And a child shall lead them....

ARVADA, Colo. (AP) — Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay. The youth protest involving six high schools in the state’s second-largest school district follows a sick-out from teachers that shut down two high schools in the politically and economically diverse area that has become a key political battleground. Student participants said their demonstration was organized by word of mouth and social media. Many waved American flags and carried signs, including messages that read “There is nothing more patriotic than protest.”

The bad news is that it appears we’ve arrived at a place where those who favor indoctrination over education are increasingly achieving positions which allow them to impose their will on our children.

The good news is that it appears children aren’t about to take their proposed indoctrination lying down…and that may be what I may need in order to maintain any hope of restoring my faith in humanity. At the very least, it’s good to know that we’re not raising a generation of unquestioning, mindless, Fox-News-watching automatons.

I’m not sure where they get it, but so many Conservatives live are convinced that they and ONLY they have the right and the wherewithal to determine what our children should learn and how they should learn it. What they conveniently gloss over is that education with an ideological filter isn’t education at all. It’s indoctrination…which is fine if you’re raising an army or regiments of reflexively obedient, unquestioning robots who will do what they’re told and fear what and whom they’re told to. To people like that, critical thinking and independent thought are the enemy, because you can’t control people when they think for themselves.

Those who seek to force their ideology onto children via our public schools too often assume that children are vessels into which ideology and values can and should be poured. The beautiful thing is that children are intelligent, independent beings capable of forming their own thoughts. Very often they question authority…because they can and because they don’t trust those charged with teaching them. Some are savvy enough to understand when adults charged with seeing them to adulthood have their own agendas. Sometimes they’re even willing to stand up for their right to be educated and not indoctrinated. When they do, it can drive authoritarian Conservatives (like Gretchen Carlson) nuts, which is reason enough to enjoy the spectacle.