Gender unicorns. “Social justice” physics. Math and reading skills deemed no longer necessary. College grads multiple thousands of dollars in debt but unemployable in the marketplace. America’s once world-class education system is crumbling around us, rotting from within.
Measured by money spent, our education system should be working magnificently. At more than $14,000 per student, the U.S. spends the fifth-most of any country in the world educating children, in a highly managed system overseen by officials from local school boards to the presidential cabinet.
Despite all this – actually because of it – the return on our investment in education has never been worse.
Decades ago, liberals realized educational institutions were a crucial tool by which to push their radical agenda into American culture; first covertly, but now openly, even proudly. The result is a system far less concerned with the actual, objective education of students, than with consolidating power by the adults who oversee it. Students suffer, but teachers’ unions, public school officials, bureaucrats at all levels of government, and well-funded special interest groups gain ever greater control.
Students barely able to read and write are being taught about gender unicorns. White students are demeaned as being “racist” simply for being white. All the while, students are being emotionally scarred and taught to be afraid of everything around them, thanks to masking mandates, social distancing, plexiglass barriers, and constant “active shooter” drills.
Sadly, private schools are not immune to these destructive shenanigans. As John Sailer writes at City Journal, plans by a Washington, D.C. private school for “anti-racist” education includes “discussions of social justice such as kneeling during the national anthem, Title IX, and paying college athletes while learning about concepts such as Newton’s Laws of Motion.”
Linking physics to the social justice movement would be laughable, were it not part and parcel of the Left’s scheme to destroy rational thinking and replace it with mind-numbing groupthink.
This problem has been simmering for years, as far back as the late 1960s, but it is only recently that parents, students, and citizen groups have awakened fully to what two generations of indoctrination fueled by trillions in taxpayer spending has wrought. Government mandates directed at schools and students as justified by the COVID pandemic, suddenly have exposed the evil scheme by those in control of education.
This revelation sparked by governments’ COVID mandates, has been aided by the way in which the education elite has openly and aggressively pushed its “woke” agenda in the classroom.
In a sense (and thankfully), the Left’s own hubris and its irresistible urge to overreach, has put its insidious agenda at risk.
Whereas the push of Common Core a decade ago began to stoke the ire of parents, today’s onslaught of progressive politics disguised as educational curriculum – best personified by “critical race theory” – coupled with the absurd and debilitating COVID mandates in schools nationwide, is moving these parents from simply being upset to becoming angry and, more important, actively so.
Democrats consider contentious school board meetings taking place in communities across the country as manufactured conservative outrage, and they publicly belittle parents choosing to stand up vocally against arrogant school board members. The anger manifested by these parents, however, is very real; more important, it is well-founded.
In many instances, the confrontations at these school board meetings focus on political issues, but at its core, the fight is about who should control the education of America’s children – parents, or progressive bureaucrats and union officials in swanky offices with well-connected friends in Congress and the Department of Education.
Parents moving to seize control of school districts from the hands of bullying officials serving their overlords in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, California, Chicago, Illinois, and other liberal enclaves, are fighting not only for their children, but for America’s future.
It is a battle long in the making but now existential in importance. The Left senses this and will continue to use every tool in its power to thwart it, from withholding grant monies, to ordering police to arrest and jail protesting parents. For the sake of our children and our country, these liberal bullies cannot be allowed to prevail.