It's Tuesday, August 30, 2022.

I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

We are watching some very interesting developments taking place,

and the opening of the school year is the occasion for some of the most interesting

and in many ways important controversies of our day.

Much of it comes down to what children will be taught in the schools and what will also

be in the school libraries, what kind of books will be on the

bookshelves in the classrooms, what kind of material, what kind of

curricula will be presented to children. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of

this for us to watch is the fact that the polarization in American society

inevitably turns to the huge question the unavoidable question of what children

will be taught. Eventually the curriculum, the

subject matter, the policies of the public schools become a central issue

in understanding the future of the culture and that's contested terrain.

And so what we are seeing is that even as the public schools emerge largely with a massive

cultural consensus behind community control of the schools, The fact is that we are living now in a very

different world. We're living in a world of absolute political, moral, cultural, worldview

polarization and what we have to acknowledge is that right now

there will be people very upset about the public schools from either the left or

the right or both at any given time. But what we also have to note is

that we are looking at a strategic period in the history of public schools in the

United States in which almost beyond question we're going to end up with one or the other picture of the future of public education in America.

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