"Social Justice" Rules Our Schools

Cool mornings in August, the smells they bring, and the chirping of crickets during the day all remind me September is very near. Automatically and unbidden come the familiar, bittersweet feelings of another school year approaching. They waft over me for a second or two before I remember that my life is no longer controlled the school calendar. I’m free of it. I’m detached. I’m liberated and I like it, especially when I see many of the trends that drove me out of public education accelerating.

Seattle public schools are implanting IUDs (Intra-uterine devices) in girls as young as sixth grade. That’s shocking enough, but what’s worse is they’re doing it without parental permission! I retired from public school only four years ago, but when I read stories like this it seems like a century. We used to get memos warning us that students may not take a Tylenol without written permission from parents, but now the school can implant a birth control device in an eleven or twelve-year-old girl’s uterus without her parents even knowing about it? What’s going on?

Left wing sites like salon.com hail the practice as liberating and do not mention that it’s done without parental knowledge or permission. To read their article, it’s all good and exciting. Salon quotes Katie Acker, a health educator at one Seattle school: “It’s absolutely amazing and crazy. The birth control culture, for lack of a better term, and the conversations have just changed so much … conversations are just happening so openly and so excitedly. There’s so much pride around, ‘I’ve got this method, I’ve got this method [say students to each other].’ It’s not a hush-hush thing anymore.”

Katie Acker

Isn’t that wonderful? I agree with Acker when she say’s “It’s absolutely amazing and crazy.” After that, she loses me. At one point Acker described how excited she was when the whole girl’s gymnastic team gathered around as an IUD was implanted in the uterus of one of their teammates. Clearly, Acker sees sex between middle schoolers and teenagers as wonderful. Investigating her profile in the King County School System, I can see nothing about cautioning her students to avoid sex until they were older. I suspect she’d look at me blankly if I suggested students might wait until marriage for sexual activity. She especially recommends a site called “Bedsider” for her students. Browsing it, I found lots of suggestions for how girls could overcome inhibitions and enjoy themselves.

Parents, probably born way back in in the regressive 20th century, are seen as obstacles to an enlightened 21st century “progressive” lifestyle. Conservative sites pointed out that students in Seattle Schools could not buy a can of Coca Cola in school, but they could have IUDs and hormonal implants inserted into their bodies. How do they reconcile this? Is there no reaction from parents in Washington? Has leftist Kool Aid been added to the water supply up there? Has the left become so dominant that conservative parents have been intimidated into silence?

Teachers’ unions endorse all this. Public school “health” classes in California elementary schools encourage students to ask themselves how they know whether they’re male or female. The Los Angeles Times reports that: “Starting this fall, students applying to the University of California will have the option to choose among six gender identities listed on undergraduate admissions forms: male, female, trans male, trans female, gender queer/gender non-conforming and different identity.” Who is behind this? Former Obama Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano who is now president of the University of California system.

Clearly our public schools, elementary, secondary, and post-secondary see themselves as agents of social change. Sixties radical terrorist and Obama good buddy Bill Ayers, for example, became an education professor at the University of Illinois where he instructed public school teachers that their primary mission as teachers was to bring about social change — not instructing students in reading, writing and arithmetic. Ayers was not alone up there in Illinois. He’s representative of an enormous trend in public education across the United States. What is “social change” in their minds? Again, Janet Napolitano is instructing her professors not to say things like: “America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” These, according to thecollegefix.com, are considered “microaggressions” and indicative of subconscious racism in anyone who may utter them.

Other examples of “microaggressive" speech at the University of California include “America is a melting pot” and “Affirmative Action is racist.” All of these “microaggressions” are phrases I used regularly when I taught US History, along with “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.” Clearly, neither I nor anybody who thinks like me, is suitable to teach in our brave new schools anymore. It feels good to be out.