Vanessa Abrahamson Blog: Oklahoma teachers’ union calls for boycott of Christian college students

OPINION:

The Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs reports that a collective bargaining group representing public schools in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is calling for a boycott of student teachers at the local Christian university. The reason for the suggested avoidance? Oklahoma Wesleyan University‘s President (Yours truly) has dared to suggest that the bad ideas currently being taught in our nation’s schools may be at least partly responsible for the bad behavior we see on our national news.

In other words – and call me crazy here – I frankly wonder if what Richard Weaver wrote about in his seminal 1948 classic Ideas Have Consequences could actually be true: Education matters, and what we do in ours Teaching in classrooms is actually practiced in our culture.

More specifically, on these pages on November 29, 2017, in a column entitled “Teach Treats and Get Lewds,” I suggested that today’s long list of villains from Hollywood and Washington might have something in common—they are products of our nation’s schools and as such, they could only act out the failed ideas they were taught at their respective alma maters.

In other words, garbage in and garbage out. Teach sexual freedom and maintain sexual licentiousness. Tell boys sex is immoral and don’t be surprised if they grow up to be young men who behave immorally.

Think about it. How many hours a week do children spend with their parents? How many hours a week do you spend in your church? Now how many hours a week do they spend in their schools? In terms of quantitative input alone, it is clear that our educational institutions have more impact on our culture than any other entity. Our colleges, universities and public schools cannot pretend to be innocent here. What we teach (or don’t teach) certainly has some impact on human beliefs and behavior. And if not, then why bother?

But to suggest such possibilities of cause and effect, the Bartlesville Education Association (BEA) published the following claim in the Bartlesville local newspaper on December 11, 2017: “Bartlesville Public Schools [must] do not accept student teachers for training in our classrooms until Dr. Everett Piper publicly apologized for it [his] personal attack on ours [teachers].”

Now it should be clear to any educated reader (not to mention anyone who considers themselves a teacher) that The Washington Times is a national newspaper and all articles written in it are intended for a national audience. My article, or any other, is by definition not necessarily a local criticism.

But setting aside the BEA’s odd ignorance of how to read in context, let’s consider the obvious question: Why is this group of teachers so intent on fabricating personal grievances when the sexual paradigm is currently being taught in our nation’s schools , is irrefutable?

Just consider these few examples:

In Jay, Oklahoma, 12-year-old middle school students are given graphic instruction on masturbation, oral and anal sex, with detailed instructions for boys on how to “put down a girl.”

In Fox Ridge and Cherry Creek, Colorado, middle school students are given a private password to an Internet portal that gives them direct access to a variety of explicit sexual practices, including real videos (not cartoons or diagrams) of men engaging in anal sex.

In Edmond, Oklahoma, the high school approved reading list includes literature on rape eroticism. Yes, you heard right. rape erotica.

Fifth graders at Andrew Jackson Language Academy, a public school on Chicago’s West Side, are presented with pictures of Homer Simpson that read, “Lube, Lube, Lube. Use more lube, increase pleasure.” This school’s curriculum also includes a female condom campaign with the slogan, “Once you break, you don’t have to stop!”

The list goes on and on. Spokane, Washington. Cupertino, California. St Charles, Missouri. There is scarcely a church in the nation that remains unscathed.

And this doesn’t even touch on the famous “sex weeks” at universities like UCLA, the University of California at Berkeley, Yale and the University of Michigan, which included activities like “The Naked Mile” and seminars featuring pornographers and sex toy sellers, polyamory activists and “courses” like Fornication 101 that boast of teaching freshmen the wonders of “carnal knowledge.”

But instead of admitting that these licentious and misogynistic ideas could actually create a licentious and misogynistic culture, this teachers’ union is calling for a student boycott of the local Christian college, as if that would surely solve the problem?

At the risk of sounding a bit pedantic, a refresher on children’s literature might be in order for those offended by my challenge. In doing so, you may recall that while a young boy exclaimed the obvious – that the Emperor had no clothes – “the masters of the bedchamber took more pains than ever to ambush a train where in reality there was nothing to stop.”

• Everett Piper, President of Oklahoma Wesleyan Universityis the author of Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth (Regnery 2017).

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