Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Part I

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There is a Countdown for Christian Parents and Public Schools: The History of the Public Schools Shows a Long-Term Strategy for the Left

Over the course of the last several decades, we have seen an utter reshaping of the educational landscape in the United States. If you were to go back to, say, the 1950s or the 1960s and you were to look at what was basically nearly a universal experience of schools, public schools from the 1st grade to the 12th grade, later kindergarten added, you look at that and you would recognize that the vast majority of Americans simply assumed that normal meant children going to neighborhood schools, described as the common schools; increasingly, the public schools.

The terminology about the common school emerged when it was argued that a part of the American experience should be the supporting of a system of common schools. That is they would commonly be populated by students and they would be supported by taxpayers. They would be community-based schools. They would be a part of the commons. As you move through the late 19th and go into the 20th centuries, those schools are increasingly described as the public schools. And as American towns grew larger and America’s largest cities grew into metropolitan areas, these became very sophisticated, very complicated educational systems. And right now, our educational systems are some of the most complicated systems to be found anywhere in American culture.

You look at a major metropolitan area, like just say Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, you are looking at something that’s so complicated it would take you a good deal of time even to get a basic grasp of how it’s organized. You would have different school systems, you would have different school boards, you would have a lot of partisan politics. You’d have a lot of what we will talk about later, as ideological capture. You would have a lot of sociological issues at stake. You would have the challenge of dealing with students from any number of different languages. You would also deal with all kinds of personal issues when it comes to these children, when it comes to specific populations of children, when it comes even to specific portions of a community.

But you are also looking at the fact that over the course of the last several decades, our public schools have largely in the influence of government, but also influenced by the educational schools and modern American universities, especially the elite universities, the schools have been turned into sociological educational laboratories. And I think most parents, even if they don’t articulate that as a concern, they do recognize it as a concern. Now, you can go back to the late 19th century, but particularly in the 20th century, especially during the decades of the Cold War, America began to look at the public schools as explicit incubators of democracy, bastions of developing citizens in a common civic culture.

Now, the schools began to take on that kind of responsibility, especially in large cities, with waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries. But ideologically, it was the Cold War after World War II that made the biggest difference in terms of the understanding that the schools needed to be the incubators of the future of democracy. In the United States, the future would be incubated in the public schools, and that’s exactly the function that public schools took on at mid-century back in the 20th century. But beginning almost at the same time, the public schools entered into an unprecedented period of controversy. This was particularly true when the public schools began to move in more liberal directions.

One of the earliest of these liberal directions had to do with the emergence of the kind of educational philosophies popular in the ’60s and the ’70s, anti-authoritarian, sometimes anti-propositional, basically turning to more emotional and sometimes explicitly political forms of education and educational motivation. But at the same time, the society was growing more secular, and so were the schools. There were successive waves of change that came, and much of it was ideological, but you also had the sociological changes that transformed American school education, and you also had federalization. And that is to say that, increasingly, decisions are made more distantly from the communities of what are supposed to be community-based schools.

Increasingly, the communities themselves are often political beds of controversy, but beyond that, much of the controversy emerges from levels of educational bureaucracy and administration. Even educational accountability is often built at levels far beyond the local school, even far beyond the local school board in the local school system. But I want to go back to something else, and that is that when the common schools emerged in the United States, the United States shared an overwhelming sense of cultural consensus. And so that cultural consensus made holding a project, like the common schools or what became known as the public schools, relatively unchallenged because you didn’t have rival worldviews.

You had Republicans and Democrats, to be sure, but they shared a basic worldview. You had Protestants and Catholics, but that distinction began to really recede into the background as a crucial issue once you had, especially, the secularization of the schools. But what neither the Protestants nor the Catholics noted at the time is that that vacuum created by the secularization of schools, driven in part not only by the ideological Left but also by the Supreme Court of the United States, that inevitably left a vacuum and that vacuum is going to be filled by something. And that something ended up being different variants of ideologies that have now been translated right down into the question as to whether or not only biological females can play on girls’ sports teams in school.

That kind of conflict, that kind of idea, even that kind of vocabulary would have been incomprehensible to those who built the strength of America’s public school system. But that’s where we are. On The Briefing, we’ve talked about the fact that in California, the governor has signed into law legislation that says that school teachers and administrators do not even have to tell parents if they have a child in the school who is presenting its school as a different gender than, well, here’s the bureaucratic language these days, “the gender or sex assigned at birth.”

To put it bluntly, if you were to go back to earlier decades, there was a basically Christian culture in place. That is not to say a culture made up of persons who uniformly were believing Christians. It is to say that Christianity formed the basic foundation and structure of the worldview. And if you were to go back at that time, you would understand that parents were understood morally and legally to be those who bear the stewardship for their children. And thus, there had to be a lot of deference to parents, and there was a lot of local input.

And so, to be honest, if you had a school, say in Manhattan, and then you had a similar school for the same age group in Birmingham, Alabama, you would find some distinctions. Not in the way that necessarily would be true that math would be different; two plus two would equal four in both schools, if they know what they’re talking about. But nonetheless, there would be ideological shifts that were not so apparent say in the 1960s, but became very apparent in the decades thereafter. During that period of social solidarity, the schools were seen as the incubators and engines of Americanizing America’s youth. You wouldn’t exactly describe them that way today, not if you know what’s going on.

Now, some of you are immediately saying, “You don’t know my local school. You don’t know my child’s teacher. Everything’s safe.” Well, indeed, I think as you look across the United States, the experience of many parents and children is that, particularly where they are right now, they may feel some relative safety. But I want to tell you that the threats are in full force everywhere. I’m not saying the reality is the same way everywhere. I am saying that the problem is becoming greater and more universal rather than less emphatically urgent and less universal. It’s coming for you, it’s coming for your school system. And that’s because what has happened in the public educational circles in the United States is that there are groups that have increasing control, and I want to mention them.

Number one, you have very liberal educational activists, and particularly you have those who are situated in the education schools that produce teachers. And once again, you can say, well, at my regional state university, at the college down the street, I don’t see that kind of radicalism. Well, maybe you need to go and look at the books that are being assigned. Maybe you need to go and have a conversation with the education faculty and find out where they are in terms of worldview and issues. Because increasingly, overwhelmingly, those schools are trending in an extremely liberal trajectory.

A second huge source of trouble here is the educational bureaucracy. Once again, I’m not necessarily pointing the finger at your local school board at all, but that really depends on where you live. Some of the school boards are doing very important work blocking some of the liberal and progressivist impulses, and frankly, keeping their schools more safe and more sane. But the reality is, that the larger educational administrative state, it holds to a worldview, which most, I think, Christian parents in the United States would undoubtedly see as contradictory to their own convictions and worldview.

And this comes down not only to what is taught, but what is the social context of what is taught, what are the methodologies of what is taught, what’s the effectiveness, by the way, of what is taught, but also what is the worldview underlying this? Even a worldview that explains how the schools and those who are teaching in them and leading them even understand about the child. And, you understand, that’s also dramatically emphatically a worldview issue. How do we understand the child as the learner? And then, of course, you have the huge question about how we understand what is to be taught and what is to be learned.

The bottom line is that the public school system as we know it today is just light years distant from the common school movement as it began. The cultural consensus that produced the common schools has largely disappeared. You’ve got red states, blue states, red state parents, blue state parents, sometimes in the same community. You have progressivists and you have conservatives. But the point is the educational establishment, and I mention, first of all, the fact that you have those who are teaching in the teacher schools, and then you have the government bureaucracies. But the third problem, and this may be the biggest problem of all, is the political power of teachers unions.

These teacher unions are absolutely unbelievably important, and in some locations they’re the most important political fact on the ground, period. Even in some states, the teacher unions are the most important fact on the ground. And the fact is that you’ve got an awful lot of people who are working in the school systems who aren’t even teachers. You have all kinds of personnel, an explosion of personnel. And by the way, some of that has been made necessary by the complexity of the assignment given to the public schools. But nonetheless, you are looking at the ideological capture of the teachers unions.

And again, if you want to understand what I’m talking about, I dare you just go to the websites of these teacher unions and find out what their positions are on any number of issues. I can just say we’re not just talking Left, we’re talking far Left, and the teacher unions have enormous political power to make certain that no fundamental changes take place. And in a state like Illinois, in a city like Chicago, one of the open scandals, and it’s not limited there, but it has been absolutely evident there. One of the scandals is that the teacher unions prevent removing any teacher who is absolutely incompetent. Once you get a job in many of these school systems, you’ve got that job for life, whether or not you know anything or have any ability to teach.

Now, I don’t want this to sound like an insult to many public school teachers who are simply outstanding. And when I was a boy, I spent every single school day of my experience in a public school; elementary school, junior high school, they changed the name to middle school, and then high school. But that’s where the experience in the public schools from my family had to come to an end. Even in my own personal experience, going back in the South to what had been a very solidified educational culture with the larger community, that became anything but that.

By the time I was in what was renamed as a middle school, the educational culture was very much given to a far more liberal direction and the children of the ’60s who are now the teachers of the ’70s, and I can assure you it had effects. Values, clarification, moral relativism, all kinds of different issues that came up from the context of the liberal educational teachings in the education schools, I can guarantee you they moved right onto the school campus where I was a high schooler even in the 1970s.

But let me just point out that even as you had this liberalization taking place in the public schools, in a place where frankly our parents had no idea what was going on, there were many wonderful school teachers, there were many wonderful school principals. Even school bus drivers were often just really important moral forces for children and teenagers. And I want to be clear, I’m thankful for every good and faithful teacher, every effective teacher. There’s so many of them. All the effective administrators, I’m thankful for all. But as I have tried to say for the last 30 plus years, we have to acknowledge that at the very least there is a ticking time alarm when it comes to the public school system in the United States.

At some point, I believe virtually all Christian parents are going to have to make the decision, “We can’t leave our children in these schools.” I cannot tell you exactly when that comes, but I will tell you, I think one of the biggest problems Christians should understand at this point is the government monopoly on the schools. That is huge. Now, when I say government monopoly, I don’t mean that the government has a monopoly such that it can tell you you can’t start a school or you can’t homeschool your children. But you do need to know, that those rights were basically hard won, including fights that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

There are those who believe even right now that it is a failure of what they would call democracy for citizens to be able to establish schools or to homeschool their own children. But this public school empire does have a monopoly when it comes to the use of tax money. And not only that, it’s the use of money that is increasingly confiscated in the forms of taxation and then are spent for purposes in order to serve ideological causes and in order to buttress worldviews, inculcate those ideas and worldviews and ideologies in young people, and at taxpayer expense. And one of the reasons they get away with it is because there is no major competition in so many areas.

The bottom line is that I believe we should empower parents and we should empower families through educational choice. I do not want taxpayer support directly for any kind of private or religious school. I do believe it is absolutely right, and that’s why I’m a proponent, for instance, here in Kentucky of what’s known as Amendment 2. It’s absolutely right that parents be assigned some ability to direct some of their own tax monies in order to facilitate educational choice. And that competition could only be good for the public schools and, frankly, for the public.

Part II

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Government Schools Will Serve the Government’s Purposes. Period. – That’s One Reason Competition with the Public Schools is a Good Thing

I want to go further and say that, as a Christian, I am increasingly convinced that the government schools are going to serve the government’s purposes, period. And when you look at the direction of our government and you look at the worldview that increasingly shapes our government, you need to understand that government schools are going to represent those ideologies. Just consider where we are right now on issues such as Title IX policies in the schools, where you have the Biden administration actively pledging that it’s going to put its energies behind forcing schools to adopt the Biden administration’s understanding, for example, of how the transgender issue should work out when it comes to the schools and, for example, activities such as organized team athletics.

The bottom line is you’re going to have boys on girls teams, because that is where the Biden administration has come down. And increasingly the government is going to use the schools, even as increasingly they are being used for the ideological inculcation, not so much of citizens, as citizens who meet the worldview moral, I’ll just go ahead and say it, LGBTQ expectations of the government and those who are in control of the government.

Now here you say, well, that just underlines the importance of the election coming up in November. Yes, of course it does. At the federal level, it is going to matter a great deal what the Department of Education looks like for the next four years, and who, for example, is appointed as Secretary of Education, who is within the President’s appointment power going down the list. But at the same time, one of the things we need to understand is that as important as that is, as important as a local school board election is, it is also the case that these trends are working themselves out towards the ideological positions of the Left, and it’s on a long-term strategy and a long-term process that isn’t going to be turned around anytime soon.

And frankly, I just want to state, honestly, I don’t think it’s going to be turned around. I think that has become more evident. It’s because of the capture of the education schools, the capture of the teachers unions, and the capture of the bureaucracies, particularly the higher the level of the bureaucracy in terms of the level of government. That’s total capture. I don’t see any way to rescue those particular sectors anytime soon, if at all. Now, as I said, I think Christian citizens should be very concerned about any direct funding, and that’s not only because we don’t want to take government money. I’ll just tell you, the institution I lead takes absolutely no government money. We don’t participate in any federal programs.

Part III

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Amendment 2 in Kentucky is Good for the State’s Educational System – Amendment 2 Gives Parents More Educational Options, Not Less

But when it comes to empowering parents to make decisions, and the parents are directing the money and the money is directed into an educational trust or a system of parental choice through something like vouchers to be used in the schools, or what, for example, is in place in states right now like Indiana, quite frankly, it appears to be something that does empower parents. It certainly looks like something that empowers families in making educational choice. And in the state of Kentucky, and I am very much and very proud to be a part of Kentucky, I believe voters should heartily endorse Amendment 2, precisely because I think it fits our worldview and our understanding of empowering parents rather than empowering institutions, not to mention empowering a government monopoly further. I just hope that Christian parents and voters are aware of what is at stake, and understand that with every passing day, the stakes just grow higher. We need to understand that. And quite frankly, we’re way behind where we ought to be on these issues. It’s going to take a lot of energy just to catch up.

By the way, in the state of Kentucky, if Amendment 2 passes, all it does is authorize the legislature to move towards legislation that would reflect this kind of emphasis and opportunity. That legislation’s down the road. We have to pass this amendment to the Kentucky Constitution in order for our General Assembly even to have the opportunity to deal with the opportunity.

Part IV

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Kamala Harris’s ‘Souls to the Polls’ Rally Gets Theologically Cloudy: Vice President Harris Makes a Reach to Untapped Religious Voters

Well, all right, I’m speaking to you today from the state of Georgia. And looking at the most influential newspaper in Georgia, which is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the front page of yesterday’s paper had an article about Vice President Harris bringing “souls to polls” pitch to Georgia churches.

Now, we talked about this a little bit already, but this is a particular opportunity for us to come back and say this is a very unusual election cycle in the United States. Both major party candidates are notable, not so much for their identity when it comes to Christianity and even denominations in churches, but rather a fundamental lack of that identity. The Vice President, Vice President Kamala Harris has been quite active at points talking about her own upbringing in the African American church. But honestly, she doesn’t seem to know a lot of the vocabulary. And furthermore, it just seems to be a very awkward affirmation.

She talks in almost entirely generalistic terms about the power of faith. There is very little reference to any theological point, including the most basic, which is theism and belief in God. Instead, it’s translated more into a social gospel about love of neighbor, and that’s generally translated into support for her own liberal programs. But nonetheless, we understand she’s making a claim, she’s showing up in these churches. And we are told that at the event on Sunday, more than 50 elected officials showed up at that one church in order to conduct what amounted to a political rally. And just to make that point, they went out to register voters and get people to vote right after the service.

But, well, on the other side, Donald Trump, the former President of the United States is a giant theological enigma. And the closer you look, the more complex the situation becomes. He clearly does not talk about Christian faith or matters of Christian experience or Christian doctrine with any ease. He does identify as some kind of Protestant these days. He certainly looks to evangelical Christians as the most solid base of his support. The former President and his wife often have attended an Episcopalian Church there on Palm Beach that is, as I mentioned before, just extremely liberal, right down to the whole rainbow affirmation, the banners out front, LGBTQ, you name it.

But you just look at that and you go on and you say, nevertheless they are sending very different signals. And there is no doubt that the signal that is being sent to us, however, is about the larger issue of the secularization of American culture. And it’s a huge question as to how exactly Christian identity is going to play into this.

Now, here’s where things get really interesting. We are looking at an election that both sides believe is so close that the slightest movement of just a marginal percentage of voters could make the difference in that state’s electoral college vote. And you look at this and you recognize, well, that’s not true in 50 states, though it’s true in about seven states. And tomorrow we’re going to look at those seven states and come to understand what’s really going on there and why the fight between the Democratic and Republican tickets on this question in those states is just so hot. It’s because the stakes are so small in terms of the numbers, but so big in terms of the consequence.

But thinking about Christian identity and wondering how that plays into this at the end of the election cycle, just think of this. If you’re trying to reach a number of voters, and if you’re Kamala Harris and you’re afraid of losing voters and losing momentum, one of the ways you can try to get back in the game, at least a little bit, is to play a somewhat different game. I think that’s why the religious aspect is coming up pretty loudly in her campaign at this point.

But here’s the problem for the Democrats. Survey after survey, poll after poll shows demonstrably that if a voter has attended church even once in the last month, even once in the last month, they’re overwhelmingly likely to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. Now, there is a distinction here when you look at the African American Church where the voting pattern over the course of the last several decades has been overwhelmingly Democratic.

Now, here’s the thing. Donald Trump does not appear to be making any new initiative towards Christian voters. It looks like he believes he’s more or less wrapped that vote up and he is going for the intensity of a deep voter turnout. Kamala Harris appears to be looking for votes that she might not have but believes she might be able to reach. But with both of the candidates, Christians need to pay close attention to the kind of language that is used.

And I mention this because I am here in Georgia and this front page article in the local newspaper talks about the comments at this special service made by the Vice President on Sunday. “For me, like so many of us, church has been a place of growth and belonging and community, a place where we are reminded of the incredible power of faith and fellowship. And in moments of difficulty and uncertainty, when the way is not clear, it is our faith that then guides us forward.” Again, this was a “souls to the polls” activity, as it was advertised to the public.

And looking at that, you just recognize there is nothing specifically Christian about this at all. And again, I am not here saying that the Republican nominee has offered a lot more theological substance. I’m just saying this is what happens to the Christian faith in politics. It gets cloudy. And that’s where, I just want to be honest, Christians need to look at the issues and try to figure out what will be the result of our vote, because it turns out that might be a clearer question than trying to figure out the theological convictions, whatever, of our major candidates.