Who surrendered the schools?!

I do a lot of news gathering in a day’s time, and sometimes different stories converge as markers of something deeper than they each, individually, tell.

That happened with two that crossed my radar yesterday. This one from the Washington Times is a shocker, if you aren’t aware of what’s been going on in the public schools in this country. It’s convoluted, but stay with it and pick apart what it’s saying.

The D.C. State Board of Education has scheduled a December vote on proposed guidelines for sex-education classes that call for teaching students about homosexuality…

The guidelines say eighth-grade students should be taught the definition of sexual orientation “using correct terminology” and learn that some people “may begin to feel romantically and/or sexually attracted to people of a different gender and/or to people of the same gender.”

They also say sixth-grade students should be taught that “people, regardless of biological sex, gender, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity and culture, have sexual feelings and the need for love, affection and physical intimacy.”

Ninth-graders should be taught to “analyze trends in … contraceptive practices and the availability of abortion,” the guidelines stated.

Furthermore…

The Montgomery County Board of Education approved a revised curriculum that teaches about homosexuality and condom use, and the Maryland State Board of Education denied requests to stop the lessons.

A circuit court judge earlier this month also denied a request by opponents to block the curriculum from being taught this fall. The court is expected to hear a full appeal of the state board’s decision in January.

What does that have in common with this story? Plenty.

“FREEDOM of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty . . . must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever,” the party’s national platform declared. “We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.”

That ringing endorsement of parental supremacy in education was adopted by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1892, which just goes to show what was possible before the Democratic Party was taken hostage by the teachers unions.

I highlighted part of that for obvious reasons. Look at the barrage of legislation across the country, at the state level and federal, that aggressively pursues new ways to take away or circumvent parental rights. The Republicans currently have no corner on the high ground, but members of the Democratic Party are more often behind this legislation. The above quoted platform was in place when the Democratic Party was great.

Today, on education as on so much else, the Democrats sing from a different hymnal.

Pay attention to this. 

When the party’s presidential candidates debated at Dartmouth College recently, they were asked about a controversial incident in Lexington, Mass., where a second-grade teacher, to the dismay of several parents, had read her young students a story celebrating same-sex marriage. Were the candidates “comfortable” with that?

“Yes, absolutely,” former senator John Edwards promptly replied. “I want my children . . . to be exposed to all the information . . . even in second grade . . . because I don’t want to impose my view. Nobody made me God. I don’t get to decide on behalf of my family or my children. . . . I don’t get to impose on them what it is that I believe is right.” None of the other candidates disagreed. None of the other candidates disagreed, even though most of them say they oppose same-sex marriage.

Thus in a little over 100 years, the Democratic Party – and much of the Republican Party – has been transformed from a champion of “parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children” to a party whose leaders believe that parents “don’t get to impose” their views and values on what their kids are taught in school. Do American parents see anything wrong with that? Apparently not: The majority of them dutifully enroll their children in government-operated schools, where the only views and values permitted are the ones prescribed by the state.

This cannot be mere apathy. What is it? Mass ignorance? How can we be so disconnected from what our children are learning and how they are being formed, for crying out loud?

Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation’s entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Yet the government’s control of 90 percent of the nation’s schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned.

But we should be concerned. Not just because the quality of government schooling is so often poor or its costs so high. Not just because public schools are constantly roiled by political storms. Not just because schools backed by the power of the state are not accountable to parents and can ride roughshod over their concerns. And not just because the public-school monopoly, like most monopolies, resists change, innovation, and excellence.

All of that is true, but a more fundamental truth is this: In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children’s minds and character.

Time to get a grip. Here’s a way to start. In his Letter to Families in 1994, Pope John Paul II gave fundamental guidance.

Parents are the first and most important educators of their own children, and they also possess a fundamental competence in this area: they are educators because they are parents. They share their educational mission with other individuals or institutions, such as the Church and the state. But the mission of education must always be carried out in accordance with a proper application of the principle of subsidiarity. This implies the legitimacy and indeed the need of giving assistance to the parents, but finds its intrinsic and absolute limit in their prevailing right and their actual capabilities…

Subsidiarity thus complements paternal and maternal love and confirms its fundamental nature, inasmuch as all other participants in the process of education are only able to carry out their responsibilities in the name of the parents, with their consent and, to a certain degree, with their authorization.

In another section of that Letter, he said this:

This is the constant teaching of the Church, and the “signs of the times” which we see today are providing new reasons for forcefully reaffirming that teaching.