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December 2, 2022

It’s time to wage war against classroom décor

By Andrea Widburg

Libs of TikTok has a running theme: Videos and photographs showing how teachers have decorated “their” classrooms. These decorations reliably take the form of pro-LGBTQ+++ and pro-BLM paraphernalia. Sometimes, the videos come from students and parents highlighting the indoctrination taking place in these classrooms but, as often as not, the videos come from the teachers themselves, proudly boasting about the political values they’re selling in “their” classrooms. However, these rooms do not belong to the teachers. They belong to the school, which is paid for by the taxpayer. It’s time to stop all this personalization and return classrooms to neutral forums.

 When I was in school, classrooms were “decorated” with subject-matter material and student artwork. In the early grades, a long poster showing the cursive alphabet invariably hung directly over the chalkboard. On the walls, you’d see students’ art, which was always reliably innocuous: Paper snowflakes in the winter and pictures of flowers in the summer. There was also a poster showing all the presidents, right up to the current ones. In a reading corner, there might be book jackets displayed.

As my generation aged up, the classrooms eschewed the cursive poster and student artwork. To the extent the classroom was decorated, it was tied closely to the subject matter. In foreign language classes, there were pictures from the countries in which the language was spoken. In history classes, there were pictures showing historic figures and events. Our civics classes had reproductions of America’s seminal documents (e.g., the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, etc.) In English classes…well, I don’t remember, but I do know that nothing controversial decorated those walls.

How things have changed! Teachers today feel that the rooms to which their public school employer assigns them are their personal bulletin boards. They can pin to that board anything and everything that represents their most deeply-held hard-left political and social beliefs. That’s how you get these kinds of classrooms and, inevitably, indoctrinated children who help keep the Democrat party in perpetual power:

One of the few good things to emerge from the COVID lockdowns is that parents have learned what’s happening in their children’s classrooms. They’re waging a valiant war against books and lesson plans, but it’s necessary to wage a war on décor.

The newly elected conservative school boards (many with help from Moms For Liberty, which turns out to be an extraordinary group that deserves generous funding) must immediately implement policies saying that the classrooms do not belong to the individual teachers. They belong to the school and the taxpayers and must be politically neutral, not only in terms of the curriculum but also when it comes to décor. What’s pinned to and painted on the classroom walls must relate solely to the subject matter being taught in the class.

Even if the school board isn’t conservative, this is something that parents need to raise at school board meetings. Boards and teachers must understand that the classroom is not the teachers’ home, just as the pupils in that classroom are not his, her, xer, or its children.

At a very important, fundamental level, the classroom belongs to the taxpayers just as the children belong to their parents. If we can shut down the constant subliminal indoctrination on those classroom walls, we will have gone a long way toward normalizing education.

Image: Classroom. Twitter screen grab.

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