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They aren't? It seems to me that over the last 15-20 years there has been a massive influx of teacher-activists whose entire raison-d'etre is to turn their students into activists for progressive causes, with LGBTQ+++ only the current fad. A key part of the Left's slow march through the institutions over the last 70 years has been through the education pipeline, trickling down from academia to grade school (and younger), and that the current credentialing system for emerging teachers is essentially a factory line for producing good little socialists. This is not, IME, dissimilar from how higher education has done the same to journalism programs, leading to the current situation with a media that is 90+% ideologically captured. Control the narratives through school and TV, and even the kids who aren't political will grow up with the socially approved understanding of the world. By the time the teenagers are being riled into activism by their cool young green-haired teachers (at my kids' charter school a few years back, they all worked on a class project to obstruct drilling at Standing Rock, even though we are thousands of miles away) they've already been primed with 8 years of socialist righteousness.
Go back to the 1990s and you will find socialist-driven environmental messaging seeping into every pore of the public grade school experience. A bit farther back, at my large suburban American high school in the late 1980s, the advanced history class used as its primary textbook Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. This isn't new; on the contrary, it's just so normal it's hard to notice.
I said that from personal experience with teenage socialists over the past decade. The specific far-left tropes and sayings they repeat do not come from their teachers, they come from places like twitter or discord, or youtube, or possibly their classmates who got them from the internet. I agree that there are left-wing teachers, but they are not the direct cause here.
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This was almost completely absent from my education in the 2000s.
Since I didn’t take AP enviro science, I got more environmentalist messaging from Magic School Bus than from actual school. Honestly, I find it kind of odd to label that as socialist rather than just…left-wing.
Government was a civic religion class with a focus on judicial review. Same for US history. Even world history spent far more time on the ancients than on anything post-Marx. The closest to endorsing socialism was probably the AP Econ admiration for Keynes.
Wait. South Carolina state history was openly apologist for the South, both for the John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond periods. That’s as political as I remember it getting.
I don’t think I’m just putting my head in the sand here.
Well, maybe location matters. I'm in Oregon, part of the "left coast," to be sure. And the 1980s -- when I was in high school -- and through the 1990s there was a massive influx of Californians looking to escape the results of hard-left politics while recreating them somewhere else. I imagine the American South was quite different.
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