The battle for America’s future and soul has its epicenter in public education.And California Governor Gavin Newsom is on the attack.“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful,” said Plato. The Founding Fathers concurred. “It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue,” wrote John Adams. “If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”Noah Webster agreed that education should “implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue….”In summary, education exists to cultivate values by steering students to love and hate appropriately. Young minds will fail to grasp the difference between beauty and ugliness unless education conditions them to see it. Moral training should therefore turn our eyes in fond appreciation to virtue and the good. It should cause us to feel distaste for vice, or, as the Bible says: “Abhor that which is evil…”But what happens when society turns this upside down? What happens when education sets our affection on the base things of earth?In a word, catastrophe.When education forsakes its lofty goal of teaching us to love good and abhor evil, when it fosters within us the wrong set of values, catastrophe ensues. And unless the nation soon redeems education, collapse will follow. SEE ALSO: Andrew Tate deserves no defense Unfortunately, in America, public schools are in a rapid downward spiral, and redemption is yet far off.In the Golden State, for example, Democrat Gavin Newsom has introduced several films (notably produced by his wife, Siebel Newsom) that feature pornographic imagery and graphic sexual language into K-12 schools. “You can expect frank discussion and sometimes graphic footage related to sexuality, sexism, pornography, abuse, suicide, rape, and more,” admitted the CEO of Common Sense Media, Jim Steyer. One of the films contains explicit visuals pulled directly from porn movies and websites. “Some of the images, when slowed down, were not blurred, and even when they are blurred, it is obvious what is going on,” said one enraged father. “It is absolutely profane and disgusting.”Indeed, Plato would be dumbfounded. The Founders would be outraged.Siebel’s organization (which receives state funding) purportedly exists to “fight sexism.” For example, one of her films, “The Mask You Live In,” attempts to dismantle “toxic, unhealthy masculinity.” Yet it does so by depicting “naked or mostly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in pornographic videos.” Only in a sick world would we determine that the best way to shield minors from inappropriate sexual behavior is to show them inappropriate sexual behavior.To make matters worse, the movie mentions the names of several porn sites thus “providing a roadmap for future exploration.”Siebel must know nothing of boys if she thinks this is the way to redress the evils of objectification. And Gavin, who appears in two of his wife’s films, should be barred from office if this is what he calls “high-quality” education. Unfortunately, the Newsom family’s “sex ed” has escaped California, infiltrating schools nationwide, corrupting the minds of over two million students. SEE ALSO: The degradation of art and beauty Scripture enjoins us in Philippians 4:8 to “think on” whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtuous, and praiseworthy. The only appropriate mode of education is to introduce students to these things first. There is no reason our kids should have to taste degradation to avoid degradation. But alas, we live in a sex-saturated society. Our kids are so bombarded, public educators have deemed it more judicious to talk about “safe” sex and porn than to avoid the subject altogether.Oh, and for good measure, they put an LGBTQ twist on the topic. Go figure.It seems Philippians 4:8 is the antithesis of the modernist’s curricula. In almost every possible way, they urge us to call good evil and evil good. Vice beautiful and virtue abhorrent. If we are to save the nation from its present state of catastrophe, we must again inculcate a love for true beauty in our schools. Until students have Plato, virtue, the Founding Fathers, and Scripture imprinted in their minds rather than sexuality, porn, and Newsom-produced propaganda, our downward spiral will continue.Jakob Fay is a staff writer for the Convention of States Project, a project of Citizens for Self-Governance.
