How progressive lawfare created a moral vacuum in our schools that destroyed the character of our most vulnerable
With the impending arrival of a new administration, we may expect the subject of school prayer, last in the headlines in the early days of the first Trump administration, to re-emerge.
At that time, Eric Zorn’s lament in a piece titled “The emptiness behind Trump school prayer references,” in the February 9, 2020, edition of The Chicago Tribune, ignored the worst emptiness in public education: The absence of moral values.
Zorn correctly cited the 1962 Engel v. Vitale, Supreme Court decision as a death sentence for God in public education, although was not until April 8, 1968, that Time magazine ran His obituary as its cover story.
Few mourned His passing at the time, as was the case on the first Good Friday. Later, exponential increases in crime, drug abuse, and nuclear family disintegration gave even some of His executioners cause for concern.
Few, if any, were found in public education. Public school students, graduates, and teachers are unconscious inheritors of the anticlerical trend that began in 16th Century Europe in the wake of the reformation, which condemned the unholy alliance between the aristocracy and the Church as a tool of subjugation, culminating in Marx’s denunciation of religion as the opiate of the people. Only in the 20th Century did we find, much to our horror, that in the absence of religion, opiates become the opiates of the people.
Today things have changed but not for the better. Zorn is gone from the Tribune, along with most of the marquee columnists of that bygone journalistic era, including the legendary John Kass. Truancy rates among teachers are an astonishing 40 percent. Among students they are over 90 percent. Schools that should have been closed years ago remain open as sort of zombie institutions. In one case, a school reportedly has 65 students and 69 staff members. Since the truancy rate among students is 90 percent, you can imagine a day when six students show up and 40 staff are there to “educate” them.
In fact, to the extent that any education of a sort is happening in the schools, it is better characterized as indoctrination. Students are drilled in quasi-Marxist doctrine and woke ideology, and subjected to tactics such as drag queen story time. So, in fact, a religious and moral vacuum created by the government has been filled by a sort of secular quasi religion that inculcates our youth with the values for lack of a better word of progressivism. All of this fits hand in glove of course with the progressive takeover at every level of government. The future voters of Cook County are taught to be loyal, unthinking progressive Democratic voters.
Sadly, there is very little, if any, education going on in the vast majority of Chicago Public Schools. Those few schools that are achieving excellence in education are the target of the unions who want to shut them down in the name of equity, apparently thinking in Marxist terms that it is better for everybody to be equally stupid rather than some to somehow manage to come out of the system with a semblance of an education. Rather than a pursuit of excellence, the educational system is engaged in a systematic imposition of mediocrity at best, and outright innumeracy and illiteracy at worst.
How can this be? The answer is very simple: the inmates are running the asylum. The schools are run almost exclusively for the benefit of the teachers. And the teachers have become the most potent political force in the city, so essentially they are running the city and have dominated both sides of the negotiating table. They have embedded their agent Brandon Johnson into the mayor’s office, who is working feverishly on their behalf to enrich them beyond what are already astronomical compensation and pension levels.
Defenders of the faithless educational complex cite their abhorrence for religion’s reliance on “imaginary beings,” in an age in which Superman, Batman, Luke Skywalker, and a rather large mouse dominate our cinema and theme parks.
Advocates of a moral education are in massive denial of the felonious failures of public education. Progressives are fond of decrying inequality, but their outrage seems blind to the tragic disparities in the pre-school to 12th grade public education in areas such as the South and West sides of Chicago.
These failing schools need private competition, unencumbered by Engel and able to instill moral values long ago banished from the public square. Whether He made us, or we made Him, He’s not only the best teacher, He’s the best beat cop. One God is worth 7 billion sworn officers. His laws are time-tested, He’s omniscient, and He never retires. In fact, He works for free. He’s incorruptible and infallible. His reward and punishment facilities (Heaven and Hell) cost no taxpayer dollars and provide hope to the hopeless. He expresses Himself in the voice of conscience, an old-fashioned term which may still be found even in online dictionaries.
Engel ostensibly removed prayer from schools, but that was code for morals, the simple difference between right and wrong, also known as ethics. Today, the closest analogy is “social justice” in some secular circles.
Nowhere to be found (at least not for long) is evidence of the foundations of not only our laws but also of all the Abrahamic religions — for example, the Ten Commandments. Is it any wonder that, lacking any moral compass, generations have gone in all sorts of directions that have hellish destinations here on this mortal plane?
What is to be done? On the South and West sides, too many Catholic parish schools whose buildings have solid old bones are being shuttered. Why not use these buildings to create schools allied with the strong community churches that provide beacons of hope to the hopeless, the synagogues, the mosques, and other faith-based communities? These schools could teach people of all faiths (and the faithless) the basic academic curriculum they need to be good taxpaying citizens while offering optional religious instruction for each faith and secular humanist ethics training to the faithless, perhaps even referencing some of the religious foundations of modernity as, if nothing else, historical artifacts.
Such programs can expect no succor from government, however private sector initiatives such as the Big Shoulders Fund are actually doing something to reverse the decades of failure to serve the underserved, underprivileged communities abandoned by the very virtue signalers who claim to be their protectors. At least such alternatives may pressure public schools to compete for the students that enable their capitated funding.
