Biden administration Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced that he will not “sit idly” while education is privatized.
In an interview with Politico, Cardona said that he believes attempts to bust up the public schools’ near monopoly on education are “intentional” and that those attacks are designed to “make sure that our public schools are not functional so that the private option sounds better.”
Cardona, a former elementary-school principal from Connecticut, has written op-eds in Newsweek and a Florida newspaper to call out opponents of the “woke” curriculum for “hiding behind the guise of ‘parents’ rights’” to defund public schools and trying to “hijack” classroom discussions.
It seems that all those opposing perversion masquerading as education are enemies of education. Cardona is going to make sure that they aren’t allowed to influence public school districts, and says he will protect “vulnerable groups” from attempts to marginalize them.
Would anyone paying attention to the trajectory of federally protected curricular standards doubt that the most vulnerable and marginalized kids in the classrooms are Christians?
Cardona’s comments in his Politico interview reveal that he considers the perpetuation of the public school domination of education in this country to be the most effective way to treat the “mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years.”
As a former school administrator, one would think that Cardona would be an eyewitness to the moral maelstrom that is the common climate in public schools today. Kids are not only unwillingly exposed to the most degenerate images and messages from people they are taught to respect and obey, but the forced association with kids whose behavior and beliefs are antithetical to those taught to them at home. Add to those elements the pressure to perform and the average of four hours of homework assigned every day, and the disinterested and honest observer learns the truth about why parents are looking elsewhere for their children’s education.
Public education is being criticized because concerned citizens recognize that the model has failed. From the educrats in Washington to the administrators in local districts, those who profit from protecting public schools from criticism know that competition is the kill shot for their system.
The proliferation of private, parochial, and home schooling and the success stories coming from those options increase the contrast between them and their public school “competitors,” and that contrast draws parents away from the assault on traditional American values and true American history and toward those schools where those vital institutions are promoted, protected, and preserved.
In a Tampa Bay Times op-ed, Cardona writes that “What we teach in our nation’s classrooms speaks to the essence of who we are as Americans.”
He’s wrong.
What they are teaching in the country’s classrooms speaks to the essence of who THEY are and the values THEY believe in. That nearly 1.5 million students have fled from public schools testifies that millions of America families don’t share those values.
To Cardona, parents voting with their feet is an attempt to “ban kids from learning the truth when it doesn’t align with their political agenda.”
He’s right.
It is parents’ DUTY to prevent their children from learning principles that don’t align with those they are taught at home. It is parents’ DUTY to “ban” their kids from seeing pictures and hearing messages that violate the values of religion and morality that they are taught at home. It is parents’ DUTY to protect their children from people — particularly their peers — whose influence would harm them and erode the trust they have in their parents.
Cardona writes in that same op-ed that “Censorship is not only against our values as a nation; it makes it harder for children to learn.”
“Censorship” is just another word for protecting children from images and words that would wound their innocent minds and souls. Parents constantly censor what their children see and hear. It’s necessary to censor the things to which children are exposed if one wants to raise mentally and physically healthy kids.
It’s ironic that a man who would accuse Americans of “us[ing] education to divide communities” would repeatedly and erroneously assert that the reason families are removing their kids from public schools is because they don’t want “black history” being taught. This is an unfounded, unfair, and untrue accusation that Cardona makes half a dozen times in his interview and op-ed. I have worked in the school choice movement for decades, and have never once heard any family complain about “black history” being taught. Pretending that Americans who choose to leave public schools don’t want their children to learn about “black history” is a race-baiting way of dividing America, no?
Besides, when Cardona says “black history” what he really means is critical race theory. For those who’ve heard the term but aren’t sure what it means, here is the definition provided by respected educator Dr. Duke Pesta:
Simply put, Critical Race Theory is an offshoot of the socialist dialectic that has evolved in universities over the last 50 years or so. It employs rhetorical strategies designed to sow decisive conflict between America’s inveterately “racist and capitalistic” past and its anticipated utopian socialist future. According to its progressive proponents, it is only after every aspect of our systemically racist and irredeemably white supremacist culture, history, art, economics, and politics has been rewritten or cancelled that we can move on to a benevolent socialist paradise devoid of “whiteness,” a secular and materialist Eden that fully empowers minorities, women, LGBTQ, and non-Western peoples to live, govern, and rule in harmony, free from the scourge of the white supremacy that is uniquely responsible for all social evils and disparity from the beginning of time. But this definition just scratches the surface.
No wonder families are “censoring” such socialist propaganda from being presented as “history” to their children!
Finally, Cardona claims that any effort to defund public schools — and by “public schools” I mean schools funded by force by everyone regardless of their choice of school — is an attack on education itself. On that absurd assertion, I’ll give the final word to Frederic Bastiat:
Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State—then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion—then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.
