To Educate

 

We cannot know how to live unless we know what is true. Once we know what is true and what is false, then we can ascribe to each proposition a moral status of being worthy or unworthy. Then we just do what we are to do, and refrain or do less of what we are not supposed to have been doing.

 

Add to this that people are born in sin, and as intelligent beings with free will, it is incumbent upon parents (mostly and directly) and society (somewhat and indirectly) to provide children with moral values, so they know how to live, so they know what to do. School education should provide each child with content education and moral training. Each generation must be so educated, or civilization will be lost. Each generation must be trained up and educated or society false apart quickly. So it has always been.

 

I subscribe to online email updates from Christopher Rufo, and I will quote it and comment on it. He sent me one of March 17, 2024. It was entitled: A World in Miniature; Raising children in an era of ideological capture.

 

Ruf (R after this): “Each generation confronts the question of education anew. The problems that face one generation are distinct from those that face the next.”

 

My response: No more than yes, though there are unique challenges for each generation.

 

R: “Today’s families feel unprecedented anxiety about the state of education. The public school, the primary mechanism for education and values transmission, has lost their confidence, as many educators have abandoned traditional pedagogy in favor of indoctrination.”

 

My response: Children need to be educated and receive values transmission, but that has been discarded by the Leftist true believers running public schools, so each child is to be indoctrinated, converted into an ideological fanatic and activist, loyal to the state, its mass movement, the Democratic/Marxist party, and parents be damned.

 

R: “Many families have scrambled for alternatives, switching districts, enrolling in private schools, or starting home schooling programs.  These families have absorbed a critical lesson: education cannot be neutral; it must be oriented to a set of principles. The only question is which ones.”

 

My response: No, the school system cannot be value-neutral, but should push the values the public majority stands for, and if parents object, they can send the kids to private schools matching the parents’ values, or the parents can home-school the kids. Kids should be given an essentialist, classical education, plus self-realization training, and perhaps a half hour a day to pray—if they are believers—or to quietly meditate if they are unbelievers or agnostics.

 

R: “ I have spent considerable effort in my professional capacity studying and exposing the process of ideological capture in American education. I have traced the rise of left-wing race and gender ideologies from the margins to the center of public life, culminating in reports, essays, and a best-selling book.”

 

My response: He has not yet defined ideological capture, but my hunch is his complaint that Progressive true believers have taken over the schools and colleges in America, and they seek to brainwash, indoctrinate all children to march lockstep in devotional loyalty to the Communist Part, all uniformity, submission, brainwashing, and groupthink.

 

R: “These investigations were, at first, objects of my intellectual curiosity. My political commitments were opposed to these ideologies, and, like an engineer, I sought to understand how they worked. But these concerns have become more personal and urgent for me since starting a family and watching my children grow up. It’s one thing to break a story about a public school drilling students in ‘heteronormativity’ or ‘white privilege’; it’s quite another to consider your own child as the pupil.”

 

My response: Yes, it is wise that Rufo studied these evil people and their secret efforts to rob America of its children, and to subvert and corrupt them into being myrmidon Commies; an enemy cannot be defeated unless exposed, what he is up to and how he is attacking society. And Rufo is correct, his children too are at risk.

 

R: “I’ve spoken with many parents, particularly those in elite cities, who lament that these ideologies are inescapable. They are not wrong. The language and assumptions of the academic Left are increasingly those of American institutions and, with assistance from technology firms and human resource departments, the informal orthodoxy of polite society.”

 

My response: Rufo needs to understand and explain it to all Americans that cultural Marxism/Postmodernist Progressivism is a holy cause, and its lethal purveyors in the public schools, academia, and corporations, are evil people hell-bent on overturning all things traditionally American. These revolutionaries and nihilists are advancing, and they are dead serious, driven by ideological fervor, hatred, rage and bottomless power-lust.

 

R: “The social costs of opposing the Left’s rotating social movements--#MeToo, BLM, transgenderism, and what is next—are swift and severe, and can render mum otherwise self-confident people.”

 

My response: All of these “reform movements” at but subgroups of the cultural Marxist holy cause. People must be brave, confident, united and fight back mightily and with iron will.

 

R: “I have tried to build a life in which I can speak freely and, after having a family, in which my children habituate themselves to sturdier principles that the current consensus offers. This has required sacrifices. My wife and I left Seattle after it became untenable. We deal with ongoing security concerns. As they get older, my children will have to negotiate the reality of having a father who is involved in political controversy.”

 

My response: We must speak out fearless for what is true and good, and that can make our families vulnerable to attack; this is painful, but we must fight the good fight as God commands us to conduct.

 

R: “But one thing we do not have to do is compromise. After settling in a small town on the Puget Sound, we built a community of people who shared our principles. We found a school and a church that challenged us to deepen, rather than undermine, our commitments. During a particularly tense political moment when we were under threat, our neighbors rallied to our defense. The men promised to show up with heavy arms if we had any trouble; the women organized a group to pray for our protection.

 

This is not to say that you can escape America’s cultural problems by leaving cities. In our town of 10,000 residents, a local high school student recently died of an accidental fentanyl overdose.”

 

My response: We cannot run, and we cannot hide from problems: my plan is to offer Mavellonialism to people in the country, in villages, in towns, cities and in red states and blue states in in countries across the globe. We must go offense and stay there.

 

R: “A friend who teaches at a local middle school told me that one-third of his female students identify as ‘trans,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘non-binary,’ which he is required to ‘affirm’ and keep secret from parents. National culture, again aided by digital technology, truly has become ubiquitous.”

 

My response: Likely 97% of girls and boys are heterosexual, and their birth sex is their unchosen, undoubted, God-given gender identity, unless sick digital technologists are brainwashing them into viewing themselves as trans, queer and non-binary when they clearly are not. It is unspeakable that kids share these fad views with teachers, but parents are not told what their children are thinking and self-referencing as. This makes me furious.

 

R: “Youth subcultures have always challenged normative standards. This is healthy for young people and, in proportion, for society. The problem now, however, is that anti-normative ideologies today are not relegated to subcultures but have become the dominant culture. These ideologies are inherently critical—based on negation, critique, deconstruction—and their proponents are not bound by a corresponding sense of responsibility. Further, they are not the creation of restless adolescents but of politically motivated adults, who seek to impose these ideologies on other people’s children from positions of authority.”

 

My response: I agree wholeheartedly with Rufo’s articulate explanation above that cultural Marxism is now the dominant culture in America, that these true-believing, ideologically irresponsible revolutionaries pushing it are close to winning, if they can rob the public of its children.”

 

R: “The ultimate problem with critical theories of race and gender is that they do not work, and they do not work because they are at odds with both human nature and human flourishing. The rising generation of American children is the most anxious, depressed, and antisocial in memory.”

 

My response: This is what is produced when children are raised as little Marxist groupists, without moral training, faith and self-realization training.

 

R: “The structures and traditions that once provided guidance and discipline are castigated as ‘racist’ and ‘sexist,’ and have been displaced by the demands of ‘social justice.’

 

Upon reflection, I am convinced that our task as parents is to create a world in miniature for our children. Not to shield them from the world beyond, but to prepare them for it. We try to create, to the best of our capacity, an ideal, knowing that is cannot be sustained forever. Given the current social moment, in which our institutions are actively opposed to preserving childhood innocence, striving for a comparatively utopian upbringing is a radical act. Those who build and sustain a local culture that repudiates the dictates of elite opinion—teachers, pastors, donors, volunteers—are nothing short of heroic.”

 

My response: Rufo is correct again: to thwart, to stunt, and to defeat the prevalent postmodern, Marxist culture today in America, parents must lead the counter-revolt politically and culturally against the elite ideologues and nihilists. In their personal lives and in their communities, parents must provide the world in miniature that protects the childhood innocence of each child, while inuring each child so she may face the world beyond her family, as a teen and an adult, to face it with competence, coping skills, courage, willfulness, and wisdom. If the children can be reared as individuating supercitizens, that would seal the deal.

 

R: “For the past several years, I have been fighting a very public cultural war against the organized Left. But the most important, and toughest, war is always at home. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci understood, modern politics is a form of trench warfare. And while offensive measures are the only way to score victories., it is imperative to build defenses around the people and institutions that one loves. We should plan campaigns—but also dig trenches.”

 

My response: Amen.