Student protesters. Photo credit: Washington Post
by James A. Bacon
If you doubt that progressive public school systems are politicizing education, consider this: Beginning next year, Fairfax County Public Schools will allow 7th- to 12th-grade students to take off one day per year to participate in “civic engagement activities” — including marches, sit-ins, protests, or trips to lobby legislators.
“I think we’re setting the stage for the rest of the nation with this,” Ryan McElveen, the Fairfax County School Board member who introduced the measure, told the Washington Post. “It’s a dawning of a new day in student activism, and school systems everywhere are going to have to be responsive to it.”
No, Mr. McElveen, school systems have no obligation to be “responsive” to left-wing activism. They have an obligation to be “responsive” to students who go to school to get an education. Students should be free to discuss liberal-left preoccupations such as social justice and climate change in class or debate clubs. But schools have no business sanctioning the skipping of class in furtherance of political action.
It goes without saying that Fairfax schools would not be granting the day off droves of students were skipping school to attend gun-sanctuary rallies or anti-abortion protests. The measure is designed to empower the Liberal/Left.
As Thai Jones, a Columbia University lecturer, tells the WaPo, most major student-led movements today promote left-leaning causes. “People who call themselves conservatives probably do still count respecting authority — staying in school — as a crucial and central tenet of the social order.”
“Kids on the right who are active, they tend to be doing it by preparing to run for school board, or being aides in legislature,” said Levinson, a Harvard University professor. In researching her book on educational ethics, she added, “I kept looking for examples of students protesting on the right, and it’s very, very hard to find.”
What’s the big deal, you might ask. If this measure were the only thing happening in public schools, it might not be a big deal. But it has to be viewed in a larger context in which certain school systems are becoming politicized in ways large and small that favor the Liberal/Left. It’s one more step in the long march of transforming schools from centers of learning into political indoctrination camps.
