Systemically Subversive

Children Fundamentally Transformed by Public Education

Distressed by various crises in 2020, many people are deeply anxious about the future. They worry about their country's future and are anxious about the kind of world their children or grandchildren will inherit.

Anxiety about the future is intensely personal when it involves one's own family. That is only natural. Throughout history, most of the blood, sweat, and tears men and women have shed has been for the sake of their children and for their future.

As children, we receive our very lives, names, language, vocabulary, ideas, stories, morals, and religion from our parents. A marriage establishes a new household in which, ideally, souls are nurtured and educated. Education begins in the home, but in modern times it has been increasingly put into the hands of public schools. Weary working parents are often relieved to have someone else watch and teach their offspring.

Until not so long ago, parents felt they could depend on the teachers in public schools and colleges to educate their children in the values, views, and history they shared. But now things are quite different, and many parents have been slow to realize how subversive many of their children's teachers truly are. Their confidence in public education is no longer warranted.

This betrayal has not occurred suddenly, but has developed over time. As it becomes increasingly obvious, more parents are deciding to homeschool their children rather than subject them to a toxic public education in their cities and states.

Forms of Betrayal

In this issue, Neil English (p. 31) insists that "children are intuitive theists" who must be indoctrinated to reject belief in a Creator and a purposeful Creation. Public education undermines natural theism.

Consider also the violent protests we've seen this past summer (see Surveillance on p. 10). Many young people support the Marxist-inspired organization called Black Lives Matter (see "Revolution, Inc.," p. 26). This is, sadly, the fruit of decades of indoctrination in leftist ideology and secular humanism, which have become standard fare in public education.

Recently, a vice-presidential candidate said during a nationally televised debate that America is "systemically racist." Young children are now being taught this as well, along with the tenets of "critical race theory," which holds that white people are inherently racist, simply by being born "white."

If all white people are inherently racist, then shouldn't every single white newscaster, columnist, politician, lawmaker, and judge who seeks "social justice" resign his or her position? Logically, yes, but of course that's not going to happen. White leftists merely use this theory to level the charge of racism as needed against others to further their own agenda and ambitions.

Race isn't the only issue in which such nonsense is evident. A presidential candidate recently affirmed the "rights" of 8-year-olds to declare themselves "transgender." Our young are being indoctrinated in gender theory, LGBT ideas, and the rest of the sham artifice of moral relativism.

Imagine a young girl growing up "liberated" to hate her nation, her family, her body, and her God. That's freedom? An old saying goes, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make insane." But our radical elites don't even believe in any god who judges mankind.

A Vain Thing

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who suffered imprisonment and exile for exposing the crimes of the Soviet Union, explained the dark brutality that enslaved Russia for 70 years by quoting a peasant: it all happened "because we've forgotten God."

While Western governments have not suppressed religion as much as Marxist governments have, they have banished God from the public education of our young people. In pretending that the world stands apart from God, they imagine a vain thing.

Salvo continues to educate readers about a purposeful Creation. Make sure your students are properly educated by reading Salvo.