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As thousands of teachers endorse critical race theory, home schooling surges

What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for elementary school kids.
What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for
elementary school kids.

In the past few months state legislatures across the country have passed resolutions that ban schools from teaching the Marxist and bigoted program dubbed Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Not surprisingly, the leftists who dominate our school systems have fought back. The very leftist Zinn Education Project immediately created a petition calling for teachers to defy such laws and to continue to teach CRT, which teaches children to hate whites and to give minorities privileged status.

In the two months this petition has been on line almost 6,000 teachers have signed it, with many adding comments of defiance. This one is typical:

“Allowing our students to thrive means being honest about the roles that racism, sexism, islamophobia, colonialism, neocolonialism, homophobia and other structures of power that oppress people interact in our communities. To move forward we must receive adequate and honest history and unlearn the mis-education of the last 3 centuries. ” Matt Church, Washington, DC.

Notice how Mr. Church only sees things through “isms” and “structures of power,” which see humans merely as members of groups, not as individuals. I expect this guy would be very comfortable accusing all the white eight-year-olds in his class of being racists and bigots, and demand that everyone else do so also. His thinking puts him only one step away from creating death camps to stone the humans he despises, a step that his badly taught students, grilled in bigotry, will be glad to take.

Nor is this petition all. The nation’s largest teacher unions have all publicly endorsed critical race theory, including the National Educational Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers.

Ironically, these teachers are not entirely wrong. The effort to ban CRT in the schools is a very typical example of Republican failure theater, and exactly the wrong way to get this ugly racist propaganda out of elementary schools. Such bans are a cop-out, since they allow funds to continue to flow to the schools, and to the very teachers who seem quite willing to disobey them.

A better and far more effective approach would be to end funding of any school that taught CRT. Let these teachers and their unions try to teach it, but make them do so on their own dime. If the teaching of CRT is truly desired by Americans, these teachers will have no problem forming private schools independent from government interference, since many parents will flock to send their kids to them.

Of course, we all know that they won’t do this, partly because the cowardly state legislatures are not cutting their funds, and partly because they know parents won’t flock to such schools. Better to remain in the public schools, where their funding remains guaranteed. Their state legislatures have not cut their funding, only made an empty gesture of condemning them.

Parents however understand the difference between empty gestures and taking real action. Even as school unions and teachers have been loudly rallying around CRT, parents in remarkable numbers have responded by taking their kids from the public schools.

First there has been a stunning drop in enrollment in public schools, with the biggest drops in the youngest grades, with the enrollment declines this year in preschool about 22% and kindergarten 13%.

Second, there has been a dramatic surge in the home schooling movement.

The surge 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.

Liberty enlightening the world
Home schooling: The essense of liberty and freedom.

If their state representatives don’t have the courage to shut down these schools, parents are increasingly doing it on their own, to the betterment of their kids.

The specific reasons vary widely. Some families who spoke with The Associated Press have children with special educational needs; others seek a faith-based curriculum or say their local schools are flawed. The common denominator: They tried homeschooling on what they thought was a temporary basis and found it beneficial to their children.

This movement to home schooling is an expression of liberty and freedom. Free to choose, parents are making conscious choices, and those choices are having them reject the public school establishment and the odious concepts it has been trying to force upon their children.

Eventually, a lack of students in the public schools should finally force a reduction in funding that the state legislatures are presently too cowardly to enact.

Then again, that funding — obtained not by choice but by coercive taxes — gives these leftist schools great power. We should not be surprised if the educational community begins to use that power to squelch the home schooling movement. If our legislators wanted to really fight for parents they would take action now, and cut this funding so that this can’t happen.

Don’t hold your breath. The battle for freedom against modern racism thus has only begun.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

18 comments

  • Dennis Jensen

    The radical left dividers and haters who are obsessed with getting white kids to hate themselves and to dissolve blacks of any responsibility at all for their situation in life will never stop until the next civil war begins..then they’ll stop. These condescending, arrogant leftist tools are shining a light on just how radical our public school teachers really are. I hope more and more people choose private schools and home schooling, and put these people out of business. Let them find other ways to teach hate.

  • Bob

    contribute to the home school legal Defense Association to defend parents who want to homeschool their children from government intrusion. It is tax deductible: hslda.org

  • Bob

    by the way, the $300 above the line charitable tax deduction is available again in 2021. You can deduct up to $300 in charitable contributions from your income on your federal income tax return even if you do not itemize deductions. Many states also allow the the deduction from their income tax.

  • wayne

    Jocko Motivation
    “Get Up And Fight”
    https://youtu.be/BZn7rS4Vkt4
    4:49

  • Alton

    From reports….many private and Church Schools are now pushing CRT.

    Home Schooling is the only safe option
    Until the Unions force CRT into the State curriculum requirements……….

  • Dennis Jensen observed: “. . . until the next civil war begins.”

    Oh, my. It’s been here for a while. If you are talking about a shooting war; well, that’s here, too. Take a gander at San Francisco, Chicago, and looking like Seattle. Everyone seems to be waiting for a Defining Moment; but the reality is more subtle.

  • Robert:

    Curious why ” modern racism” needs the qualifier?

  • GWB

    Notice how Mr. Church only sees things through “isms” and “structures of power,”
    Even more importantly, notice how Mr Church can’t write a complete sentence. Or he lost track of what sort of verb he was going to use. He filled the sentence with so much jargon he lost his logic. Assuming there was ever any logic there to start with. Diagram that first sentence and it’s gobbledy-gook.

    more than doubling
    Black households saw the largest jump
    YES! Go homeschooling! (And homeschooling is a lot more broad than just sitting your kid(s) in a room with a book. There’s co-ops, ‘pods’, etc.)

    a lack of students in the public schools should finally force a reduction in funding
    Hah! You’re dreaming! They will never see a reduction in funding, unless actual school vouchers are enacted, actually pulling money from the public schools into the market.

    But it’s nice some people are finally starting to understand what the public scruels are doing to their children, and the implications it has for the future.

  • MadrocketSci

    When Kelly Johnson was in highschool in Michigan, he was designing aircraft as part of some school design competition. When “The Martians” went to highschool in Hungary, they apparently got enough of a head start in physics to define the quest for atomic energy. They ended up in the US, and so we ended up developing the atom bomb (and the fission reactor) before the Germans could. The range of outcomes from schooling is so vast you need a log scale! I wonder if in most times and places in human history, “education” was just this sort of vicious cult-indoctrination, devoid of useful content. Culture as a cult instead of useful grounding – a terrible and irreversible waste of precious time.

    “Kids these days”: Well, they’re not going to learn anything in the 12 years of their lives we insist on gratuitously wasting. Nevermind calculus, they’re not even learning arithmetic, the teaching of it has been so corrupted. My own blurry knowledge of history probably seems like a classical education in comparison to the total break these kids have with any (real) knowledge of the past.

    Somehow, if civilization is to continue, they’ll have to make up the difference in their spare time. The homeschooled will probably be giants in comparison to the crippled public-school children – sought after by anyone who needs actual knowledge and results. While the internet lasts, these kids can get their hands on pretty much any textbook they want for free (for pirate values of free): libgen can help there. Sci-hub allows them to get their hands on scientific papers. But those are just books. Lab experience, experience doing work, experience with tools and machinery – how things are made and done: I’m still trying to correct the lack of that experience in my own life. The raw experiential vacuum people are growing up with today is making them helpless in the face of the world.

  • MadRocketSci

    My understanding of the Hungary situation at the turn of the century was that PhD college professors also taught highschool. There was no division between professional university teachers and “education majors” – everyone was educated in their subject.

  • Sevy

    “Eventually, a lack of students in the public schools should finally force a reduction in funding…”

    Unfortunately, the route they’ll take isn’t reduction in funding, but creating new laws to limit/ban homeschooling and force kids back where they can continue to “…unlearn the mis-education of the last 3 centuries.”

    I like your optimizism, though :)

  • Bob

    Some resources for homeschooling and to enrich the education of children who must attend government schools:

    Prageru.com has a great series of short videos on history, culture, and straight talk on topics like climate change. They also have a series of videos for young children and I believe also books for them.
    Kahn Academy for math and science topics
    websites like Mr. Zimmerman’s to interest children in space exploration. Also his books.
    Other books to counteract the propaganda fed to children in government schools but also to interest children in the interesting and important topics of our time. For example, I just came across a great book by Ian Stewart discussing the importance of mathematics.
    I’m sure other commenters know of other resources.

  • GWB

    Bob
    August 6, 2021 at 9:37 am

    Some resources for homeschooling
    I would recommend Right Start Mathematics for math up through geometry.
    And Shurley for English writing – yes, it makes you diagram sentences, which would have helped poor Mr Church up there.
    Also, the HSLDA as mentioned above. They not only provide legal support for homeschoolers (particularly in places where they are made to jump through a lot of hoops), but also have lots of resources related to homeschooling conventions, state organizations, and co-ops and such where you can learn more and get a good start.

  • Bob: There are also my own books. Anyone who wishes to teach kids a well-rounded history of space exploration in the 20th century must include my books as part of the curriculum. I hope that home schoolers are doing so.

  • Bob

    Robert, I agree that your books are important and useful for young people. I mentioned them in my previous comment. I just downloaded your book Conscious Choice and it seems great for young people. And even slightly older people ?

  • Bob: All my histories are written for high school or higher. High level junior high school kids would likely find them readable as well. They are aimed at the general public, and are designed to not only tell the history of space exploration, but to do it in the context of the politics of the time.

    I have never been able to figure out how to get educational institutions to consider them. Maybe the home schooling movement might be interested.

  • Col Beausabre

    ” they’re not even learning arithmetic, the teaching of it has been so corrupted. ”

    Of course not, math is white (and therefore racist) since it insists there is a discrete, singular answer to a problem.

    Which totally ignores the contributions of medieval Arabic (isn’t that an oppressed minority, or were they “white” or “acting white”?) to the science

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