CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSATIONS
What’s Old is New Again
by
M. E. Boyd, Esq., “Miss Constitution”
America started educating its young children officially (1642) within one generation of surviving the famine and disease that killed most of the early colonists. The purpose of this education was to assure that children could read, write, and do basic sums within the context of a developing moral core. That concept lasted until the 1960s. Within public schools today, many of our children cannot read, cannot write, cannot think, and are unfamiliar with what constitutes “right” and “wrong.”
The Supreme Court, as it does in all eras, exists in the culture of the times, although it is the one institution in the American system that is theoretically to remain outside the fires of current political thought and inside the vast libraries that house the Common Law of ages past and the empirical wisdom developed through representative bodies, even colonial ones, throughout our country’s lifetime. These are our few sacred, true scholars who are to fend off the uglier machinations of human corruption that forever pressure them to join the Legions of A Mediocre Mind.
In an odd twist, when they decided that traditional moral education was not the province of public educators, they set a precedent for currently fashionable ideologies not to be the province of public educators, either.
Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance, 1787, passed by Congress under our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, deals with the admittance of territories as states, and tells us in its beautifully simple way what the foundations of the nation are.
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
By 1962, most schools had a small ceremony to start the day that included the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer. There were prayers at the beginning of football and basketball games, beseeching good sportsmanship; invocations and benedictions at graduation exercises, encouraging students to success and happiness; and separate baccalaureate services, imploring the Almighty to bless these particular persons.
A small group decided to challenge these traditions as violations of the 1st Amendment Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution and soon most invocations to a higher power in public school events were wiped out by Supreme Court decisions that concluded that these references coerced students into accepting certain notions.
The Court relied heavily on an earlier case, West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), that said:
“If there is any fixed star in our constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
So, we have come full circle. What was banned as coercion by the majority is now being foisted on students in public schools by the minority. “If there is any fixed star in our constellation, it is that no official [public school] can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics. . .or other matters of opinion or force citizens. . . to confess their faith therein.”
The 1619 Project, an attempt to foist political views of historic inaccuracy on public school students, violates Constitutional principles espoused in a myriad of cases before the Supreme Court. Critical Race Theory is a theory, it is an idea, it is not objective information. It is, in fact, an attempt to coerce public school students to accept the notion that the Supreme Court is an institution that preserves white racism, both conscious and unconscious. It amounts to a political “religion” that the Rule of Law is simply a means to abuse people of color, that racism is endemic in American society, and can never be eradicated. Facts to the contrary are dismissed as part of the problem.
Two kids laughing and playing, unaware of race or anything else, is best understood as not two kids playing and laughing but as the early initiation of abuse and subjugation. No wonder many American parents have lost faith in the public schools. Our public schools, government actors and subject to the constraints of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution through the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that applies the 1st Amendment to the states, have lost touch with the fundamental reasons we started public schools in 1642 in the first place – objective education in reading, writing, grammar, math, and moral socialization.
The Supreme Court has spoken. No public school official can compel an impressionable child to accept a political theory deemed true by the school but dangerously false by the child or the parents or guardians of the child. If a case regarding Critical Race Theory or the 1619 Project is brought to the Supreme Court it will take years for a ruling to be issued. Many children will have been indoctrinated to their detriment by that time. The answer is to change your public school or to exit it altogether. Parents who do so will be honoring long-standing precedents of the Supreme Court of the United States and showing a great deal of love and devotion to their children.
