does so surreptitiously, without seeking school board review and approval.  Often times a teacher in the social studies department just starts incorporating CRT into their classroom, and before you know it, they have young students ranking themselves according to their “power and privilege” as part of a lesson. In California, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction” is the proposed new math curriculum framework to guide K-12 instruction.  The framework rejects the idea that some students are naturally gifted at math and opposes ability grouping. It also wants to stop Algebra 1 being taught as early as 8th grade.  Meanwhile, students in Singapore and Taiwan routinely receive it in 8th grade or earlier.   These social justice lessons and frameworks are unnecessary, and do more harm than good.  I want my grandkids to simply learn and use math to decide when they can afford to buy a home.  They can use their math skills later in life to ascertain the reality or fiction of the alleged income inequality between ethnic groups in Africa.  That important distinction should be maintained in our schools.     

I also don’t agree with the state getting involved and setting a policy that limits or encourages what is taught in a local school regarding social justice causes.  You may agree or disagree with any of the ideas of a faction, but the state acts no better than these factions when they seek to impose their will on all others inside the state boundaries.  The state should be protecting our rights to choose what our children learn, not imposing its own interpretation.  Don’t tolerate this. Do something.  Tell your Federal and State Representatives to stay out of the education of your child.   Make your voice heard by sharing your concerns with your local school board, or choose another school.  They will get the message.  The biggest mistake you can make is to minimize the threat, accept the teaching done by a faction as having “good intentions” without doing your own due diligence, or simply to ignore the civic war of ideas that is truly going on in K-12 and higher education.