Culture Wars, Part II--Schools and Socialism

In the prior post, I briefly covered two topics, acceptance that conservatives have lost the culture war, and what that meant in terms of the loss of cultural touchstones.  This post addresses the how and why.

How did this happened? We let it. We let liberals, by which I mean socialists, take over the schools and destroy our youth. The nanny state believes that it, through the schools, is the proper authority to raise and guide children, not the parents and extended family. I laughed when I heard that Hillary Clinton wrote a book called It Takes a Village, because even as a teenager I knew the premise implied in the title was ridiculous, but I'm not laughing any more because I now know that there are a great number of people who actually believe that.

Why did this happen?  Because the socialists waged total war, while the conservatives sought a limited action.  Socialists fought on every front all the time, always making sure to keep an eye on the long game as well, whereas the conservatives were focused on the individual battles and merely lamented about gradually losing the war.  Ask any Vietnam vet how well a limited action works out in the long run.  And the ultimate long-term goal was to gain control of the schools, because compulsory education guarantees that virtually every young, malleable mind will be able to be shaped by teachers, without the children realizing it, until they become just like the teachers.

For a more specific example, the Left fought to have prayer removed from schools for decades, and have achieved almost total victory in this.  They lost many court cases along the way, but always they probed for a new angle, a different judge, and gradually they chipped away at a ritual that was once a given and have turned it into a historical footnote in most districts.  Having accomplished this, they now attack the most sacred of the American Christian cows--Christmas itself.  How many districts now insist on parity between Christmas and Kwanzaa, or have banned any sort of Christmas celebration?  Does anyone actually know what Kwanzaa is and celebrate it for those reasons?  Search Ann Coulter's column archives for a devastating indictment of Kwanzaa and its founder--the short version is that the holiday's roots are about as genuine as a three-dollar bill and that it not-so-secretly promotes radical socialist redistribution.

Volumes could be written on how public schools have been subverted to left-wing ideology, but I don't have the desire to tackle all the evils at this time.  For my purposes at this time, it is sufficient to acknowledge that this is the case.

The next post in this series will be Culture Wars, Part III--The Triumph of Relativism and Divinity of Self.

Culture Wars, Part I--Where We First Went Wrong

In the ongoing culture wars, conservatives continue to be routed by liberals.  The recent election proves this, where a slim majority reelected a man--Barack Obama--who has made negative net progress on the economy in the past four years over a man--Mitt Romney--who has rebuilt numerous now-successful businesses.  Now, we could argue a great deal about who on the Right is to blame for this specific failure, but the truth is that it is all of us.  We have ceded the entire war on culture and values in the name of political correctness.  To be sure, other elements are in play--which I hope to discuss later--but we have failed the Founding Fathers.

We have allowed separation of church and state to be twisted to mean virtual banishment of religion, especially Christianity, from the public sphere.  We have failed to inculcate entire generations with mores and norms that were a given for centuries in Western Civilization.  How many children or young adults can describe the framework or the meanings of even a fraction of Aesop's fables?  Would they see the ant as a horrible villain and the grasshopper as oppressed, or would they even understand that so much of the current culture encourages them to become grasshoppers?  Would they jeer the mouse for removing the thorn from the lion's paw?  What about other former cultural touchstones?  Would they understand Hansel and Gretel is an object lesson on poor planning and disobeying one's parents, or would they decry the violence of the story as too toxic for children?  Would they understand the parable of the prodigal son as the love of a father (and God) for his child, or see it as a template for endless largess for the wealthy to the poor, even if one is poor after having squandered his own wealth so foolishly?
This is the first post in a series on this topic.  Next will be Culture Wars, Part II--Schools and Socialism.