I remember back in the 1960s, when I was still in public school, and they first tried to add “sex education” to the curriculum.
Practically the whole town turned out for the school board meeting, to tell the board, in no uncertain terms, “Thou shalt not!” And so they didn’t, because they would’ve all been voted out of office if they had.
My friend Jimmy’s father, Mr. K., was particularly persuasive. They didn’t like to see him coming. So they refrained from innovations to the curriculum–because they had a wholesome fear of how the community would react. Because back then, see, we still had a community.
What’s changed?
For one thing, the state took away virtually all the power that the local school boards had to determine how education was conducted in their district. So if the voters rejected the school budget, the state commissioner had the power to nullify their vote. Eventually people stopped voting down school budgets, because it was futile. And meanwhile, the board had to tailor the curriculum to conform to whatever the state wanted.
I’m sure this happened in other states besides New Jersey.
Local control of school districts protected us from the kind of endless mischief now perpetrated daily by the state and federal governments. We could get it back, if there were ever the political will to abolish the federal Dept. of Education and get the federal government out of education altogether. We would also have to abolish the office of state commissioner of education, abolish state departments of education, and repeal Common Core–including all the “rewrites” which are only Common Core hiding behind a less controversial name.
All of that would be tremendously difficult to accomplish, going up against rich, powerful, entrenched opposition from the government and teachers’ unions.
Much better to pull Christian children, and others, out of public education and give them a Christian education, either at home or in a Christian school.
And there’s a wonderful upside to that.
Kill public education, and liberalism dies.
When the spiritual revival we are all praying for comes, the first sign will be the exodus from public schools, which are really federal government schools.
It’s sad, but the government seems to no longer acknowledge their responsibility to their citizens. Things have reversed in my lifetime.
Their attitude now, to us, is “Shut up and pay!”
That attitude needs adjusting.
It’ll happen sooner or later.