America's Public School Sausage Factories

Classroom is becoming a political platform to proselytize children into the world of Woke

Public Schools are the legacy of the John Dewey (1859-1962) inspired educational sausage factories.  Grinding out graduates with the impersonal regularity of Jimmy Dean.  Dewey was raised by a strict Calvinist fundamentalist Christian mother. Late in life, he declared himself an agnostic socialist.  It surprised few.  Dewey, widely recognized as the Father of American public education, was a progressive philosopher, psychologist, and a widely proclaimed education expert.   He taught at the college level in several universities, but not in any K-12 public schools.   In 1894, Dewey and his wife Harriet opened an experimental primary school at the University of Chicago, where he planned to test his educational theories.  But he resigned when Harriet was fired by the university. There's a disparaging saying that: “Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate.”   In Dewey's case he became a prolific writer on educational theory.     Once established, the model of climbing the ladder through public school grades K-12 became the norm.  In more than one large urban school district, the primary criteria for making it to the end of Grade 12 to graduation is the ability to fog a mirror.  Meanwhile, today the Independent School District (ISD) classroom is becoming a political platform to proselytize children into the world of Woke.  And across the country, some parents are catching on to the socio-political agenda of the progressive educational sausage factories. As parents emphatically voice their dissent to school boards, U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland has tasked the FBI to investigate the radical dissidents among angry parents at school board meetings.  They have become the new domestic terrorist threat.

Terry McAuliffe: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

Could that have anything to do with Garland's son-in-law's education company which markets materials for the Critical Race Theory being peddled to some public school districts?

“Panorama Education, co-founded by Xan Tanner, sells surveys to school districts nationwide with a focus on ‘social and emotion climate,' according to a report by Forbes. With contracts in more than 50 of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S., Panorama Education claims to be supporting ‘13 million students in 23,000 schools and 1,500 districts across 50 states.'”

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) plays on Garland's team.  He's proclaimed that anti-Critical Race Theory parents should not be “telling schools what they should teach."  (Seems as though Terry has that backwards.  Parents are telling schools what NOT to teach their children.)   Like many of America's churches, public schools have shifted from in-class instruction to, first the virtual classes, and often subsequently, student mask mandates.  That's led to an unintended consequence.  A surge in home schooling.  The Associated Press News noted in 2020 that: “The surge [in home schooling] has been confirmed by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reported in March that the rate of households homeschooling their children rose to 11% by September 2020, more than doubling from 5.4% just six months earlier...Black households saw the largest jump; their homeschooling rate rose from 3.3% in the spring of 2020 to 16.1% in the fall.”

Terry McAuliffe: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." pic.twitter.com/7S15pTv1gY

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 28, 2021

So, sadly for the social justice warriors, homeschooling is not a domain reserved for the white privileged

This cannot be welcome news for the two major teachers' unions.  Event that stalwart of liberal news, The Washington Post, noted in July 2021 that:  

“As the new school year approaches, millions of parents are eager to deliver their children back to teachers and put remote schooling — which wrought anger, frustration and financial turmoil for parents who needed to return to work — behind them. But for other parents, particularly parents of color, the pandemic and last summer's national reckoning over race prompted them to pull their children from traditional schools entirely, moves that helped fuel an explosion in popularity of home schooling…The percentage of children in home schooling has nearly tripled since mid-2019. By May of this year, the U.S. Census Bureau found more than 1 out of every 12 students were being home-schooled. Even more remarkable are where those gains came from: Even though home schooling has often been considered the domain of religious White families, the most significant increases were seen among Black, Latino and Asian households.”

So, sadly for the social justice warriors, homeschooling is not a domain reserved for the white privileged.  It's for all parents who want a better education for their children.   

The times, they are a-changin'

To quote Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a-changin'”  

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land And don't criticize what you can't understand Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, Your old road is rapidly agin', Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'”

The old Dewey model of K-12 sausage-grinding education of the public schools is a product of the collectivist-tribal form of teaching.   For the welfare of the student and for the nation, going forward public education must yield to the sovereign individual's pace of learning.   The lifetime learner is born in the kindergarten.   And graduates at death.