We Lost America in the Classroom, Before We Lost Her in the Voting Booth

by Chris Banescu –
As conservatives try to make sense of the disastrous results of the 2012 presidential elections, many pundits have begun to reflect on the reasons why the voters rejected Mitt Romney and re-elected Barack Obama instead. Despite Obama’s destructive socialist policies, abysmal economic record, failure to keep many of his promises, and brazen assault on our Constitutionally-protected rights, the majority of the electorate still supported him. How did this happen?

Some point to the impact of hurricane Sandy, America’s changing demographics, Romney’s message and campaign strategy, the biased mainstream media, or the voting irregularities and fraud seen in many areas of the country. While each of these factors may have contributed to the problem, I believe something else played a much bigger part in this catastrophe. It is America’s public education system that is largely to blame. Besides the reality that America has turned away from God and has progressively embraced immorality, our corrupt educational machine has been working overtime to insure the decline and radicalization of our republic.

The socialist teachers’ unions now dominate all aspects of public education and have transformed our schools and universities into virtual leftist indoctrination centers for America’s children and college students. In the last several decades the leftist influence in public education has expanded unimpeded and mostly unchallenged. “Marxist intellectuals realized decades ago that the eventual victory of socialism would be assured if leftists dominated the educational system and used their influence to push a leftist worldview,” writes Timothy C. Daughtry on American Thinker.

The Marxist intellectual elites achieved their goal many years ago. Socialists and communists teachers now have full control of our public education system. With guaranteed lifetime employment, taxpayer-funded and government guaranteed salaries and benefits, and with the full backing and protection of their powerful unions and compliant politicians, the left has successfully indoctrinated multiple generations of American students into rejecting America’s founding principles and adopting and embracing a leftist world-view.

Millions of these students have now become voters who are loyal and unquestioning supporters of Obama and passionate believers in his leftist ideology. They will not be swayed by appeals to Constitutional principles or pro-liberty and pro-free enterprise arguments, no matter how logical, truthful, and well reasoned they are.

Unless and until America challenges the dominance of the socialist teachers unions, restores balance in our classrooms, and gives parents full control over their children’s education, little will change in the makeup of our electorate. Without shutting down the communist indoctrination machines in our schools we don’t stand a chance to save America from the encroaching tyranny that will ultimately collapse our free-market economy, destroy our Constitutional democracy, and enslave current and future generations.

For all our sakes I hope it’s not too late. It appears the tipping point has already been crossed.

Why We Lost the Republic
by Timothy C. Daughtry
…

Surely an educated and informed electorate would recognize and reject liberal bias in the media and would never allow our government to be turned into little more than a vending machine that dispenses favors in return for votes. Educated and informed voters would see through the hollow, sweet rhetoric of the left to the tyrannical core just beneath the surface. And there is the painful answer to how so many citizens of a republic just voted to become subjects of a government.

Conservatives have long bemoaned liberal dominance in education from the universities on down, but we haven’t done anything about it. Marxist intellectuals realized decades ago that the eventual victory of socialism would be assured if leftists dominated the educational system and used their influence to push a leftist worldview. The power of their “long march” through the cultural institutions was that it was not necessary for students to consciously convert to socialist thinking; generation after generation would simply be gradually immersed in the assumptions and dogmas of the left.

Now, after years of patient effort, the teachers’ unions have turned America’s schools into a wholly owned subsidiary of the political left. Conservatives have complained when reports surfaced about students being taught to sing hymns of praise to Obama, or when conservative students were harassed in class, or when examples of blatant liberal bias in textbooks came to light, but somehow we allowed ourselves to write off public schools as a lost cause. Homeschooling and private schools gave some relief, but the idea of getting public schools to transmit a love of liberty and appreciation for free enterprise seemed hopeless.

Besides, conservatives did win occasional victories at the polls, so the republic that our founders left us still seemed capable of self-correction. But even when conservatives won elections, the people who lost those elections taught our children the next day. Our children learned that Reagan’s tax cuts increased the deficit, but they never heard that those tax cuts stimulated the economy and doubled revenue. The idea that those deficits came from excessive spending was not even on the table.

So even if it had been Romney taking the oath of office in January, our children would have learned about his policies from the people who voted against those policies. Our children — and our future voters — would have heard the shallow mantras of “tax cuts for the rich” and paying for bombs instead of schools, and many would have absorbed the rhetoric without questioning it.

As long as the left has controlled the schools, time has always been on their side. We lost the Republic in the classroom long before we lost it in the voting booth.

HT: American Thinker