How Grassroots Censorship Threatens the American Experiment

With Teachers Under Fire, Parents Are Teaching Kids the Wrong Lessons

I remember the time a teacher called me a “patriotic monkey.” In class. She was progressive, I’m conservative, and we were fighting over the Cold War. I was in ninth or 10th grade (it was early high school). This was the middle of the Reagan era, when tensions with the Soviet Union were at the breaking point.

She blurted out her insult in the middle of a heated discussion over the possibility of a Third World War. I wasn’t advocating for conflict with the Soviets, but I argued that we shouldn’t shy away from greater confrontation. I’ve remembered the moment all these years not because I was hurt but because it was funny—and because it demonstrated how emotions can get the best of us in an argument.

It didn't occur to me to complain to my parents. Nor did it cross my mind to complain to the principal. And I definitely did not even consider trying to get her fired. While she shouldn’t have insulted me, we should have grace—even as kids—and retain a larger view of other people’s lives and careers.

Moments like that happen in life, especially when people disagree, and a fundamental aspect of American education should be learning how to handle difficult conversations—even when they’re not conducted particularly well. In reality, moments like that sharpened me. They made me learn (I didn’t want to lose the fight!), and they prepared me for exactly the life I lead, a life immersed in the battle over ideas.

I bring up this story because of two vitally important reports—one in The Washington Post and the other by ProPublica—that illustrate what happens when parents take the opposite approach, when they reject disagreement, discourage free expression, and lead campaigns to fire dissenting teachers. The Post’s report begins like this:

A Florida teacher lost her job for hanging a Black Lives Matter flag over her classroom door and rewarding student activism. A Massachusetts teacher was fired for posting a video denouncing critical race theory. A teacher in Missouri got the ax for assigning a worksheet about privilege — and still another, in California, was fired for criticizing mask mandates on her Facebook page.

They were among more than 160 educators who were either fired or resigned their jobs in the past two academic years due to the culture wars that are roiling many of the nation’s schools, according to a Washington Post analysis of news reports. On average, slightly more than two teachers lost their jobs for every week that school remained in session.

The tally—based on combing through news reports and social-media feeds—is certainly an undercount. We can’t presume that every firing or resignation resulted in a public discussion prominent enough to catch the Post’s eye. It also demonstrates the extent to which cancel culture is a bipartisan problem. Of the 74 terminations the Post found, schools fired 31 teachers for upholding traditionally conservative beliefs and 31 for upholding traditionally liberal beliefs (12 were unknown).

The ProPublica report is a deep dive into a grassroots campaign against an educator named Cecilia Lewis, who was forced to quit her job before she could even start after a hysterical school-board meeting at the height of the anti-CRT panic, a meeting where a man stood and screamed at the school board, “We’re going to hunt you down.”

While I believe that parents should be deeply engaged in the education of their children—regardless of where they’re educated—punitive parental uprisings teach their children exactly the wrong lessons and corrupt a core purpose of American education.

First, punitive parents are teaching children to appeal to authority when they’re upset by ideas, rather than engage with the ideas themselves. When we teach children from the earliest ages until they’re 18 that exposure to a contrary idea—even an upsetting idea—is a cause for complaint, then we’re preparing them to mimic that same behavior in college and beyond.

We’re training them that fragility is a path to power. That their hurt feelings can trigger immediate action and real-world change. And that, perversely, learning a degree of stoicism and toughness achieves nothing in the short term.

Second, punitive parents are teaching children to see their political opponents as inherently untrustworthy and problematic. Whenever I object to firing or disciplining teachers for expressing political opinions, I always get the same response: “Can we trust them to grade fairly?” But is there any evidence that they have graded unfairly, or is that a presumption based on a prejudice against people who disagree?

Actual evidence of ideologically biased grading should be grounds for discipline (I once filed a lawsuit after an activist professor refused to grade a Christian student’s paper and wrote, “Ask God what your grade is”), but evidence that a teacher possesses an ideology is not the same thing as evidence that they possess bias against dissenting students. Many of my best teachers (at all levels of schooling) disagreed with me vocally and profoundly.

Third, punitive parents are helping raise the temperature of American politics to the boiling point. If you teach generations of Americans to appeal to authority in the face of disagreement and that their political opponents are inherently suspect, then attaining and holding political power is of paramount importance. After all, what good is an appeal to authority for emotional redress if the authority is politically hostile? And if political disagreement is evidence of a character defect, then how can you possibly trust any politician of the opposing party?

Under this formulation, both your fundamental liberties and your sense of belonging are directly related to the extent of your cultural and political power. This spirit directly contradicts the principles of American pluralism, which preserves individual and associational liberty so that a variety of American factions and communities can flourish side by side in American life, even if they can’t win elections or dominate corporate boards.

Fourth, punitive parents are forsaking a core purpose of American education. There is a reason we often refer to this country as the “American experiment.” There simply isn’t much historical precedent for a continent-size, multiethnic, multifaith, pluralistic democratic republic. Achieving a combination of unity, liberty, and prosperity across so much difference is hard. It takes intentional effort, and that effort should be embedded within American education from top to bottom.

The Supreme Court has put the challenge well. In a 1982 case called Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico, the Court noted that educators should preserve access to even controversial ideas to prepare students for “active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society in which they will soon be adult members.”

Note the phrase often contentious. Pluralism cannot exist without contention. To teach students otherwise—through words and deeds—is to teach against America’s founding ideals.

This does not mean that no standards or limits should apply. Some students are too young for real debate, and some ideas are too big for small children. But students who begin their educational lives struggling to stand in a straight line end the process as adults voting in the elections that decide the leadership of the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

If we use that years-long process to train children to believe that dissenting ideas and perspectives are a cause for concern rather than an opportunity for conversation, we’re training them to reject American liberty and instead seek American conformity. But conformity creates a false unity. It’s rooted in fear and breeds frustration. It’s inherently destabilizing.

Yet that’s exactly the goal of punitive parents. Their aspiration is power. Their weapons are fragility and fear. And if they control American education, then they can ultimately shake the cultural and political foundations of the American republic itself.