ABOUT FAITH & FREEDOM

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

9-Year-Old Confronts Her School Board Over Indoctrination

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Fortunately, someone thought to get a video of 9-year-old Novalee confronting her school board over their hypocrisy regarding political advocacy and indoctrination in her school.

The video has gone viral because her message connects with millions of kids and parents who agree.

Former two-time Attorney General Bill Barr also agrees with the message. In a recent speech, he declared that our public schools "are becoming unconstitutional secular progressive Madrassas."

Be informed, not misled.

"The greatest threat to religious liberty in America today," said former US Attorney General Bill Barr in a recent speech, is "the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system."

More on his speech in a moment.

Nine-year-old Novalee confronts her school board.

Recently at a seemingly routine school board meeting in Minnesota, a 9- year-old student named "Novalee" spoke to the board about a recent experience she had at her school.

As is always the case, someone had their phone turned on to video.

The 9-year-old is seen on video confronting her school board for putting Black Lives Matter posters around her school, despite a ban on political posters.

She says she asked her principal to take down the posters, but he refused. The principal told her that the school board members were the ones who made the posters. 

The posters, she says, are "calling for an end of police, rioting, and burning buildings, while King Gov. (Tim) Walz just sits on his throne and watches."

Some of the posters had been changed a bit, but the 9- year-old caught that as well telling the board, "These posters can't be changed by reworking the color or font. I am 9 years old and I know that. You expect [me] to believe that you did not know what you were doing when you were making these posters? C'mon people!"

She quoted MLK about not judging someone by the color of their skin but their personality, from his "I Have a Dream" speech saying, "That dream has come true. I do not care or look at the color of skin. But you make me think of it."

Neither the school board nor the principal would respond to inquiries from the press.

Parents, and in many cases their children, are getting sick and tired of paying thousands of tax dollars each year to support public education and getting nothing more than indoctrination from the far left secular progressives.

Just this year more than 1.3 million kids were withdrawn from public schools to be placed in alternative settings---private, homeschooling, etc.

Former A/G Barr: "Government schools are the No 1 anti-religious force.



In a speech given last month at the Alliance Defending Freedom "Edwin Meese Award" banquet, Barr said, "It may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools."

The speech, coming from someone of his stature and experience, should cause every parent or grandparent to pause and give thought to the education your child will no longer get, and the indoctrination they will get in government-run schools.

It's a ten-minute read, but I strongly encourage you to read it.

Public education cannot continue as it is. 

The legal lion put together a strong argument that a half-century of Supreme Court decisions combined with the left's long march through the institutions has pushed US public schools so far from religious neutrality that many now comprise a government-established preference for the atheist religion.

"Government preferences for some religious views over others are unconstitutional under the First Amendment," he says.

"The-heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country. In light of this development, we must confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical or even constitutional to provide publicly-funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools", he said.

There is a great misconception about schools keeping religion out of the classroom. He addresses it, calling Government Schools the "NO 1. Anti-Religious force."

The adult misconception.

While many American adults believe US public schools keep religion out of the classroom, that era ended with their childhoods, Barr says. Too many Americans are dangerously unaware that today's public schools forcefully instruct children in specific religious and political beliefs that openly undermine Christianity and, therefore, the private government necessary to preserve the United States' foundational natural rights regime.

Joy Pullmann, executive editor of the Federalist, author, journalist, and mother of 6, says the evidence of the effect this indoctrination is having is strong both in data and personal testimony.

She notes that sociologist  Lymon Stone said in a 2020 review of research on the topic, "Expansions in government service provision and especially increasingly secularized government control of education ...can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world."

Dennis Prager repeatedly talks about parents he speaks with who are living in regret because they did not take action regarding their child's education. Now their child hates our country and has often rejected the religious beliefs of their parents.

Barr explains how public education got to this low point.

He says US public schooling used to be explicitly Christian, but now has become the strongest antagonist to religion in American life. He details a brief history of American education to make his case, in three historical phases.

In the first phase, "The advocates of public schools agreed that religion was integral to such an education. You could not separate moral education from religion," he said. "Thus, in America's founding era, taxpayer-supported schools were explicitly religious."

In the second phase of American education's history, Barr said "the Left embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square. Public schools quickly became the central battleground." This was the era when the Supreme Court cooperated with the political Left to eradicate Christianity from publicly supported education--- for example banning prayer in schools.

It is impossible to educate someone without passing on some form of religious beliefs---what is good, and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong---religious neutrality is a myth.

Barr says, "It's hard to teach someone how they ought to behave unless you can explain why."

He says some parents believe the assault of indoctrination on their kids is "infrequent," but it isn't. It's daily.

And the indoctrination by virtue of its content creates a wider sphere of indoctrination, Barr says, using transgenderism as a prime example.

The third phase in America's educational system's decline was a new government-sponsored religion called "Cultural Marxism."

Keeping Christianity off-limits opened the way for the substitute. 

He noted that one-fifth of all Americans live in states that require public schools to teach LGBTQ ideology, all the way down to kindergarten. And he says the LGBTQ ideology is "marbled into all the other curricula."

We are no longer talking about stripping religion out of school---we are now talking about indoctrination into an affirmative belief and value system that replaces Christianity. 

"The tenets of progressive orthodoxy have become a form of religion with all the trapping and hallmarks of a religion," he says.

Barr says, "It has its notion of original sin, salvation, penance, its clergy, its dogmas, its sensitivity to any whiff of heresy, even it's burning at the stake."

So, what should we do?

He says the only way to "resolve these major difficulties is for states to resort to full school choice so anti-religious government K-12 education does not maintain an unconstitutional monopoly on the formation of American children."

He says, "If the state-operated schools are now waging war on the nation's moral, historical, philosophical, and religious foundations, then they would seem to have forfeited their legitimacy as the proper vehicle to carry out the mission with which the American people have charged them."

Indeed they have.

Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful.