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May
21
2021

Time To Privatize Our Public Schools
Boyd D. Cathey

Recently, a good friend related to me some of the experiences his daughter was having in a high school not too far from him. You see, his daughter is a history teacher—or should we say “social studies” teacher, to be politically correct? It seems that the curriculum she must teach and the approved texts her students must use in the classroom are redolent thematically with the idea that from its beginning America was characterized by ingrained racism: indeed, a white racism which infected and colored practically everything, from the social structures in the colonies and later codified by a racist Constitution, to the dealings—both legal and familial—between inhabitants, to the very language they used to communicate their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas.

Like other teachers at her school my friend’s daughter is instructed to impart these insights as part of an overall educational template that suggests that from its earliest settling the America colonies, and then the American republic, were moored historically in a quasi-religious belief in “white supremacy” and the pervasive “racism” which defined it.

While not as forward or fulsome perhaps as the “1619 Project’s” recommendations and its embrace of “Critical Race Theory,” grammar and high school curricula echoing the “Project” now shape students in such a way as to prepare them, if they are college bound, for a fuller indoctrination as they continue their education.

Given that most freshly minted teachers coming out today from the vast majority of our country’s schools of education already possess a well-developed predisposition and vision that comports with the vision projected by the “1619 Project,” and that many local school boards are dominated by the same vision, is it any wonder what students in public schools are being taught?

And for those who go on to college, the ground is well prepared. From a young seven year old boy who is proud that his conservative parents supported Donald Trump, who goes to church with them regularly, whose everyday thoughts turn to games, sports and friends, and are millions of miles away from “wokeness,” we transition to the molded college journalism grad at age twenty-two from the University of North Carolina or from any number of other institutions of higher learning across the nation, who mouths fierce and unrelenting slogans about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “intersectionality,” and demands “equity.”  And “equity” is a weasel word never fully defined, but an essential ingredient in the Critical Race Theory (CRT) lexicon.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in their volume, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2012, 49) describe it, CRT calls for “aggressive, color conscious efforts to change the way things are,” meaning the use of race as the determinant in making decisions as to how property, positions of power, and prestige are allocated in society. And since for the past two millennia the white race has oppressed and abused black and brown peoples around the world, simple equality of opportunity is not enough, in fact is evil, just one more effort of the white man to maintain his privileged position. Indeed, what is entailed in the current talk about “equity” is the requirement for various forms of reparation, a kind of reverse discrimination to satisfy the social injustices and the effects of white colonialism, slavery, and exploitation of black and brown peoples over past centuries.

True, while the curricula in thousands of public schools may not be this explicit, they nevertheless seed impressionable minds and groom students for what is to come. The results are evident…on the downtown streets this past summer of nearly every large or medium-sized American city set ablaze by howling mobs, or as dozens of historical monuments have come down because they honor white people who helped create this nation, or as “woke” corporate executives, media barons, entertainment glitterati, as well as the educational establishment censor and cancel hundreds and thousands of years of Western civilization and culture…because it was created by whites.

For some twenty years I have chaired North Carolina’s Confederate Flag Day, held in early March each year. Sponsored by the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the event was held in the House of Representatives chamber of the historic 1840 State Capitol building, honoring the historic flags of the Confederacy and the citizen soldiers who fought under those flags. The event was always peaceful. Back in 2019, with heightened racial tensions nearly everywhere after the Charleston shootings, as we ended our observance, a large violent mob of Antifa thugs, Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and others assembled outside the Capitol blocking our exit. I’ve recounted what happened in a column published on March 11, 2019. Nearly 200 armed police and State Troopers had to form a cordon to enable us to exit the building safely and find our way to our cars.

I wrote then: “As I exited with other attendees I looked into the faces of the mob: what I observed was a very real madness, an unleashed fury, eyes filled with uncontrolled hatred…. Those angry faces—those glaring and fierce eyes…betrayed ruptured souls, corrupted and demonized, existing in a kind of counter-reality with their own set of always-advancing rules, but dedicated in a fearsome and unambiguous way to the destruction—salvation through destruction—of Western Christian civilization, of mankind as we have known it.”

That hatred, that fury, that lunacy so apparent in the eyes of those demonstrators in March 2019 and so evident in thousands and thousands like them, begins in our schools with administrators and teachers, and with local school boards, dousing our children with the flammable ingredients which corrupt and pervert, and turn them into what I have termed modern “pod people.”

These “pod people” serve a larger and more fearsome purpose: the ultimate success of the Revolution against God and man. For their fanatical assault against what they perceive as white supremacy and racism is in fact an attack on Creation itself, on the natural laws of that Creation, and the God Who made it.

It is time for our cowardly legislators to begin the process of privatizing the public schools and turning education over once more to the parents where it belongs.

 

Boyd D. Cathey holds a Ph.D. in European History from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an M.A. in Intellectual History from the University of Virginia. He was assistant to the late Russell Kirk and State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History.

 

 

 

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