Cultivating activists, not balanced American citizens

What do classicism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, and transgenderism have in common? These are the themes dominating the “Social Justice Book List,” the books recommended by the National Network of State Teachers of the Year for children in [public] preschool through sixth grade.

America’s top public school teachers recommend even darker reading for grades seven through nine, adding suicide, child abuse, mental illness, “othering,” and police brutality to the “isms” of elementary school. The recommended reading for high school moves on to sexual violence, sexual identity, sexual trafficking, climate change, and the “history” of the United States from the “perspective of marginalized and oppressed people.”

These lists were not compiled by academic radicals at progressive universities but by some of America’s most celebrated public school teachers. Worse, this is the vision of America that our “best and brightest” classroom teachers believe our children need.

We have seen how America’s public schools are busily forming our children according to the progressive vision of the person as secular and irreligious, androgynous, and self-defining. But there’s more to that problematic vision.

Progressives look at America and see a deeply flawed country, built by oppression and maintained by privilege, a system ripe for “change” imposed by a new generation of social justice warriors. In the globalized utopia of their dreams, “citizens of the world” abjure “nationalistic” allegiance to the United States, and patriotism is a vice, not a virtue.

How did this happen?

The scholastic attack on American patriotism began with the move to abandon “useless” facts and dates in history classes, which were reconstituted as “social studies.” Social studies, in turn, gave birth to a new kind of “civics,” which catechizes students in progressive identity politics – community organizing for schoolchildren. “Rights talk” has replaced teaching the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.

Beneath the surface of these changes is a slow-boiling hostility to America – hostility to the founding, our market-based economic system, the Constitution, our Judeo-Christian moral tradition, and the American ideals of industry, patriotism, respect, equal dignity, and opportunity. Students are trained to see America as blighted by racism, white privilege, sexism, classism, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and a slew of other “isms.”

By the time our children reach college, the familiar anti-American sentiments have given rise to activist demands, intimidation, and even riots.

Excerpt from Get Out Now – Why You Should Pull Your Child From Public School Before It’s Too Late , by Mary Rice Hasson & Theresa Farnan (Regnery Gateway, 2018), From Chapter 5, “Cultivating Activists, Not Americans,” pp. 85-87.

MARY RICE HASSON, J.D., is the Kate O’Beirne Fellow and the director of the Catholic Women’s Forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

THERESA FARNAN, Ph.D., is a philosopher specializing in virtue ethics, moral education, philosophy of the person, and ethical issues facing the family.