[UPDATE (July 16): The new chair of the Texas State Board of Education is not Cynthia Dunbar, but another socially conservative member, Gail Lowe. Texas commentators say Lowe's appointment will continue the anti-evolution, Reconstructionist bias of the board. The scary details are here.]
JISHOU, HUNAN — After doing some research, I have concluded that Texas is just plain wacko. Perhaps some of you are not surprised at this news.
Back in April, I wrote about the Texas State Board of Education’s efforts to weasel creationist ideas into the state science curriculum. Despite efforts by its overtly right-wing Christian chair, Donald McLeroy, and his cohorts on the board, most of the creationist ideas were tossed out.
Since then, McLeroy’s heavyhanded tactics and nutball pronouncements about evolution and science cost him a lot of the support he had in the state legislature. He lost the chair of the SBOE.
Republican Gov. Rick Perry now has to choose a new chair from the other board members. The leading candidate now is apparently Cynthia Dunbar, who may be even nuttier than McLeroy.
Dunbar has accused — in print — presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of being a terrorist, and then refused to retract her statement. And even weirder, she opposes the very existence of secular public schools and home schools her own two kids.
She is on the Texas State Board of Education.
From the Houston Chronicle:
Dunbar didn’t trust the very public schools she helps oversee with her own children; she home-schooled. And, in her recent book, One Nation Under God: How the Left is Trying to Erase What Made Us Great, calls the public education system a tyrannical, unconstitutional “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”
In my last post on the Texas SBOE, I discussed the undue influence Texas has on the textbook market. Texas adopts new texts en masse for all its schools, so its regular order of millions of textbooks essentially forces publishers to cater to Texas’ whims.
Now I see the problem with the Texas SBOE goes even deeper. We can use Dunbar as an example.
In rejecting the legitimacy of the public schools, Dunbar is parroting one of the beliefs of a far-right-wing brand of Christianity called Reconstructionism, of which she may well be a member.
Reconstructionists want to reconstruct the American political and legal system along Biblical (mostly Old Testament) lines. They believe that the founders of the United States originally wanted it to be a “Christian nation,” but later secular humanist and Masonic influences corrupted their vision. Educator John Dewey to them is one such evildoer; his progressive educational philosophy introduced moral relativism and weakened students’ grasp of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Furthermore, Reconstructionists see secular, pluralistic public schools as a major obstacle to their goal of a Christian theocracy. So, they attack the public school system, while simultaneously pulling their children out to teach them at home or in church-related schools.
Gary North is a leader in the Reconstructionist movement.
Still, it is in the next generation that most Reconstructionists hope to seize the future. “All long-term social change,” declares Gary North, “comes from the successful efforts of one or another struggling organizations to capture the minds of a hard core of future leaders, as well as the respect of a wider population.” The key to this, they believe, lies with the Christian school and the home schooling movement, both deeply influenced by Reconstructionism.
Unsurprisingly, Reconstructionists seek to abolish public schools, which they see as a critical component in the promotion of a secular world view. It is this secular world view with which they declare themselves to be at war. “Until the vast majority of Christians pull their children out of the public schools,” writes Gary North, “there will be no possibility of creating a theocratic republic.” [From Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence, by Frederick Clarkson, www.publiceye.org, 1994]
While not openly a Reconstructionist, televangelist Pat Robertson shares their philosophy and many of their goals. His Regents University has many Reconstructionist books in its library, and its courses apparently skew toward the Reconstructionist worldview.
Dunbar has a law degree from the Regents University School of Law. So, it’s pretty easy to see where she gets some of her nuttier ideas.
In my graduate school days, I took a course on the history of American education. The gist of the course was that a properly functioning democracy requires first a well-educated, literate public and second, a public that shares the same knowledge about the history and political philosophy of the nation. The public schools serve both purposes, and also enculturate each new wave of immigrants into being “Americans.”
Now, if you adhere to a moderate (and logical) worldview, the role that the schools have in molding each new generation into being “Americans” should be seen as a good thing. We have to have common ground on which to base our debates about national laws, policies, goals and aspirations, especially if our populace comes from all over the globe.
On the other hand, if you are one who believes in conspiracies, distrusts government “control,” and already has a theocratic vision for the nation, the public schools can be the enemy. Wingers need only look to the national educational systems of autocratic governments for proof of the power of mandated curricula.
Part of the Reconstructionist game plan is to put wackos like McLeroy and Dunbar in positions of influence. Another part of the plan is to inculcate the Reconstructionist worldview into the minds of younger Christians, from kindergarten to higher education, and then let the new generation carry on the war.
There was a time when I was sympathetic to home schoolers. Most of the parents I knew who home schooled their kids were primarily liberal in outlook, and who wanted a better education for their kids than was offered by local public schools, without shelling out tons of money for private schools.
But my little circle of home schoolers were in the minority. Most parents educating their kids at home have a religious agenda. The materials they use — and there are tons — are hopelessly biased toward conservative Christian beliefs and traditional pedagogy. They push creationism over evolution and cosmology; and tell lies about the founding principles of the nation.
Most of those ideas are parroted almost daily by right wing radio talk show hosts. They are all cut from the same cloth.
Clarkson, in the 1994 article I cited above, estimated there were perhaps 100,000 home schooled Christian children. That number is probably higher now.
The public school system may be flawed, and parents certainly have the right to have their kids well educated. But the idea that there is a sizable cadre of learners who are not receiving even remotely similar information as their peers in the public schools should worry us all.
I am worried. Thanks, John, it's a wacky world ou there!
Unfortunately, the companies that print textbooks know that Texas buys a lot of their product, so they listen to what their customers say. People who are objective know even a textbook, is just a subjective view of the subject,
That a functioning democracy requires, first, a well-educated, literate public and, second, a public that shares the same knowledge about the history and political philosophy of the nation is the basic thinking of any statist, when public schools are to serve as the chief means to achieve this homogeneity of thinking.
It’s no wonder there are parents and organization already determined to abolish public schools by opting out from compulsory education.
It’s an effective way to fight tyranny, particularly the tyranny of the majority.
Excuse me? You need to read up on some history. One of those “statists” who favored public education was Thomas Jefferson. George Washington also recognized the need for a well educated public. Read his farewell address.
So, by your argument, both these Founding Fathers favored tyranny.
In fact, the Founders recognized the dangers that a “tyranny of the majority” would present to a representative democracy, and built safeguards (“checks and balances”) to prevent it. The USA is also a republic, in which the person who gets the most votes wins the race … and governs everyone.
Moving on, each school district in the USA is supervised by an elected school board. These people have to run for office. If you don’t like your local school’s policies, vote for someone else, or run for a post yourself. You don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Compulsory education means everyone has to go to school. State education law do not require everyone to attend public school; they just have to attend school. That school can be in their home, in a church school, or a private school, or even in a different state. So, how is this tyrannical?
Abolishing public schools is the dumbest damn idea I have ever heard. You would sentence a majority of the schoolchildren in this country to no education at all. Contrary to what you believe, an uneducated public paves the road to tyranny.
If you want to see a real tyranny of public education, read up on North Korea. Your imaginary “tyranny of the majority” here in the US is but a shadow of a ghost of a figment compared to the real thing.
I don’t deify humans. Jefferson and Washington had character, unlike so many charlatans today in public “service”. But their recognition of the importance of a good education does not imply their support of the State-centric system of coercion that is in place in our nation, that forces the young and the ignorant to lap up all the pablum that passes for “good” teaching in the bureaucrat-infested concentration camps that we call public schools today.
These Founding Fathers encouraged liberty and personal responsibility. You explain to me how that squares with the State dictating universally that all children must receive the kind of education that the State mandates under penalty of removing the child from the home, if the parents refuse to comply.
As to democracy, I’m not into that kind of religion either. I believe in representative government, yes, which is why I support a republican form of government and a democratic process for the selection of representatives. But that’s as far as it goes. I’m not interested in collectivist methods for getting things done. Open collaboration does not require majority ruling. That is to say, Liberty does not require Democracy.
You say the U.S. is a republic? Really? Is that why you refer to it as a democracy first and foremost?
Each school district in the USA is supervised by bureaucrats attached to the state tit for their milk, for the lion’s share of funds comes from the states’ capitals, which means that lobbyists such as teachers unions control the dynamics of the game as pure centralists that they are. They make a whole career of it “for the children”. It’s a naivete of the worst kind to assume that voters will kick the rascals out, when the very same voters have been brainwashed all their lives for generations by the same bunch of bozos to look up to them for enlightenment.
But if you believe in democracy and its ability to change this corruption of its own making…be my guest! Ha!
The baby is a rag doll. So dump it and the water! It’s the only way.
Who is the State to compel all parents to instruct their own children? The State is not a person nor can it love the children better than the parents. The State is a collectivist means by which the elite control the people, using the people’s own weakness to control them. It’s job is small: enforce justice. But it takes on more and more because it loves to grow and be a god walking on earth.
Since you think like a typical statist, you believe that only the State could do a better job than the parents at caring for children that do not belong to it. You suffer from the same arrogance that all so-called educated elitist suffer from, which attempt to arrogate to themselves divinity-like powers to change the life of others who you could care less about, since you don’t even know them all at a personal level nor ever will.
That’s why you can dare say with a straight face that the abolition of government schools would “sentence a majority of the schoolchildren in this country to no education at all.” You don’t understand parental love and responsibility. You only understand State worship.
Get the State off our backs and we will have the means to hire better teachers than those who don’t even know how to compete for their dough, because they’re dependent on tax revenues extorted from working families to pay for their incompetent performance year in, year out.
Tyranny takes many forms. North Korea’s totalitarianism is of the old-fashion kind. But America’s is “fascism with a smile”. Yet it’s still the same thing underneath the facade: State-driven coercion to force the people to adopt beliefs that will keep the State in power at the expense of the little guy.
Joey, your latest remarks deserve more than a few retorts in a comment box, so I am moving this discussion onto a new post. It may allow for a wider discussion among my readers. I hope.
i was home schooled too but i would still prefer regular schools.~:-