The National Education Association Wants to Indoctrinate Children Across the Country
We’ve always known that large teachers unions, particularly the National Education Association (NEA), are quite liberal. Yet in recent months the NEA revealed itself to be a full-fledged liberal indoctrination organization.
The NEA is the largest teacher’s union in the United States. It is “the most influential teachers’ union… and with more than three million members is also the nation’s largest labor union of any kind.”
In July of this year, the NEA embraced a woman’s “fundamental right to abortion.” It adopted Business Item 56 which states that “the NEA will include an assertion of our defense of a person’s right to control their own body, especially for women, youth, and sexually marginalized people. The NEA vigorously opposes all attacks on the right to choose and stands on the fundamental right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.” This means that the official position of the NEA is that a woman has a right to an abortion.
The NEA explained its rationale for the amendment. “The most misogynistic forces, under Trump, want to abolish the gains of the women’s right movement. Women’s leadership is essential for any successful egalitarian movement and therefore must be protected.”
This is concerning considering teachers are paid to teach, not indoctrinate their students.
In addition, the NEA recently co-authored a document with the American Civil Liberties Union, Gender Spectrum, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Center for Lesbian Right titled “Schools In Transition: A Guide for Supporting Transgender Students in K-12 Schools.”
The document leads with a story from Janice Adams, who is a superintendent in Benicia Unified School District. Adams recently encountered a situation where she needed to decide how to support a male kindergarten student who believed himself to be a female.
The superintendent goes on to list all of the things that were done to affirm the child’s feeling that he was actually a she. The school helped his classmates (kindergarten students) accept him, set up private meetings with concerned parents, and held “a parent night facilitated by Gender Spectrum.”
The superintendent states that the student “eventually transitioned to live openly and authentically as a girl in second grade.”
The introduction to the document states that, “in our nation’s schools… an increasing number of transgender and gender-expansive students live openly as their authentic selves.”
The NEA goes on to provide recommendations for teachers in how to affirm transgender students. One of those recommendations is that “a gender-expansive student should never be asked, encouraged or required to affirm a gender identity or to express their gender is a manner that is not consistent with their self-identification or expression.” In other words, teachers should always affirm the child’s preferred gender identity. The NEA then discounts any objections teachers may have to doing so. They state that, “It is irrelevant whether a person’s objection to a student’s identity or expression is based on sincerely held religious beliefs or the belief that the student lacks capacity or ability to assert their gender identity or expression.”
Continuing the trend, earlier this year One News Now reported that NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia took part in Read Across America Day. She “read the kindergartners’ books on being transgender at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia. The books were I Am Jazz and Julián Is a Mermaid.”
In addition, the Illinois Family Institute reports that the NEA passed other concerning resolutions earlier this year. They have taken an official position to “organize and mobilize in support of the Equality Act… create space in all individuals’ name tags, badges, and IDs for the individuals’ pronouns… [and] lobby for a K-12 cross content curriculum that is LGBTQ+ inclusive.”
What is abundantly clear is that the NEA is no longer focused on improving the quality of American student’s education. A recent report analyzed by The Heritage Foundation revealed that 37 percent of fourth-graders and 36 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in reading, and 40 percent of fourth-graders and 34 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in math.
Surely, with abysmal numbers like these there are more important priorities for the NEA than reading transgender affirming books to kindergartners. But apparently indoctrination takes a priority over education these days.
One of my favorite professors in college said the following at the beginning of our Political Theory & Philosophy course, and I’ll never forget it. He said, “There’s a difference between education and indoctrination. There’s a lot of indoctrination going on in higher education these days, but not in my classroom.”
Let’s hope more of America’s teachers, and the NEA, learn from my professor. Their job is to educate, not indoctrinate.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zachary Mettler is a writer/analyst for the Daily Citizen at Focus on the Family. In his role, he writes about current political issues, U.S. history, political philosophy, and culture. Mettler earned his Bachelor’s degree from William Jessup University and is an alumnus of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Daily Citizen, his written pieces have appeared in the Daily Wire, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, Newsweek, Townhall, the Daily Signal, the Christian Post, Charisma News and other outlets.
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