The Holiday Tango

The Holiday Tango

The Evacuation of Public Education

I am a recipient of 12 1/2 years of public education (when I was young kindergarten met only half days. In those days kindergarten was seen as a transition year, allowing children to adjust from life at home into their years as students. Today many kids are in school full time starting at age three. Some call this Head Start. Some call it Head Block. 

Public school has long had its critics. Paul Simon wrote in a song: “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school; it’s a wonder I can think at all”. Public school was losing its soul in the 60s, but today it has become a kind of zombie land. It’s not that kids are not learning—kids will learn—but what they are learning is factoids and fictions. 

I recently attended several Christmas/Winter Season concerts in which my seven grandchildren participated. Those presentations served as windows to the dogmas of the respective school systems our kids are in: Roman Catholic, Reformed Episcopalian, and public. There’s something to object to no matter which way you look, but it is only the dogma of the public schools that I find terrifying.

The public grade school presented five musical numbers. One number was choreography (mostly hand motions) set to music. The other four numbers were songs about the following four subjects: mittens, snowflakes, a snowman, and snow pants. Was this intended as a kind of irony? After all, with global warming, snow is becoming an uncommon event in our lives. But, no, I don’t think the school was sending a message about the environment. What the school was saying was that, even though Christmas is the most celebrated holiday of the year, throughout the world, in the U.S. our public institutions have become afraid and/or are determined not to mention it. During the Christmas season, when I visited various public businesses, most of them had a Christmas track playing. Most of the songs were familiar, innocuous ditties, but the businesses weren’t shy about including genuine Christmas songs, such as O Holy Night. It takes a government bureaucracy to remove references to the soul of Western civilization from its educational design.   

I also attended a middle school concert from the same public school district. Interestingly, there were three songs from Judaism, two of which were about Hanukkah. These songs at least suggested that humans have purpose, moral agency, and connection to a higher being. It’s odd that Jewish songs are permitted in public schools, though. My guess is that, due to recent Palestinian atrocities in Israel, combined with perplexing anti-Jewish protests in the U.S., the school district felt the need to show support for the Jewish community. (We’ll check in next year to see whether Judaism, too, gets the Ban.) 

The other songs presented at the concert were as follows: The Holiday Tango (a song that glories in the rush of holiday shopping); Be a Candle of Hope (a saccharin bit about speaking truth in order to generate love); Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree (about partying); Carol of the Snow (joy of snow play); A Holly Jolly Christmas (be happy); Sleigh Ride (joy of sleigh rides); and Holiday Road (written by Fleetwood Mac member, Lindsey Buckingham which, however infectious as a tune, is intellectually vacuous: 

I found out long ago

It’s a long way down the Holiday Road

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

Take a ride on a West Coast kick).

These songs represent the profound decline of public education in the United States. I understand that this sounds like hyperbole. People will counter that these are kids are singing happy, harmless songs. But the songs aren’t harmless. Education ought not to be the emptying of heads. This is an education that teaches children that good is what feels good. It teaches children to value the cute, the sentimental, and the superficial. By avoiding spiritual realities it teaches children that there are no spiritual realities.

Every half year or so, in America and in the shrinking world community, because of the slow erasure of guiding principles for human behavior, a new idea bullies its way into the public eye that becomes the moral watershed for distinguishing black from white, or red from blue, or green from brown. Be on the lookout for the next color-code invasion. Woe to anyone who finds himself or herself on the “wrong” side of the watershed. This pattern may seem to conflict with the moral theme of inclusivity, but inclusivity is brushed aside for watershed offenders. 

Public education possesses no real tools that can help children distinguish right from wrong. Consequently, their moral frameworks are formed on the basis of volume rather than content. By volume, I mean both the quantity of propaganda and the loudness with which it is presented. By loudness I mean the emotional expression which, in recent years has mostly been about victimhood. Truth in America is no longer thought of as something with absolute foundations—it is seen as the fruits of political wrangling. The truth trends through propaganda, overwhelms the opposition, seizes the majority, and seizes power. Truth is the loudest voice. 

Public education in the United States has come to mean the emptying of the American mind. The new motto is, “What you say is of little concern, but it’s important to say it well.” We’re becoming a land of politicians, spin doctors, and snake oil salesmen.

The most serious problem with public education is its failure to understand how Church and State are to be separate. The Constitution rightly says that the government should not require individuals to support or conform to religions against their will. So, yes, public schools should not be promoting particular denominations or particular religions. The logical misstep has been to interpret this to mean that religious thought should be removed from the public schools. First of all, this is impossible. Religion will be taught. The only question is, which religion. The covert religion the State is force-feeding children is scientific materialism, which says there is no meaning in the universe.

Ironically, public schools push behaviors on children as much as any rigid, knuckle-cracking Catholic school. “Be strong. Be caring. Be respectful. Be quiet. Be attentive. Be embracing,” on and on, ad nauseam. It’s not terrible that schools are trying to instill basic behavioral norms; it’s impossible to function without them. The problem is the disconnect between being an accident of a meaningless universe and being a person bound to tomes of moral regulation. It tends to work on young children, and many adults give into the incongruity, simply because it’s impractical to do otherwise. The problem comes when teenagers and other thoughtful beings begin to think about these things and they recognize how they are being manipulated and lied to. This (and not feeling loved) lead to teenage rebellion. And well it should. It’s good to see the struggle  against hypocrisy.

There has been much talk in recent years about the phenomenon called “cancel culture”. This is not really a movement of the radical Left; it is more of a consequence of center-Left ideology, which has been hollowing out the public school system for decades. Over those decades there has been a dramatic shift from uncritical praise of American history to a view where only the negatives in American history are given any attention. 

Our culture has come to a place where grace itself has been cancelled. It is one thing to be unwilling to forgive those who in the past abused native Americans and enslaved American blacks. (Even as there is little attention given to native American inter-tribal abuse and, similarly, the critical part that blacks in Africa played in the slave trade that brought 470,000 blacks to America.) It is quite another to be unwilling to forgive people for sins they did not commit, but were committed by their forebears. Or by people who look like their forebears. 

There has been an astonishing lack of recognition of the harms caused to children by the present trend-driven moral model. The garbage coming from it, such as the idea that victimhood justifies compensatory discrimination, has only lead to a race to victimhood. Children are being taught to blame, while the concept of responsibility has been forgotten. 

There has also been an amazing fairy-tale acceptance of the idea of a self-made universe, at the center of which is the self-made humanity. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Psalm 19.1. Humans know, too, from the tips of our fingers, to the rangings of our eyes, to the observations of our ears, and to the depths of our souls, that the heavens are quite right. It has always been difficult to admit that we are beholden to a Being greater than ourselves, who would routinely call for life-choice modifications. But we now have an institutionalized education that actively absolves humanity of the inconvenient Truth of God. 

The best prescription for the disease we like to call public education is a comprehensive system of vouchers. All schools will improve when they understand they must please parents in order to receive students. This is not to say that parents are all-wise, but average Americans have much greater and more appropriate interests in their children’s welfare than politicians who are manipulated by special interest groups. And, more to the point, in order for there to be a true separation of Church and State, people must have the right to have their children educated in keeping with their own consciences, not a worldview (religion) cobbled together and dictated by a pluralistic bureaucracy.

In the meantime, public schools need to stop the intellectual censorship of its students. Go ahead, expose kids to Islam, Hinduism, Communism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, atheism, and scientific materialism. Education must confront meaning or it’s merely training factory workers (whether that means working in an actual factory or as the President of the United States). Schools should be pressing students toward thinking, which is not what the public school system does today.

I’m sure most public education teachers desire to help students mature and become high-functioning citizens. I think many have become exhausted and cynical about how many public schools are fundamentally childcare institutions, though. That such institutions do more to prepare children for lives of crime than lead them from it is a sad fact. 

But even the high-functioning public schools are failing to educate children in the area of education that is most important for human development. That area has to do with the question of what it means to be human. The essence of being human has become the taboo of public education. Education in America has become a matter of avoiding discussions about what matters most. It has become an exercise in the evacuation of the American mind. We are all paying the price of this evacuation, but the young are paying the greatest price.