As many parents are becoming aware, schools are no longer a trusted place to send your children, and the worldview presented now no longer likely matches that of the parents. This is evident by two bills that just passed the Texas Legislature.
The first bill is Senate Bill 3, which bans the teaching of critical race theory in Texas public schools. As most people are becoming aware, there is a political agenda by the progressive left to create victims and oppressors and intentionally teach children that they are automatically in one of these two categories by virtue of their skin color. Because this has been taught in our universities, young teachers in the classroom now convey this secular worldview both consciously and unconsciously. CRT is also now in many online curriculums. Since parents are not in the classrooms—nor do they have easy access to online curriculums—there has been a lag in public awareness. However, since many children spent part of the last year learning online from home, people are now seeing the harmful effects.
One bill banning CRT passed in the regular session, but it was limited in scope, so another bill has now been passed. This bill, SB 3, does ban CRT in all subjects. It does not have the parental transparency we had hoped for, and there are a couple of minor loopholes that will need to be addressed; however, the bill gives parents a foundation on which to insist overt critical race theory be eliminated from education.
The other bill passed in the special session is SB 9. This bill adds instruction in prevention of child abuse, family violence, dating violence, and sex trafficking to “appropriate grade levels.”
This sounds like a nice idea on the surface, especially since Texas is one of the largest hubs in the United States for human trafficking, but here is the problem with Senate Bill 9 and other similar bills:
When did it become the job of the public education system to add in topics to education other than academics? This has actually been happening slowly over the past couple of decades, but it has begun in earnest in the last five years, since our Texas Legislature passed bills to set in place an infrastructure providing for mental health assessment and treatment in our public schools. Moreover, since the advent of Social Emotional Learning theory (which advocates adding emphases on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in addition to traditional academic subjects like reading and math), teachers are now assessing students in emotional and mental functioning and directing them in the state’s chosen values and behaviors.
But here is the huge problem now on our hands. Children in the United States, and Texas, are now rapidly declining in academic ability. Mental health issues are rising rapidly, as is the suicide rate in children. This was occurring before COVID hit, but it has escalated in this last year. As our society is becoming more unstable, children are unable to cope or think or learn. This is not an accident.
The goal of the socialist progressive left is to break down our society. A primary way is to target the most vulnerable: children. As they grow up, they will be much easier to control. A prime example of this is what is playing out now in Australia. The people there are losing most of their rights, and the latest attack is the implementation of a social credit system and government tracking apps on citizens’ phones. Young people—having been robbed of a clear understanding of their inalienable rights, given by God—are accepting servitude.
All of the major online curriculums that would meet the requirements of SB 9 are taught through a social justice lens, which includes the normalization of LGBTQ. They affirm the gender ideology that supports confusion and gender dysphoria. Part of the mental health decline we are seeing in children is caused by forcing a depraved, inaccurate “reality” on kids where they are asked to choose their own pronouns. We are seeing evidence that this is happening in many school districts nationwide, including Texas.
As Texas Republicans, it is time to take a radically different approach to education. We must figure out a way to return to sanity, support the authority of parents, and get the school system out of the role of the parent and back to teaching only academics. This experiment on our children is going horribly wrong, and we must course correct. Let’s begin a serious discussion with our state legislators about fixing the system.
This is a commentary published with the author’s permission. If you wish to submit a commentary to Texas Scorecard, please submit your article to submission@texasscorecard.com.
