Building and Sustaining Local Culture Repudiates Dictates of Elites
Christopher F. Rufo has spent most of his adult professional life studying
and exposing the process of ideological capture in American education. He
as traced “the rise of left-wing race and gender ideologies from the margins
to the center of public life, culminating in reports, essays, and a best-selling
book titled ‘America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered
Everything.’
The top of his list has been “understanding how each new generation
confronts education anew.” He views today’s families as suffering
“unprecedented anxiety about the state of education because the public
school as the primary mechanism for education and values transmission,
has lost their confidence, as many educators have abandoned traditional
teaching pedagogy in favor of indoctrination.”
He focuses on how many families have scrambled for educational
alternatives that include switching districts, enrolling in private schools, or
starting home schooling programs. He concludes that these families have
absorbed a critical lesson that “education cannot be neutral; it must be
oriented to a set of principles. The only question is which ones.”
Rufo states that his intellectual pursuit was similar to an engineer seeking
to investigate and understand emerging educational trends and address
problems in the delivery system. But he acknowledges that education is
“more personal and urgent for me since starting a family and watching my
children grow up. It’s one thing to break a story about a public school
drilling students in “heteronormativity” or “white privilege”; it’s quite another
to consider your own child as the pupil.”
He observers that elite parents that have the most educational options, now
worry “the language and assumptions of the academic Left are increasingly
those of American institutions and, with assistance from technology firms
and human resources departments, the informal orthodoxy of polite society.
The social costs of opposing the Left’s rotating social
movements—#MeToo, BLM, transgenderism, and whatever is next—are
swift and severe, and can render mum otherwise self-confident people.”
Rufo understands that speaking truth to power of consensus has been a
burden to his young family. They had to leave the big city of Seattle after
he was doxxed and had to stay vigilant regarding ongoing security
concerns. He understands that “my children will have to negotiate the
reality of having a father who is involved in political controversy.”
But by moving to a small town his family was able to build a community of
people who shared their principles:
“We found a school and a church that challenged us to deepen, rather than
undermine, our commitments. During a particularly tense political moment
when we were under threat, our neighbors rallied to our defense. The men
promised to show up with heavy arms if we had any trouble; the women
organized a group to pray for our protection.”
Rufo learned that you do not escape all America’s cultural problems by
leaving cities. He was told by a friend that teaches middle school “that one-
third of his female students identify as “trans,” “queer,” and “non-binary,”
which he is required to “affirm” and keep secret from parents.” National
culture, again aided by digital technology, truly has become ubiquitous.”
He has written extensively that it is normal for all youth subcultures to
challenge American normative standards. But he views the current “anti-
normative ideologies” “are not relegated to subcultures but have become
the dominant culture.” The new ideologies “are inherently critical—based
on negation, critique, deconstruction—and their proponents are not bound
by a corresponding sense of responsibility.” Rather than the creation of
restless adolescents, this critical thinking is “politically motivated by adults
who seek to impose these ideologies on other people’s children from
positions of authority.”
He cautions that the “rising generation of American children is the most
anxious, depressed, and antisocial in memory. The structures and
traditions that once provided guidance and discipline are castigated as
“racist” and “sexist,” and have been displaced by the demands of “social
justice.””
Christopher Rufo calls on parents “to create a world in miniature for our
children. Not to shield them from the world beyond, but to prepare them for
it.” He argues, “Given the current social moment, in which our institutions
are actively opposed to preserving childhood innocence, striving for a
comparatively utopian upbringing is a radical act. Those who build and
sustain a local culture that repudiates the dictates of elite
opinion—teachers, pastors, donors, volunteers—are nothing short of
heroic.
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