Education and Schools

Introduction

Many of you have seen homework or head discussions among students or even had discussions with your kids on what happened at school today or last week. That's a good thing as every parent should be involved with what is going on at the local education level.

However, some of those conversations can get into areas where you're wondering where that topic came from and why it's being discussed in a classroom of educational learning. Whether it be social issues that push limits of historical events that are questionable at best, it's up to us to keep watch over what our kids are learning. It takes extra time out of our busy schedules to do this, but our kids are in school 8 hours a day during the school year. It's a very large portion of forming their mentality for the rest of their life. Below are some explanations and resources you can keep in mind.

School Board Officials

This is an amazingly important role, although most of the time fairly mundain. The school board members approve curriculum and many of the policies implemented at the local level. They are also in charge of hiring or approving hiring of important positions.

Critical Race Theory or "CRT"

To summarize, this is the "theory" that we have systematic racisism and everything throughout our daily life is racist. It's become very popular over the past couple years with things like the "1619 project" which distort history to fit a very specific narrative.

It's very easy for things like this to slip into classrooms and become part of the normal education courses. All it take is one history teacher to latch onto this topic and promote it.
Now history is very important and we should all study it and be aware of all the good and bad things that happened. However, when it becomes so focused on one topic and anti any group, race, religion ect.. that should be concerning. CRT has slipped into many areas of our lives whether we know it or not.

CRT is more related to marxism than you may think. The Heritage Foundation has and article here for bit of discussion, but dont' stop there, make sure you understand the topic and go further. There are many aspects of this topic to learn about.

As with many things there is a lot of disinformation about the project. So please review, research and understand all view points before making informed decisions and opinions.

Civics and education

Civics - The study of rights and duties of citizenship.
- When is the last time you have a dinner conversation or talk with your student about civics? Most likely you haven't as it's not exactly taught anymore.
- Civics is very important as it give the citizen and understanding of how their government works, what rights they have and how to defend them. It's no wonder why it's taken a back seat over the past few decades. \
- Several states have now made it a requirement to pass a civics test to graduate. Maybe that's one things we should shoot for. If our kids are to graduate school we paid for, get a job and pay taxes, they should be able to understand where their taxes are going and what they are for.
- Here is more about the National Association of Scholars toolkit on Civics.

1776 Project

Former President Trump started the 1776 project in a direct response to the 1619 project.

As with many things there is a lot of disinformation about the project. So please review, research and understand all view points before making informed decisions and opinions.

Here is a link to the actual project website itself.