Victory Against Child-Corrupting Marxists in Louisiana
By Carole Hornsby Haynes March 19, 2024 First Published at American Thinker
“Give me your four year olds, and in a generation, I will build a socialist state.” Vladimir Lenin
Parents have been bullied, marginalized, shouted down, targeted by the FBI, arrested and literally dragged out of school board meetings by police for exercising their first amendment right to protest what their children are being taught. Since their God-given parental rights have been hijacked by our legal system and institutions, parents are doing what our forefathers did to protect their liberty – organizing and fighting back. And parents are winning. It seems the Left has woefully underestimated the Momma Bear instinct to protect their young.
Parents in Louisiana organized and fought back. As a result, they are celebrating their victory after a long battle against the Marxist attempt to hijack the state’s early childhood standards. The Left underestimated the wrath of parents over their brazenly sneaking Marxist ideology into the draft standards for children aged 0-5. As parents compared the proposed revisions to the standards with those passed in 2013, they were alarmed at the extensive changes that included Transformative Social and Emotional Learning.
Louisiana parents were aware that, although SEL is hawked to the public as the solution for student mental health issues, it is actually the vehicle for implementing the tenets of Marxist Critical Race Theory and Queer Gender Theory. The result is not improved student mental health, but rather mental destabilization and dramatically lower academic levels. Instead of preparing students academically for their future, public school focus is on preparation for leftwing activism -- America’s Red Guard.
Shocked by the radical proposed changes, the parents’ organization, Louisiana State Advocates, contacted me to request that I conduct a comprehensive expert review of the Early Childhood Education Standards for the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Louisiana State House Education Committee, comparing the proposed changes with the 2013 standards and more specifically the Social-Emotional Development domain. State curriculum standards are intended to be a comprehensive roadmap for what is included in the local education process, yet it was very clear that the Louisiana draft standards had deviated from this by producing only a skeletal outline that was purposely vague and limited to allow personal interpretation and implementation by teachers or caregivers.
The Left revealed their true intentions in their powerpoint explaining how the proposed standards included “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” ostensibly to be “inclusive of children’s individualized needs.” In reality, this teaching methodology fuses radical left politics into the curriculum with discussions about LGBTQ+, racism, and DEI – code for the tenets of Critical Race Theory. Embedded political issues in 0-5 lessons set young children up for more advanced culturally responsive curriculum in K-12 such as Wit & Wisdom English Language Arts K-8 that is already in some Louisiana public schools. Here they are psychologically programmed in thinly disguised Marxist lessons on racism, transgenderism, ant-white, and anti-America.
I found it strikingly odd that one of the proposed standards for children aged 16-48 months called for encouraging expressions of embarrassment, shame, guilt, gratitude, and remorse. In K-12 white students are being forced to admit shame and guilt merely for being white and supposedly irredeemably racist (Critical Race Theory). Consequently white children are becoming so stressed out that many are experiencing mental health issues with some considering suicide.
Lessons about suicide and death are not uncommon in public schools. In the Wit & Wisdom curriculum noted above, first graders read Brave Irene where the character of the story considers suicide. In Amos and Boris, a third grade book about a mouse and whale, the idea of suicide is again presented.
The consequences of teaching impressionable students about suicide and death are devastating for a moral society. The story of the grisly school massacre in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado exemplifies the mental health travesty that radical left indoctrination is having on students. Death education was integrated into many courses at Columbine where death was portrayed as being glamorous. Reincarnation was presented as the solution to a hard life with students returning in a much better life form to become like God.
In addition to Transformative Social and Emotional Learning, the Louisiana draft standards were aligned with the National Sex Education Standards K-12, which also are infused with Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ+. Early exposure in daily lessons to NSES’s core concepts psychologically prepare young children for the more comprehensive core concepts in NSES K-2, which normalize deviant sex and transgenderism.
Not only did they have to contend with radical reviewers, but parents had to battle Marxist professors from Louisiana colleges and early childhood organizational “experts” who denigrated the parents. Paige Lowry, education advocate for the Baton Rouge chapter of Moms for Liberty, spoke at the meeting of the BESE members to urge their approval of the final version of the proposed standards. Casting Lowry as a dangerous person, the left-leaning Louisiana Illuminator wrote that the “Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, considers Moms for Liberty an ‘extremist’ group.”
With the vast differences among the reviewers, it seemed almost impossible that a strong set of Early Learning and Development Standards without SEL indoctrination could ever be passed. Yet BESE approved the proposed changes without the SEL content and radical sex alignment by a unanimous vote. The organizational strategies and the refusal to compromise by the brave parents in Louisiana serve as an extraordinary example to all Americans of how to win against Marxist activists who will stop at nothing when critics oppose them – loss of jobs and reputation, burning down businesses, prison, even murder.
Louisiana parents understand why Marxists want to control what their young are learning. Dictator Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Our legal system has not stopped the war on children nor the cultural revolution being waged in this nation. It will take dedicated Americans like the parents in Louisiana to save our children and our nation.