To obtain or keep teaching licenses, Illinois now requires all K-12 teachers to indoctrinate their students in critical race theory, destructive lies about sex and gender, and other leftist mind poison. The rules clearly communicate that in Illinois public schools are no longer places to learn, but places children will be lied to, manipulated, and warehoused as wards of a corrupt and malevolent state. And this kind of schooling is spreading nationwide.
Every decent parent, family, and church should refuse to allow this kind of instruction to be inflicted upon the children in their care, and assume personal responsibility for securing their genuine education outside such anti-public schools. Those who do not are abdicating their sacred duty to teach their children to love and know the truth.
The new Illinois rules require teachers to demonstrate that they “embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives.” It clearly specifies that these include incorporating into all their teaching and curricula neo-Marxist falsehoods about race and sex, and actively discriminate based on religion, viewpoint, and race. The rules require teachers to:
- Directly oppose and undermine the concept of objective truth: “Understand and value… that there is not one ‘correct’ way of doing or understanding something, and that what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” This is an exercise in forcing people to affirm two contradictory things, as the rest of the requirements are extremely dogmatic, not open to any other “way of doing or understanding something.”
- Treat themselves and students as a determined product of their race, sex, and sexual behavior: “Recognize how their identity (race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, religion, etc.) affects their perspectives and beliefs about pedagogy and students.”
- Believe and preach cultural Marxist identity politics: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”
- Agree the United States is systemically racist: “understand that there are systems in our society that create and reinforce inequities, thereby creating oppressive conditions” and “work actively against these systems.”
- Support different behavior standards based on race: “Know and understand how a system of inequity creates rules regarding student punishment that negatively impacts students of color.”
- Engage in and support cultural Marxist activism: “Be aware of the effects of power and privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action to better empower diverse students and communities.”
- Push students into leftist activism: “support and create opportunities for student advocacy and representation in the content and classroom” and “Create a risk-taking space that promotes student activism and advocacy.”
- Introduce and promote adult sex behaviors and gender identity confusion: “Implement and integrate the wide spectrum and fluidity of identities in the curriculum.”
No joke: Illinois’s state school board and legislature also deleted requirements that teachers prove they have learned any traditional curricular content or subject-matter knowledge. Social agitation uber alles.
“What’s more,” notes Stanley Kurtz, “the Illinois experience is about to go national.” A coalition of leftists is working together to make rules like Illinois’s operate in every state under the guise of “civics,” as Kurtz documents in depth. They intend to co-opt and subvert the grassroots recognition in America that education institutions use public resources to teach the next generation to hate the country that gives them more than every other country in the world does.
The goal is to use the label “civics” to make people think the plan is teaching children to be more patriotic and literate about history, while accomplishing precisely the opposite: doubling down on young Americans’ well-documented anti-American animus undergirded by their historical ignorance.
Obviously this transformation is occurring as majorities of American children have endured frequently disrupted and lower-quality education than usual nearly an entire school year, with half completely online and another quarter partially online now. It is clear that school “as normal” will not soon return even though many schools’ “safety” rules are contrary to evidence and the seasonal flu is truly a higher risk to children than COVID.
If your child is one of the three-quarters “doing school online,” you can do it better yourself. If your child is being taught lies instead of truth in school, you can definitely do it better yourself. Just read good books and talk about them.
Schools’ increasingly open function as indoctrination factories and massive ineptitude at effective and reliable instruction — which long predates COVID — mean it is past time for parents to stop with the wishful thinking and get their kids something better before it’s too late. Community organizations, primarily churches, must come to their aid.
State-sponsored instruction that makes your child a dogmatic, racist relativist is not worth any benefit you feel schools give in return. Not a single one. Being Mowgli raised by wolves and bears would be better for your child than this. Thankfully, unlike the therians or human pups your children could meet under instruction like this, you realize you are not a wolf or bear, so you can do a lot better than raising Mowgli.
Truly, it would be better for children to be feral in their backyards than manipulated with false COVID fears and dangerous lies about how racist they are for being born white. It would be even better for a child to have a library card and a large supply of craft materials than to attend this kind of “school.” It would be ideal for children to have truly excellent schools to attend instead, but one step at a time, okay? First, stop the bleeding.
It’s easy to compete with stupid and evil. Just don’t be stupid or evil. This is one key reason homeschool kids whose parents don’t have a teaching degree do better than public-school peers whose teachers do: eating grass is better than eating poison, and any person who isn’t indoctrinated can see that.
Instruction of the kind Illinois has committed itself to is a code red for people to get children out of such schools by any moral means possible. It’s not as hard as you think. Remember: Even Baloo can do better than this. So can you.
Now that teacher licenses are hinged not on curricular competence but the affirmation of false political creeds, a loving parent is clearly better than a teaching college-certified critical race zombie. Many parents who thought they could never homeschool are finding out that even doing it while also working from home is better than trying to substitute teach the garbage local public schools are calling “online instruction.”
Many parents are finding that the little education “pods” they put together are actually a tiny private school that almost any church or community organization could host, and are accessible at very affordable costs, especially if parents’ mortgage bill is freed from the upcharge of living in a “good” school district gone woke and others like grandparents pitch in on tuition.
It is churches, parents’, and charities’ moral duty to step up to the plate, and not only in Illinois. American public schools are not much better than this across the board, except for a few outliers, and they are likely to get a lot worse under a Biden administration committed to accelerating critical race theory, forcing boys and girls to shower and sleep overnight together, imposing different school rules for different races, and keeping schools closed as long as possible.
The time has come for people who love their country to begin building and investing in parallel private social institutions to replace the institutions the left has corrupted beyond restoration. The people who control public schools, public health, our energy grids, you name it have proven they are willing to teach the next generation the greatest country in the world needs to be burned down and looted and uphold COVID superstitions rather than perform basic safety checks on crucial energy infrastructure.
It’s time for all people possible to divest from these corrupt institutions and invest their resources — time, children, money, buildings, whatever you’ve got — in sound ones, for the sake of the common good for the country we love.
By Joy Pullmann
