When parents go to Back to School nights at their children's schools, they're accustomed to the fact that the teachers have personalized "their" classrooms, filling them with materials related to the subject matter.  We've all seen, though, the teachers who have gone too far, bringing in personal or political material that has no place in a public school.  In one Los Angeles classroom, parents discovered that a teacher had turned the classroom into an homage to far-left politics.

Parents Defending Education, which describes itself as "a national, grassroots nonprofit empowering parents to advocate for classrooms that educate — not indoctrinate," obtained photos of a history classroom at Hamilton High School, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

The banners shown in the first photo, though, have nothing to do with history, unless it's the history of far-left organizations.  There's a Palestinian flag; a transgender flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; and one of those new, overdone LGBTQ++++ everything flags.  In the background, an American flag is tossed over a barrier, with only part of it visible.

The second photo shows two posters on the classroom wall.  Both are a bit hard to read, so I’ll include the text below the photo:

The first poster reads as follows:

Policing is a violent, anti-Black, settler institution that originated as slave patrols. Their primary mandate is to protect property and to militarily enforce white supremacist capitalism. They are doing their jobs as they are trained and paid to do. You can't fix what isn't broken — that's why we fight for police and prison abolition.

F--- THE POLICE.

And the second poster, which shows Christopher Columbus and either subjugated children or Native Americans, says:

Settler Colonialism

Genocide

Slavery

Imperialism

War on Drugs

Jim Crow

Prison Labor

F--- AMERIKKKA. THIS IS NATIVE LAND.

Parents Defending Education reached out to LAUSD, which promptly responded with a statement saying the policy is to treat everyone with respect, that teachers can decorate their rooms "in a variety of ways, with some decorations being directly tied to or in support of our district curriculum, while others are inclined to adorn based on their freedom of expression and individuality," and that displays that are overtly political or otherwise objectionable get taken down.

That all sounds very nice.  However, LAUSD included with its message links to its policies supporting BLM and LGBT "pride."  In other words, except for the Palestinian flag, all the flags in the first photo have the school district's imprimatur and are an integral part of the message that a public school is foisting onto the children trapped within its classrooms.  The anti-American posters may push these boundaries, but, to the extent that the "Defund the Police" movement is inextricably intertwined with BLM and LAUSD supports BLM, that poster probably passes district muster, too.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was still very much a Democrat, I excoriated religious people who wanted to bring their faith into the public school system.  It was clear to me that religion had no place in public schools.  And when Christians babbled on about challenging "secular humanism," I thought they were being ridiculous to compare rationality to musty religious superstition.  Then, in 1994, I read Stephen L. Carter's The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, and suddenly I understood that aggressive leftist policies are themselves a belief system and a powerful one at that.

Intellectually, our public school systems are in the place that I was before Stephen Carter set me straight.  They are incapable of understanding that their fealty to BLM, abortion, "pride," etc. isn't an objective, constitutional "absence of religion."  It is a fully-realized belief system that aggressively counters traditional American values that still are today's traditional Judeo-Christian values.

When the public school system began in America, it was intended to ensure the educated, moral populace that could handle the liberties in a constitutional democratic republic.  As immigrants from outside Great Britain and Western Europe began to flood into America, the public schools became a way to create a common culture binding together America's disparate parts.  Leftist ideology, with its devotion to Critical Race Theory, non-normative sexuality, and anti-Americanism, is trying to blow America apart, one indoctrinated student at a time.

The starting point for beating back this aggressive indoctrination in leftist (or secular) values is to say classrooms are not the teachers' living rooms, their private offices, or the bumper of their hybrid cars.  These are public spaces that should be devoted solely to the agreed-upon classroom curriculum.  Anything else is an inappropriate effort to impose the teachers' personal values on their students.

And of course, the ending point for beating this back is homeschooling, vouchers, and the end of the public school system.

Image: A classroom in King County, Washington, in 1909.  Public domain.

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