Liberals knew that if they could capture the schools, they would have future generations of people agreeing with them on almost everything.

They sold parents on the premise that public education is “free.” In reality, it has been very costly, not only in monetary value but in ideological devaluation.

Mike Huckabee does not seem to understand this.

“[F]ormer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) called on conservatives to ‘stop the fight’ over the Common Core standards and, instead, consider the positive effects the nationalized standards might have on students in poor-performing schools.”

Every school my wife and I have taught in (including homeschooling and classical schools) has had standards from pre-school to senior high. Every school has standards.

There didn’t seem to be a problem with learning when I was going to school. Each year there were courses that had to be taken and expectations that had to be met. It’s not rocket science.

The problem isn’t with the standards; it’s with the content of the curriculum, the goals of those in control of education, the competency of the teachers, and the motivation of the students.

You can have the best set of standards the world has ever seen and yet there still be unmotivated students and disinterested parents.

Watch the 1988 film Stand and Deliver if you want to get an idea of low versus high educational expectations.

The Marva Collins Story is another one. It’s the movie that the teacher unions love to hate.

Poor-performing schools aren’t the result of the curriculum. It’s more about expectations, motivation, the demand for excellence, and why an education is necessary.

The education establishment today is more concerned about pushing a certain leftist ideology. The goal is control.

Consider this from an interview with Ralph Peters:

“I would say a crucial problem is that the conservatives over the last two to three generations turned the education system over to the Left. I mean, people self-segregate, conservatives self-segregated in the business world or the military, and the Left has self-segregated in education, and the result was changes in the curriculum that essentially took history and civics out, except for the most vanilla version of things. You may not like it, but Robert E. Lee had a greater influence on American history than Sojourner Truth did. There’s just no way of getting around it, but our children are much more apt to be taught about an idealized Sojourner Truth than about Robert E. Lee, or Ulysses S. Grant, or Andrew Jackson, or Teddy Roosevelt. The result is that there are today Ivy League-educated young Americans who have no sense of our history, let alone world history.

“Also in the interest of protecting our children, we’ve dumbed down children’s literature. When I was growing up in the United States, you could buy history books specifically for kids. If I were citing the ten most influential books in my entire life, right behind the Bible – not as a religious text, but as a guide to human behavior, by the way – right behind the Bible would come The Golden Book of World History which I got when I was about six years old. It was amazingly sophisticated, with brilliant artwork. There was a series called the Landmark Books, actually, by Random House, which were by serious writers like William L. Shirer of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich fame, but simplified for pre-adolescents.

“The Landmark series was brilliant. But it too has gone. By the time I got to 6th and 7th grade, I’d read about the Cossacks, the Battle of Britain, the battle of Midway, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, and many other global struggles. You go into a children’s bookstore today, or the children’s section of a bookstore, and there’s nothing like that. So our educational system has, I’m mixing metaphors wildly here, force-fed us historical amnesia. And when you do not know your own history, let alone world history, you are prey to demagogues.”

How many of you remember when Stanford dropped its Western Civilization course “just months after the Reverend Jesse Jackson came on campus and led members of the Black Student Union in chants of ‘Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.’ More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned ‘Western civilization’ courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.” (Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014), 1.))

Civilizations abhor a vacuum. While Western Civilization is not perfect, it’s what made the United States the beacon to the world. The leftists want to throw out the baby with the bath water. In the end, we may end up with an Islamic Caliphate as a replacement.