“What constitutes a family?”
I won’t rehearse all those points here. But just consider the question above. The Roadmap advises teachers to bring it into class presentations and encourage discussion, which might raise immediate questions about the civic goal of the exercise. To be sure, the Roadmap contains many traditional topics such as the content of the Constitution and historical takes on immigration, expansion, voting rights, and political parties. But this query about the family doesn’t quite fit. Why would civics sessions with 7-year-olds turn on the definition of something many would regard as both irrelevant to civics learning and inappropriate to children of that age?
After all, the family is a contentious subject. The traditional conception of it—father, mother, married and with children, all in the same home—has been one of the left’s prime targets in the 50-year Culture War that continues today. That nuclear model is accused of being sexist, heteronormative, homophobic, reactionary, and denigrating to all those households that don’t have a traditional mother-father setup. It’s said to put down single mothers and same-sex couples.
Why bring those tensions to children who haven’t the equipment to understand them? For the obvious reason: This is good old-fashioned proselytizing. It follows a standard leftist tactic: get ‘em while they’re young. Let’s not be callow enough to believe that “What constitutes a family?” is a genuine question.
Imagine what would happen if a student were a fundamentalist Christian, an Orthodox Jew, or a devout Muslim. That student would rise and state a definition of the family that runs squarely against the liberal one, and the teacher wouldn’t let that stand. The ideology of the social studies profession and of the schools, in general, wouldn’t allow it.
No diversity on this one, no pluralism.
We know that’s what will happen because we’ve seen it a thousand times before. More than any other site in our country, for the past half-century, the classroom has been the place where traditional conceptions of family, men and women, God and country, marriage and parenting have begun to slip and fall.
When guests on CNN speak of Western Civilization as white supremacy, they may believe that they are cutting-edge commentators, but, in truth, they are parroting ideas that had become academic dogma (and cliché) by 1995. When young, energetically left-wing members of Congress opine about imperialism, they say nothing you couldn’t find in every average “studies” class in the 1980s.
For a long time, with a few exceptions such as William Bennett, prominent Republicans paid little attention to the advance of political correctness in the classroom. Or, rather, while all of them realized the bias going on, they did nothing about it. Either they didn’t fully understand how it was happening, or they didn’t know what to do to counter it, or they didn’t want to take action and face the inevitable smears of the media and activists.
It’s now quite clear that what happens in classrooms comes to happen in the public square 20 years later, but Republican leaders are too old or too poorly equipped to think in “long march” terms (as the left does). Besides that, their corporate donors have signaled their compliance with progressivism on social matters, and they don’t want their politicians to cross lines of political correctness. If the leftist momentum is to be stopped, it will have to be the people who do it.
That means getting them to recognize the tendentiousness, the tactical character, of small gestures such as “What constitutes a family?” We have people going to school board meetings and denouncing overt critical race theory exercises, which are easy to recognize as abominations. It’s not so easy to see the small ones as likewise dangerous. But they are. I can hear the leftist educator scoffing at the worry, claiming that the family question is just a discussion prompt about an important topic. Relax—lighten up!
But in cases such as this one, we have two renditions: one ideal and one actual. The ideal one, which progressives offer the public, is benign and nonpartisan and open-ended. “We’re just talking about important things—that’s all,” we’re told.
And then there’s the truth, what really goes on in real situations. There, the direction of righteousness is clear, and it’s always to the left. The curt query, “What constitutes a family” signifies one thing in the abstract—in the Roadmap document, for instance. It signifies a whole other thing in a classroom with a left-leaning teacher at the front and a captive group of 7-year-olds looking to her for guidance.
Do not believe the promises of the educators—they have broken their promises too many times in the past. Progressives regard the schools as an opportunity to spread the word, their word. Most liberals don’t see the classroom that way, but they have decided to let progressives call the shots when it comes to the social contents of the curriculum. The Woke Revolution is the result of decades of this leftist push in higher and lower education.
Conservatives, then, must accept themselves as counter-revolutionaries. No more compromises, no more benefits of the doubt. Flood those school board meetings, yes, and tell the authorities that you don’t trust them and you don’t like them—and you’re going to stop them.
