Oklahoma's state superintendent has been an outspoken critic of teacher's unions and their role in keeping schools closed during the pandemic
Ryan Walters said he plans to hold 'Marxist' teachers unions accountable and completely overhaul the state's education system.
"If truth be not diffused, error will be." That warning seems to be even more true and urgent now than when it was originally given by American statesman and Senator Daniel Webster. Americans today should heed Webster’s warning with all the gravity it demands.
When truth disappears and creates a void, something else is going to take the truth's place. That self-evident ultimatum presents American educators, policymakers, and parents with a critical, twofold-choice, and how we choose will determine the futures of our children and the kind of country they will inherit.
For most of American history, the American education system was rooted in patriotic and Christian values. As a result, American students got both the practical knowledge needed for the working world as well as the foundation of values necessary to be citizens of a representative government.
After years in the classroom, it is my firm belief that these values should be the basis for our education system. Unfortunately, Biden and the radical teacher unions have decided to take public education on a different course, replacing American and biblical values with woke, anti-education values that tell students that they should treat their classmates differently depending on their race and sex and that they should be taught graphic sexual content at a young of an age as possible.
The Biden administration would prefer that our students are pushed down a path of political indoctrination and extremism — one that strips our education system of any positive values and endangers our students by replacing subject-related lessons and a value-based education rooted in reality with a system designed around the left’s radical fantasies. In this liberal vision for education, our students are told that they should be treated different because of the color of their skin or sex as early as Kindergarten. Our students are given library books with graphic pornographic images and an education stripped of any positive values. Seeing how our president and the unions have made it their mission to strip away any values and real instruction from the American education system, it is clear we need a return to a truth-based way of teaching.
Luckily, there is another way forward other than the politically hijacked Biden curriculum. This path teaches students that they are equal, and that their race or sex does not change the fact that they are born equal under "the laws of Nature and Nature’s God." It puts books with real educational value back in our school libraries and empowers educators to go back to teaching actual subjects in school, with curriculum that imparts actual meaningful lessons and values on to our students.
This path provides resources to schools which will help all students read better. It teaches American history as history, rather than a contrived political narrative, and it teaches math to put our kids back on par with the rest of the world.
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For this approach to succeed, it will need people willing to fight. The teacher unions have become so entrenched in our political system that they will fight back against any positive change in the education system. They will sacrifice our students’ future if it means entrenching their own power.
Students line up to enter their respective classrooms. (Craig Hudson)
We need to organize and win at the ballot box and every step before that in 2024 and beyond. It’s going to take candidates stepping up to run and saying that they have had enough of the radical Biden agenda and the iron grip of the teacher unions. If you can’t run for office, I encourage you to volunteer your time in other ways. This election is critical for the future of education. Despite the uphill battle we face, 2024 can mark the beginning of the restoration of classical American education, and the end of the radical education agenda perpetuated by the Biden administration.
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If we as a people can get back to the proper foundations of education, I firmly believe we can put our students, and therefore our future, back on the right track. American History and the Bible have provided us with values we can use to guide our education system; they are an invaluable inheritance handed down to us and to dismiss them resources does a great disservice to our students and to the country in which they will one day work, vote, and hold office.
While Biden and the unions are doing everything in their power to push education down their path of political activism, it is my priority as Oklahoma State Superintendent that we go down a path that puts education back in the education system and puts common sense, moral truth, and American patriotism back in our classrooms.