Read the latest news about the struggle to preserve parental rights at all levels of government. Learn what the Santa Clara Moms for Liberty group has been up to, what upcoming events and functions we're having, and how you can help.
Is it time to get rid of the Department of Education?
I believe the answer is yes. But first a bit of background.
The Department of Education Organization Act of 1979 provided the impetus for today's Department of Education, but centralization of the education system dates back to the year 1870, by which time every state had tax-subsidized elementary schools.
Is education among the enumerated areas that can be addressed by the federal government? According to Article I Section 8 of the Constitution, no. But SCOTUS, in the truly attrocious decision of Helvering v. Davis concerning 301 U.S. 619 (1937), concluded that Congress "may spend money in aid of the 'general welfare'....". What exactly is the general welfare? Whatever Congress says it is! Convenient, right?
Article I Section 8 and Amendment X have been rendered impotent.
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4 (NIV)
Consider Homeschooling
If you share our concern over what has been taking place in our classrooms, please consider joining with us as we fight for families, for children, for education, for truth, and for common sense.
We continue to ask people whether they understand what is now taking place within our school systems. We continue to provide information and resources to help people, especially parents, gain some idea of what's being taught to kids (and why). And yes, we continue to ask people to get involved and help with the lifting.
We fight against children being taught to hate their country, to judge people based on the color of their skin, and to ignore the basic truths of biology. We fight against the sexualization in school of little ones and the destruction of the innocence of youth. Perhaps most importantly, we fight to ensure that the proper teaching of math, reading and writing remain at the forefront of a child's education.
The idea that it is parents who are responsible for raising, educating, and seeing to the well being of their kids, that is sacrosanct.
Join with us in preserving the attributes and ideals of this great nation.
Feel free to forward this newsletter to friends and family. Actually anyone who acknowledges the fundamental right of parents to raise, educate, and protect their children are invited to join with us. We are gathering a group of joyful warriors, folks who understands why (and for whom) we fight.
Who makes decisions for local schools?
Despite agreeing to adopt the state endorsed curriculum, the Temecula Valley Unified School Board objected to the portrayal of gay rights activist Harvey Milk in the book Social Studies Alive!
California law requires that students get instruction about “the role and contributions of people with disabilities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans; and other ethnic and cultural groups.” The Temecula School Board had issues with pedophile Harvey Milk and decided not to include rhe book Social Studies Alive as a part of their curriculum.
In July Governor Gavin Newsom threatened to fine Temecula Valley Unified $1.5 million for rejecting a state-approved textbook that included a supplemental lesson on Harvey Milk, the former San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978. Newsom said the state would order the new textbooks on its own and bill the district. Last week, the board relented and agreed to purchase the new textbooks but review the material related to gay rights, replacing it with a curriculum that reflects “the board’s commitment to exclude sexualized topics of instruction from the elementary school grade levels.”
So while a School Board should be able to decide what gets paid for and what curriculum gets set for use, the governor has shown himself to be more than happy to override decisions made by more conservative boards. And so it goes.
Sat August 5th at 11:30am: See You At The Library! Moms for Liberty Santa Clara County hosts a reading of a selection of Brave Books. Bring the little ones (grades K through 4) for a fun, wholesome, family-friendly reading time.
Sat August 5th at 1:30pm: Monthly membership meeting. We will be meeting in-person this month, at the San Jose Rose Garden Library (in the Community Room). The meeting is open to anyone interested in learning more about what activities Moms for Liberty Santa Clara is currently involved in.
Location for both of the above events: San Jose Library Rose Garden Branch (the Community Room), 1580 Naglee Avenue San Jose, CA 95126
Education and Indoctrination by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
What’s the difference between education and indoctrination?
We have been arguing about this question since the emergence of public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that charges of indoctrination are essential ammunition in the culture wars currently rending our public schools. “We need to be educating people, not trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.” So said Ron DeSantis when the Florida Board of Education voted to ban critical race theory from K-12 schools last year. In a separate statement, touting the benefits of the Stop WOKE Act, DeSantis declared, “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”
The late educational philosopher Kieran Egan observed that we use the term indoctrination whenever children are taught ideas, beliefs and values that conflict with our own. It’s a pattern with a long history, reaching back to the emergence of “common schools” in the 1840s. Horace Mann—first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education—and other leaders of the common school movement were terrified by the prospect of sectarian religious divides and partisan politics blowing up what was a fragile new experiment in universal education at public expense.
“If parents find that their children are indoctrinated into what they call political heresies, will they not withdraw them from the school?” Mann fretted in 1848. “And, if they withdraw them from the school, will they not resist all appropriations to support a school from which they derive no benefit?”
Mann’s solution to the problem of indoctrination was for teachers and schools to remain scrupulously nonpartisan and nonsectarian. Students would receive instruction in the “great essentials of political knowledge,” including the Constitution, the three branches of government and elections, but any and all “political proselytism” would be forbidden.
In terms of religion, Mann affirmed the public school system “earnestly inculcates all Christian morals.” “[The] Bible,” he said, “is in our Common Schools, by common consent.” At the same time, Mann declared schools are not “Theological Seminaries,” nor should they “act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions.” On the dangers of injecting doctrinal disputes into public schools, Mann explained:
This year, the ordinance of baptism is inefficacious without immersion; next year one drop of water will be as good as forty fathoms. … the fiercest party spirit will rage and all the contemplations of heaven be poisoned by the passions of the earth.
Rather than wade into esoteric theological debates, the Common School would convey “universal” religious truths such as “the existence of God, the Creator of all things” and the “immortality of the soul.” Public schools likewise instilled “Christian virtues,” including piety, industry, frugality and temperance. Popular textbooks such as the McGuffey Readers contained nondenominational religious lessons and prayers such as “Creation of the World,” “Praise to God” and “The Lord’s Prayer.” They also featured homespun parables with titles like “An Early Riser,” “Honesty Rewarded” and “Waste Not, Want Not.”
While the U.S. Constitution does not expressly discuss parental rights, the right to protect, raise, and educate your own children has been described as the oldest of our fundamental liberties.
The history and culture of Western civilization embraces a strong tradition of parental rights, and the Supreme Court of these United States has described parental rights as being "established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition." See Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 US 205, 232 (1972).
Parents need to begin to recognize the rights they hold as parents, and make their voices heard. Only then can we hope to turn things around.
Madison Meetup
Interested in learning more about our Constitution and Declaration of Independence? Want to discuss the principles upon which this precious republic was founded? Well you are in luck!
Moms for Liberty Santa Clara is now hosting monthly "Madison Meetup" gatherings on the last Sunday of each month. Meetings take place from 3 to 4:30pm in meeting room at the Bascom branch of the San Jose Public Library, located at 1000 South Bascom Avenue San Jose.
Open to ages 8 years and up. All attendees will be provided with a pocket constitution. Discussion topics will be emailed to those who are signed up one week in advance of the meeting. Please let us know if you'll be attending.
Make James Madison and the other founding fathers proud!
Mann’s lowest-common-denominator approach to religion in public schools may have been informed by his own religious upbringing and his shift away from the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism of his parents to a kinder, gentler Unitarianism. When Mann was fourteen, his older brother Stephen drowned after skipping a Sunday church service to swim in a local pond. The family minister devoted his eulogy to castigating Stephen for profaning the Sabbath, proclaiming that his future life would be one of eternal damnation.
It was harsh, uncompromising views like these that Mann wanted to keep out of public schools. Controversial topics—the “hot and virulent opinions, in politics and religion, that agitate our community,” in his words—were to be avoided at all costs. Mann worried that if “the tempest of political strife were to be let loose upon our Common Schools,” public education would devolve into “gladiatorial contests” among “hostile partisans.” Everything from the election of school board members to the selection of textbooks would be contentious. Town meetings would become tinderboxes, prone to “fierce combustion” with intense, devouring flames. When Mann wrote these words in 1848, he would have already witnessed tremendous upheaval and controversy in public schools across the northeast, including a deadly riot in Philadelphia. He may not have wanted to admit it, but the tempest was already raging.
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This question—why parents and taxpayers should support public schools that teach content that conflicts with their most cherished beliefs—has reverberated across the decades, sometimes registering only as a faint echo and sometimes, such as today, resounding at top volume.
In different times and places, parents and citizens of all backgrounds and political orientations have accused public schools of indoctrinating their children. In the past century, however, white religious conservatives have been the loudest, most well-organized contingent. You can track this conservative culture wars movement from opposition to the teaching of evolution in the 1920s and campaigns against “Un-American” textbooks in the 1950s to crusades against sex education in the 1970s and today’s anti-CRT campaigns.
This rolling conservative backlash to a public education system that supposedly undermines “traditional” values and beliefs has always been informed by a parents-know-best orientation. The architect of the most recent backlash, Christopher Rufo, has cannily framed today’s fight to take back the schools around parents’ rights. At a Forsyth County, Georgia school board meeting last year, one parent testified: “If you have materials that you’re providing where it says if you were born a white male, you were born an oppressor, you are abusing our children.”
Emphatic claims like this are the stock-in-trade for conservative culture warriors, and it is true that grandstanding media personalities, politicians and right-wing activists have manufactured most of the controversy surrounding “critical race theory” in schools over the past year. That’s how you end up with someone filing a complaint about a “Civil Rights Heroes” reading unit in Tennessee, under the auspices of the state’s new anti-CRT law. (The complaint alleges that books about the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruby Bridges cause elementary school students to “hate their country, each other, and/or themselves.”) Indeed, it is tempting to simply dismiss all such concerns as being products of residual ignorance or bigotry; and that is what most of us liberals and progressives have done.
And yet, beyond all of the noise, there is a signal that is worth paying attention to. It pertains to a discomfort with the model of antiracism most closely associated with Ibram Kendi, or what I call Antiracism, Inc. The bible of the Antiracism, Inc. enterprise is Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, a runaway bestseller that has shaped DEI and antiracist initiatives in nonprofits, corporations and schools across the country. From my own research on American educational trends, it is clear that Antiracism, Inc. has been embraced by schools of education and is quickly gaining traction in public K-12 schools through trainings, teacher professional development and the implementation of antiracist curricular materials.
The debate about whether CRT is taught in schools has been maddening—and is ultimately a red herring. Schoolchildren are as likely to know the names of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda as they are to know the names of Earl Warren, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. But many of them will have been introduced to Antiracism, Inc., which is like a cheap, knockoff brand of critical race theory. It’s Antiracism, Inc. that has popularized—and diluted—key CRT concepts such as white privilege and systemic racism. Kendi himself noted that he has “been inspired by critical race theory” and that Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework is “foundational” to his own work.
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Horace Mann got it dreadfully wrong that public schools could somehow avoid getting caught up in partisan politics. In our pluralistic, democratic society, there will always be fierce battles about public schools, from how they are funded to what they teach. But I think Mann was onto something when he stressed that teachers should not act as proselytizers. Students, and here I’m paraphrasing former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, should be encouraged not just to answer every question but also to question every answer. Public education, at its best, gives students the foundation of knowledge and skills to make up their own minds.
Please let us know if you'll be attending. We are trying to get a handle on if there's interest in doing this. Thanks!
Think on this...
A DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE IS THE ONLY GUARDIAN OF TRUE LIBERTY.
- James Madison
ENLIGHTEN THE PEOPLE GENERALLY, AND TYRANNY AND OPPRESSIONS OF BODY AND MIND WILL VANISH LIKE EVIL SPIRITS AT THE DAWN OF THE DAY.
- Thomas Jefferson
IF VIRTUE AND KNOWLEDGE ARE DIFFUSED AMONG THE PEOPLE, THEY WILL NEVER BE ENSLAV'D. THIS WILL BE THEIR GREAT SECURITY.
- Samuel Adams
IT SHOULD BE YOUR CARE, THEREFORE, AND MINE, TO ELEVATE THE MINDS OF OUR CHILDREN AND EXALT THEIR COURAGE; TO ACCELERATE AND ANIMATE THEIR INDUSTRY AND ACTIVITY; TO EXCITE IN THEM AN HABITUAL CONTEMPT OF MEANNESS, ABHORRENCE OF INJUSTICE AND INHUMANITY, AND AN AMBITION TO EXCEL IN EVERY CAPACITY, FACULTY, AND VIRTUE. IF WE SUFFER THEIR MINDS TO GROVEL AND CREEP IN INFANCY, THEY WILL GROVEL ALL THEIR LIVES.
- John Adams
Moms for Liberty Santa Clara County operates as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization.
The organization's primary mission is to organize, educate and empower parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.
