May 19, 2021
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Time to Privatize Our Public Schools
Friends,
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.
There is certainly no doubt that the gulag of government day prisons that masquerades as schools, must vanish from this country. These examples only further serve to make that point. But in doing so, the term "privatize" should be clarified. The GOP has traditionally pushed for the private ownership of previously government-owned entities, while maintaining the monopoly status that made them so horrible. To maintain the violence-based and immoral funding mechanism for schools (taxes), while handing over the profits to private individuals or corporations, would only perpetuate the immorality of the current system while doing nothing to improve things in the long run. Vouchers are a similar problem as they maintain the theft while pretending to give more freedom. So long as the government is involved in education even in the slightest way, there can be no freedom in education. ALL strings to stolen taxpayer dollars, will come with demands, restrictions, and everything horrible that has destroyed education to this point. ONLY a fully competitive free market in education, that includes charity, private, home, online, co-op, parent-run, neighborhood, etc. schools, combined with fully private scholarships, can EVER hope to restore accountability and real quality to education. ONLY by putting parents both in control and fully responsible, can we ever restore what used to be an educated populace.
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