As usual, Americans are distracted by the constant bombardment of news stories that do little more than trap their minds in a frame of thought, while keeping their attention diverted from what is really going on. Even that is an understatement carrying huge implications because there is so much going on behind the scenes, it is hard to determine what the media is distracting you from. For the most part, the media has us focused on the transgender issue, what public schools are teaching our children, and gun control. These issues alone are framed and presented to audiences in a way that dictates how we think about them. Gun control, for example, is contrasted with mental health as conservatives argue that mental illness should be the focus as opposed to banning commonly owned firearms. The reality is taking that position aids in the gun control agenda because mentally ill people aren’t allowed to own firearms. In my article on the topic, I argued that the left may be using the trans issue to attach the term mental illness to an ideology. If they are successful in doing this, mental illness, something that is already an abstract concept, will take on a whole new meaning. Conservatism itself has been dubbed a mental illness by many in the field of psychology because of our alleged, strict adherence to outdated ideas and unwillingness to change. In the end, the goal is to create such a broad definition of the term “a danger to yourself or others” that it will become a socially accepted norm to disarm anyone who doesn’t fit the description of the ideal citizen.

With that being said I can move along to my main point. While we are being distracted, and fighting school boards over sexually perverse curriculums, the agenda steadily moves on. I want to be clear here, parents are one-hundred-percent correct in the efforts to challenge school boards. In that context, they are not distracted, they are paying attention. To what is being intentionally fed to them that is. In the background, the entire school system is being completely redesigned to bring us more of what we are opposing in the first place. It is a classic case of keeping the focus on one area while the real work is being done elsewhere. Last year, and in the early weeks of 2023, I wrote many articles describing why topics like Critical Race Theory can’t be banned in school. I presented the evidence that it was a research model being used to reshape society. While this idea was met with much skepticism because there were massive efforts underway across the country to ban it, the fact is, the research they were doing is contributing to the education reformation agenda known as Learning 2025: An American Imperative. The goal of this program is to fully integrate concepts like social-emotional learning and community-relationship-based education into the classroom so that education can focus on “the social, emotional, cognitive, mental health, and trauma-based needs of ALL learners.” Of course, another purpose of this reform is “confronting and overcoming long-brewing racial, economic, and social injustices and disparities so that we may promote and safeguard healthy civic participation for all.

William Tate, the author of Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education, written in 1994, explicitly stated that CRT was a research model used to frame the direction of research in education to examine the connections between whiteness, property, and inequity in public schools. Well, nearly thirty years to date, our school systems are being reformed, under our very noses, with the explicit purpose of promoting equity and deconstructing white privilege, while people think they can ban it no less, but I digress.  It is important to keep this in mind because the authors of the Learning 2025 document say their vision for reformation is driven by their, wait for it, research. Along with the research of others. It is safe to assume that any research by conservative academics was not included in this proposal. Twenty years after Tate’s essay was written another paper was published entitled Where Are We? Critical Race Theory in Education Twenty Years Later. In this paper, the idea of CRT being used to examine social inequities, particularly concerning the idea of whiteness being connected to property ownership is discussed. If you know anything about Marxism at all, you know the agenda is to completely abolish private property. The point here is that the research of these race baiting scholars cannot be discredited or ignored, it is the work being examined to guide social policy and the overall direction of the country.

What other research might these people have turned to? John Dewey, without a doubt. Known as the father of modern education, Dewey was instrumental in creating our public school system from the perspective that education should be creating citizens that one, serve a basic social need and two, share common social values. Individualism is detrimental to social cohesion because we all live in a shared social environment. Dewy shared a common belief with B.F. Skinner that acceptable behaviors could be created and maintained by the approval/disapproval of the community at large. Operant conditioning has been used in public schools since the 1960s, and it has been gradually shaping the behaviors and attitudes of Americans to bring us to where we are today. One of the bigger takeaways from Dewey is that he said education should strive to eliminate social values that are deemed undesirable to society as a whole. Looking at things from a CRT perspective, it is safe to say that whiteness and property ownership are now undesirable values. Education, from Dewey’s standpoint, was something that should evolve with the needs of the social environment. He wrote in Democracy and Education, the only way education can be a tool for individual growth and the advancement of knowledge is when the society itself, has reached a point of distributed equity. What does this mean? In the simplest term, Learning 2025 is the culmination of this idea. Dewey wrote that the only this was possible was through a democratic society, meaning a Democracy. America was not founded as a democracy but as a Democratic Republic. So, the end goal of education is to create students who have a mindset conducive to the acceptance of a social democracy based on shared social values as opposed to individual goals.

It has been my contention, and I have expressed this many times in my writing, that conservatives are way behind the curve on this. The authors of the Learning 2025 document state that educators, and school superintendents, must take the lead responsibility in implementing this change. This is the problem. Who are the school superintendents? Trump voters? Constitutional conservatives who want to teach the importance of our second amendment to the children? Nope. They are radical leftists, trained as social change agents who have worked themselves into these positions so that they can change it from within. I remember back in 2012 when I was in the NSU social work program. The one where they said my opposition to white privilege made me unfit to be in the field. We had a textbook on institutional change and it literally said change agents needed to infiltrate and reeducate so that society can be remade in their image. This is what they have been doing for decades. No thinking conservative reading this could possibly argue that the left doesn’t have us beat hands down when it comes to organizing. They have a vision, they are united, and they are succeeding. It doesn’t matter what little victories we think we are winning here and there. If this education agenda becomes the new model, the left will have dominion over the minds of your children’s children for decades to come.

When writing an article, the common practice is to describe the problem and offer a solution. The problem is that the solution most people want to read is one that doesn’t require them to do any work. Unfortunately, in this situation, the solution is long past us. They control education hands down, and they know it. I have argued before that one possible route is for conservatives to abandon their traditional view of the American dream and become social change agents themselves. This would require that we become the teachers, psychologists, social workers, and school administrators. That is a long haul that could only be implemented in the same manner the left achieved their goals. Incrementally. Like in many other instances, that idea was met with great resistance. Across the nation, people in college education programs are being denied their chance to progress, as I was, because their conservative views are being held against them. Another possible solution is to refuse to send your kids to public schools. Some people believe charter schools are the answer, however, these curriculums are still dictated by the government as charter schools are taking public money. To be honest, I don’t have a solution and I think people would be pretty hard-pressed to come up with one that doesn’t fit some cherry-cutter worldview of how conservatives think things should work. It is easy to write things that make people feel good. Just tell them what they want to hear and make them feel like everything is normal. It is difficult to break people away from their perceived norms. This agenda will not be stopped by protesting school board meetings. So far, the biggest thing that has been accomplished is having the Department of Justice classify protesting parents as potential terrorists. Such is the way, I suppose. Truthfully, electing Trump or Desantis won’t stop it either. This is all part of the Great Reset agenda and I have to be honest, I don’t see many people whose responsibility is to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States trying to stop it. We will see though. If a conservative wins in 2024, we will have to watch them closely to see what they do about this. If anything.

Article posted with permission from David Risselada