Hello, , from NHERI and Dr. Ray.
There were about 16,000 of us in Chicago that day, three weeks ago. Researchers, university graduate students, policymakers, teachers, and school administrators. Has this got you excited
yet?
It was the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. I have attended these for 29 years now. But who cares?
A Brief Concept
Consider this little
graphic: Professors ---> graduate students ---> public school teachers ---> K-12 students/children (minds, hearts)
Are you getting the drift yet? Ideas have consequences.
An Event
I showed up at the Roundtable Discussion. The name of the presenter in the program was “Jenna” but the nametag on the human was “Jacob.” I wondered, “Am I in the right place.” Yes, the same person is Jenna and Jacob.[1] Her/his talk was entitled, "Maybe You Disagree—Most Boys Don't": Teaching Gender in the Age of "Not All
Men!"
He/she excitedly and enthusiastically explained going into schools and “queering” 4th- and 5th-grade students. Her/his dissertation says: “At the core of this dissertation is an intervention designed to support late elementary (4th and 5th grade) students in challenging the fiction of the gender binary” (p. vii).[2]
In other words, this scholar’s objective is to re-train and re-program the thinking, values, and beliefs of these public school 10- and 11-year-olds. She/he wants to queer them, to force them to question, doubt, and debate whether God (or evolution) really designed humans to be male and female, “the gender binary.”
Actually, it is more than that: she/he thinks that male and female is a “fiction” – that is, an invention, a fabrication, as opposed to fact.
When she/he was done, I asked politely and calmly: You have given us marching orders and you apparently felt some marching orders to go in and change the thinking of 4th- and 5th-graders. Can you tell us the origin of your moral
authority to give us marching orders and to do this with these children? Silence. It felt like a long time, but it was probably only 7 seconds, and he/she replied, “I don’t think I understand the question.” I re-phrased it. Silence again for several seconds. Then another person in the audience jumped in and tried to answer for him/her. It was a vague non-answer. Then another attendee offered to me, “She wasn’t being militaristic.” I responded, “I didn’t think she was.” My question about moral
authority was so significant to Jenna/Jake that the even made it to her/his Twitter page.
Conspiracy Thinking?
If any person thinks that it is “conspiracy thinking” to say that many in State/public schools are out to teach, train, and indoctrinate children, he really needs to stop, look, listen, and think again. The
facts are undeniable that large portions of professors of education and their graduate students and teachers are fully bent on transmitting their religions – values, beliefs, and worldviews – to all children in public/State schools.
One can read it in their papers and dissertations and listen to it at their talks. It is full and completely public and clear now. And it is practically applied in
the schools on a daily basis.
Read here about a Kindergarten teacher:[4]
“And I read a [pro-gay child’s] book [King and King], and I started to
realize that conversations can be very difficult, and they can have the most power when they are the most difficult.”
“But difficult conversations are a part of what we do as teachers, right? And when these conversations are properly supported by teachers within the safety of the classroom, they provide a rich environment for our students as
they unpack these complex social issues and they reflect on their own preconceptions, rights, of gender, sexuality, love, all these different things,” she said.
This teacher of children, as young as four, proceeds to explain how she breaks down the little children’s conceptions of what is right and wrong and what they were taught by their parents and churches. The teacher gladly breaks down their
value systems, then moves on to the next classroom of young children.
The purpose of public schools to re-train, re-educate, and re-indoctrinate children is not new. It was being done in America’s public schools in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, and throughout the history of public schooling.
Professors James Carper and Thomas Hunt reminded American scholars, parents, church leaders, and anyone who would listen of the following, just under a decade ago:
In sum, then, we contend that the public school is the functional equivalent of an established church, buttressed with religious language, expected to embrace all people,
legitimating and transmitting an orthodoxy or worldview, and underwritten by compulsory taxation. ( p. 4).[5]
Another thing that is not new is that most parents, including Christians, are missing reality. They are either ignorant of or ignoring the indoctrination of their
children that is purposely being done by public school teachers and administrators, and professors who lead and sway the school systems and their curricula.
Taking the Bull by the Horns
One relatively new development is that those in the modern homeschool movement
have finally realized that all of schooling – whether public schooling, private schooling, or homeschooling – is the transmission of ideas and ways of thinking to children. While professor Jane Roland Martin argued that the public school must become the “schoolhome,” where children get care, concern, and connection from and with adults,[6] increasing numbers of parents
around the world have rejected this notion.
While an swelling number of professors and graduate students are getting bolder and more brazen about changing public school children’s and teens’ morals, values, and religious beliefs, more parents are opting to keep or take that job themselves.[7] While these academics and teachers want public schools to be the schoolhome for training in LGBTQIA religion, many parents are finally holding the line. (LGBTQIA stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, and asexual.)
In study after study, homeschooling parents explain that one of their key reasons for practicing home-based education is so
that they are the authentic, genuine, and effective teachers of truth, values, and beliefs to their children. They think they should not hand over their children to others, especially agents of the State, to indoctrinate their children.
Even if professors and graduate students will not honestly face the question, every parent must answer this: What is the source of moral authority to teach the
truth and mold children’s minds and hearts, and to whom is that authority given, the State or parents?
--Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.
National Home Education Research Institute
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Endnotes:
[3] Every person, whether a researcher, journalist, academic, policymaker, judge, carpenter, or nurse, has a worldview or weltanschauung. Examples of worldviews are atheism, Buddhism, Christianity/scripturalism, communitarianism,
critical theory, Islam, metaphysical naturalism, Mormonism, queer theory, Roman Catholicism, scientism, socialism, and statism. Christians might say there are only two: scripturalism/Christianity and else. [6] Martin, Jane R. (1992). The schoolhome:
Rethinking schools for changing families. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [7] Murphy, Joseph. (2012). Homeschooling in America: Capturing and assessing the movement. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, a Sage Company. Ray, Brian D. (2013). Homeschooling associated with beneficial learner and
societal outcomes but educators do not promote it. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 324–341.
