Communities have the feeling that it’s not their place to inquire about classroom discussions of controversial cultural questions, and they have the feeling that they don’t have the right or the ability to redirect public schools in this matter.
There is legitimate legislation, composed by various elected bodies, about privacy and confidentiality; there are rules and regulations by unelected agencies of dubious authority which address the same topics. The public is vaguely aware of laws like FERPA and IDEA which control access to information about a student’s educational records.
The public’s fuzzy perception fails to note that, e.g, FERPA applies to only postsecondary students, and IDEA applies to only a small percentage of K12 students. Many parents labor under the idea that it’s not their place to inspect, investigate, and sometimes adjust what public schools do. As authors Jane Robbins and Karin Effrem write,
Regardless of one’s opinions on a given issue, it is parents’ right and authority to discuss these issues with their children, not the government’s to set standardized norms about thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When government begins manipulating mindsets of still developing and impressionable children, the dangers are legion.
As the old proverb phrases it, schools are supposed to teach students how to think, not what to think.
Public educational systems, despite their clear denial of the fact, have ideologies which they attempt to instill into their students. On most major social and political questions, and especially on the most controversial ones, most public schools have a hidden but clearly-defined agenda.
Students, being often more perceptive about this matter than their parents, will often be able to tell you the social and political views of their school, despite the school’s claims of neutrality and objectivity. While individual teachers may have, and might sometimes reveal, their own individual ideologies, to varying extents, the institution as a whole will have an ideology as well.
Parents should be aware that their local public school isn’t a neutral playing field of ideas, but rather has assigned itself the task of promoting some ideas, while silencing other ideas. The same is often true of private schools, but they are often more transparent about the fact, being under less pressure to maintain the charade of neutrality and objectivity.
The indoctrination process is spread across the curriculum, infused into various classes and subjects. Indoctrination is also present in non-curricular activities, e.g., in middle school and high school counseling departments, as authors Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan note:
The growing emphasis on “social-emotional learning” provides cover for the government to probe intrusively into our children’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Race relations being a topic of inflammatory passion, indoctrinators seize upon this topic, hoping to harness the powerful emotions which it evokes. The accusation of racism is wielded by those who are themselves racists, using it to silence anyone who questions their motives or actions, as Hasson and Farnan report:
The accusation of “privilege” delegitimizes a person’s viewpoint, identity, or achievements. Anyone who is not part of a protected victim class may be told to “check your privilege” or to defer to the “lived experiences” of the protected class of the moment. The extremes to which this theory leads were evident in protests on college campuses around the country, where even “white allies” were directed to the back of the protest or shouted down.
In a complete reversal, those who are unequivocally racist hide their racism by level unmerited charges of racism against others. In such contexts, the surest sign that someone is a racist is that she or he will be accusing others of racism.
This tactic has been applied to other matters of identity. So it goes with religion, ethnicity, varying income levels, etc.
The strategy amounts to dividing populations, rather than uniting them, using these categories of identity. Once they have divided the individuals into identity groups, school administrators convince them that they are powerless to rise up and find opportunities. The only hope presented to the groups is that of following the prescribed ideologies presented by the K12 institutions. Hasson and Farnan phrase it this way:
Identity politics, then, is destructive not only because it divides us but also because it induces a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and despair — a poisonous drink for anyone but fatal to those who are, in fact, disadvantaged. They become convinced that no matter how hard they work they will never succeed.
In other words, the ideology of the school is presented as the only route to opportunity or equality for the groups that have been formed by isolating them from the general population by using identity as a knife with which to chop up society.
Individuals are programmed to believe that their only identity is that of race, religion, ethnicity, etc., and that there are no overarching unifying identities like, e.g., all being residents of the same community, etc. The system’s duplicity is intensified by the fact that the institution’s ideology will not help people obtain opportunity or equality, but rather is designed to reinforce the very inequalities is claims to work to eliminate.
Ideologues thrive on despair. A type of despair is instilled into the students, which discourages the students from following those paths which might lead to opportunity and equality:
If the system is rigged against them, what hope is there of succeeding?
The tactic of the bureaucracy is not to extend “privileges” to those who don’t currently have them, but rather to take “privileges” away from those who are alleged to have them. Setting aside the questions of what these privileges are, and whether they exist, the ideology makes no sense on its own terms: if an identity group doesn’t have privileges, or is made to believe that it doesn’t have privileges, then why not extend those privileges to the group? Why, instead, destroy another group’s alleged privileges?
