The Sooner State could have done it sooner — but better late than never.
Following a story yesterday about English authorities pushing back against “trans” radicalism in their schools comes another example of reasonableness rising against risible radicalism:
Oklahoma is saying no to sexual devolutionary ideas and racialism in their schools — and yes to what has always been in them: faith.
Per Fox 25:
The Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) plans to file three new controversial rules. These rules relate to religion, “drag queens” and programs about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
“DEI should rightly be called discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said.
On Thursday afternoon, Walters announced his plans for three new OSDE rules.
Rule number one: banning DEI from K-12 public schools.
“What we will be doing with this rule is to ensure that we don’t have anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion positions. So that would be the roles themselves. This would be the curriculum. This would be the programs.”
He admits what inspired this move is Governor [Kevin] Stitt taking DEI out of Oklahoma colleges.
“We need to make sure that our schools are focused on getting back to the basics. Not focused on resources and programs that divide us.”
Walters’ next priority is ensuring prayer and bible verses are protected in public schools.
“We are going to continue to pass rules and make sure that we are doing all we can to stand for individuals’ religious freedom here in the state of Oklahoma.”
Walters mentioned as well that secular activists have been bullying rural schools for reflecting their communities’ religious values (in accordance a proper understanding of the First Amendment). He said he’d help these beleaguered institutions combat the “lawfare” used against them by providing whatever legal help is required.
Yet Walters wasn’t done. As commentator Todd Starnes writes, providing the rest of the story, “Walters also warned teachers about using their positions to sexually groom children.”
“‘I’ve heard from parents all over the state who are very concerned with the left pushing sexuality on our kids, and pushing transgender ideology,’ he said.”
“‘Students should not be exposed to sexually inappropriate material,’” Starnes continued, quoting the superintendent further. “‘We will lead as a state to ensure every child and every parent in our state knows we are doing all we can to ensure that will not happen in our schools.’”
Much could be said about these radical (mis)education agendas; in reality, however, there’s an easy way to determine what probably doesn’t belong in schools. Remember the classroom exercises in which you had to determine which in a group of items didn’t belong? For example: dog, cow, chicken, pig, parrot, apple. Well, this technique works here, too.
Just ask: reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, sex…. Which is out of place?
Or, reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, racialism…. Where’s the incongruence?
Also see a red flag when hearing about some “great new pedagogy” or novel teaching paradigm; always just the latest shiny thing and perhaps untested in the laboratory of time, the hapless children will be the guinea pigs used to, eventually, illustrate its folly. This naive or nefarious fondness for the “new” isn’t new, either, just intensifying. Consider, for instance, a very profound passage in G.K. Chesterton’s 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World:
The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea.
In reality, we don’t in education need “new” ideas, which are usually just “old mistakes,” anyway, as Chesterton also observed. Nor do we need mere old ideas — but eternal truths, whose status has been revealed in the crucible of time.
Speaking of which brings us to religion. Contrary to popular myth, the Constitution does not forbid “religion” in schools. All the First Amendment states is, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Note the term “Congress.” State legislatures aren’t Congress. Local school boards aren’t Congress — and schools certainly are not. The Establishment Clause’s limitations only apply to the central government’s legislature.
Moreover, the mere showcasing of religion is not the establishment of religion, which is why Congress could and did open with Christian prayers at its very birth in 1789. The First Amendment does not disallow states and localities from infusing their institutions with faith as they see fit.
The bigger issue for Superintendent Walters is that the Oklahoma constitution’s very imprudently conceived and written Section II-5 would appear to prohibit religious expression in schools. This would mean that “Thou shalt not” kill, steal, or covet mayn’t be in state schools, but communism or Nazism may be. Anything wrong with this picture?
When God is cast out the Devil always, one way or another, slithers in.
