The following is a selection of statements from a 1974 essay in Volume 20 of Annals of America. It is as an example of how long the battle for control of public education has been fought and describes “liberal leaning” educators’ agenda. The author, June K. Edwards, is the female Bizarro to Superwoman Rebecca Friedrichs (see: Standing Up to Goliath: Battling State and National Teachers’ Unions for the Heart and Soul of Our Kids and Country, 2018). Note the contrast in the use of pronouns between Friedrich and Edwards indicating whose children the students are. In true Leftist form, this author resorts to name-calling, stereotyping and exaggeration to support an otherwise unsupportable premise. Nothing has changed in the last fifty years – except for becoming more perverted, insidious, and blatant.
This author assumes teachers and administrators have any authority over curriculum – they don’t. Never have and never will as long as their salary comes out of taxpayers’ pockets. Neither do her and her “liberal leaning” cohorts have any authority to indoctrinate our children. Her conclusion, of course, claims legitimacy by granting the children the authority to choose their own curriculum – a false flag on its face. That hasn’t worked at Harvard or Yale for fifty years much less in high school – evidenced by Fortune 500 companies requiring prospective Ivy League graduates to write essays while applying for jobs, and the abysmal national test scores. Edwards, et al need to read Dewey and reorient their professional compass.
“The strong protest being mounted in Virginia and West Virginia against textbooks used in English classes in the public high schools of those states strikes those of us of liberal persuasion as outrageous. Never will we let ultra-rightists dominate our schools, telling students what they may read and may not read.”
“And now comes the die-hard “Christians” trying to squelch all that is good in high school English class, trying to bring back the “good old days” of censored classics, traditional teaching and sheer boredom. Their concern over “dirty” words is only a focus for a much deeper concern: who shall control the education of their children?”
“Public school teachers and administrators have long envied the prestige enjoyed by physicians, lawyers and college professors, and have longed for the salaries that go with such recognition. It seems that the more esoteric the knowledge an individual possesses, the more the public is willing to pay him or her.” [this teacher is a Freudian dream]
“The public schools’ [teachers’] rebuttal to low salaries and low prestige has been to make the services they render more elusive, less easily observed. Just what do schools do these days? What books are the children reading? What ideas are they encountering daily in the classroom? Unless one is employed in a school or does volunteer work there, the answers are not easily come by. Bureaucratic as they are today, it is more difficult to find out what they are doing. The myth of “expertise” has all but taken over.”
“The Virginia fight against the English textbooks, then, is in reality a fight against the theory that “professional” educators have the right to control all decisions in a school system. It springs from the frustrated desire of parents to have some say about the education of their children – whether the parents’ viewpoint be left, right or middle. In the case in question, people holding fundamentalist religious beliefs are rebelling against the more liberal-minded educators on the textbook selection committees. If these right-wingers have their way and force school boards to remove from classroom and library shelves all books they find objectionable, liberals and radicals will no doubt rebel in turn, and for the same reason: to determine who has the right to control the schools.”
“Today’s controversy over “filthy” English books is simply another move in the age-old power struggle for the control of children’s minds. The struggle will go on as long as each side insists on the triumph of its own views. The only ethical and politically practical answer to one group’s manipulative domination of another is the establishment of alternatives in education and of freedom for students to choose their own direction.” – June K. Edwards: The Textbook Controversy, November 13, 1974; Annals Vol. 20, p. 100
I’m happy to see American parents finally waking up to storm the brainwashing barricades of public educators. We’ve already lost too many generations.
