(To look at the video for a monologue on this article and a interview with the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh, on the breaking of the power of public schools.)

It is shaping up to be a miserable downfall for schoolchildren, at least in the nation’s blue states.

Sure, they’ll finally be back for in-person classes, but thanks to the heroic stupidity of our Centers for Disease Control and local health departments, millions of children will be forced to wear masks – all day and all. the days – to protect yourself from the coronavirus. It is a disease that we all knew children were at virtually zero risk. We’ve known that from almost the very beginning. It still is, as a John Hopkins study proved last month.

What does this mean for children? You were a child once. Try to remember how long each day has seemed to you, how even a few minutes of inconvenience seemed like an eternity. Even as an adult, wearing a mask literally all day is deeply unpleasant. For millions of children, it is torture. And now he’s entering his sophomore year for no reason except that our leaders are too weak to let life return to normal – and they’re too cowardly to admit that COVID-19 won’t go away with the perfect combination of health policy. .

As a satirical headline from The Babylon Bee said last week, “To beat the Delta variant, pundits recommend doing all the things that didn’t work the first time around.”

Of course, even without masks, there is another great danger in schools that we have heard of before: Critical Race Theory. Technically, this is a theory that our laws need to be reconsidered because, since we are all equal, any difference in outcome between black communities, white communities, Asian communities, and Hispanic communities is synonymous with racism, no matter what. the context.

Once this review is complete, we need to design the laws to work for Blacks (and some hastily added allies) at the expense of everyone else. It’s the sort of thing that leads bogus academics like Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) to suggest a new constitutional amendment that makes any difference in racial success rates beyond one. certain threshold is unconstitutional. The amendment would also make “racist ideas” of “public officials” illegal; a standard as ambiguous and dangerous as ever before.

Critical race theory began in the academy decades ago, spread somewhat under President Barack Obama, and gained significant momentum under President Donald Trump.

A few states have banned the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, although most have not. Some, like Washington State, have made his teaching law. The two major teachers’ unions have touted it on their websites and both have written in support of its teaching in public school classrooms. The American Federation of Teachers promised in the Washington Post to legally defend teachers who want to teach CRT in states that have made it illegal. But then something funny happened.

The same American Federation of Teachers turned the tide and said they don’t actually teach critical race theory. The National Association of Educators has deleted its defense from its website. Experts have started appearing on CNN and MSNBC to say the same thing. There is no critical theory of race in our schools! Fact checks have started to emerge, indicating that Washington state laws requiring CRT in public schools do not really require CRT in public schools. Rep Jim Clyburn did an interview last week in which he said the same thing.

“It’s just a college story, guys. cathode ray tube ? Never heard of her. Has not been here.

This is where a problem lies, because they could actually get away with it. Not in real life, of course – they lie to our faces – but in court, maybe. Because, technically speaking, Critical Race Theory is a legal framework. This is the law our friend Kendi wrote about.

Right now, in elementary schools, they line the kids up, tell them to close their eyes, then ask them questions, and they step forward or backward in order to highlight the racial and economic differences between small children. They teach them that equal opportunity is racist. The point is, it’s not a legal philosophy, it’s just downstream of legal philosophy.

The founders of critical race theory know this. In fact, they bragged about how the so-called
the “privileged walks” are downstream of their ideas. They approve of them. But now they know how incredibly toxic the CRT brand is, how harmful it is to parents of all races and income brackets across America.

They were beset by a parenting revolution spurred by Zoom cameras in classrooms and kids doing their ridiculous and racist homework at the kitchen table. So now his supporters are backing down and claiming Critical Race Theory is just a right-wing myth not really being taught.

This is absurd, of course. It’s the equivalent of saying that you don’t really teach Catholic thought in Catholic schools because you don’t teach children the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Do you see the absurdity? Everyone knows that Catholic morals and virtues are still inculcated in Catholic schools (or at least should be).

Proponents of critical race theory know that its decidedly non-Christian values ​​and virtues are taught in schools. You don’t have to teach the legal framework to instill the central philosophy, and they understand it. Until recently, they bragged about it.

The big picture is a big deal

All of this is irrelevant, and here is where we hit a serious wall about what we can actually do to stop this. Is the problem with our schools really just masks and critical race theory? No of course not.

Our schools – from kindergarten to graduate programs – have seriously gone astray in a way that no law can ever hope to correct. Masks, “critical race theory,” or whatever you want to call it, are basically just visible sores in our schools. These are painful symptoms of a much deeper disease.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter whether your children attend a Christian school, a non-denominational school, or a public school. Everyone goes to a religious school, it’s just a matter of religion being taught – and our public schools teach bad.

It’s a religion that tells them that “masculine” and “feminine” are just chosen identities, like a costume, and that you can be one or both or something in between at any time. It is a religion that tells them that their country is wicked, that its story is just one atrocity followed by another. That the country’s heritage can be broken down into a handful of distinct identity groups, and that some races or religions are good and others are bad.

You can’t fix something like that by just banning Critical Race Theory and calling it a day. If your children were to spend all day in the hands of a dangerous schizophrenic, could you remedy the danger by passing a law prohibiting him from speaking with one voice in his head?

Of course not, your children still spend all day with a mentally ill person. And these are our public schools right now. Each year this country spends $ 640 billion on K-12 public education, and a huge chunk of that money goes to people with bad ideas who want to poison your children to think about it. same way.

Think bigger

So what is the solution ? The answer is to think bigger.

The Conservatives spent most of the 2010s promoting school choice. Charter schools, free registration, easier home schooling. It was all done in the name of helping children escape failing schools, attend the best and, through the magic of competition, encourage all schools to be better.

While home schooling is on the rise, school choice is no longer quite the new hip fad that it used to be. It’s time to revive it on a grand scale, and this time to break the power of the monsters of public education. Public teachers’ unions have long accused anyone who advocates breaking their monopoly of wanting to destroy them. This was not the case then, but since that time they have revealed themselves. It is time to do it.

For decades, teacher unions and school principals have been raising ever larger amounts of money and bragging that no matter what you are trying to teach your kids around the dinner table. or at church on Sundays, they receive them eight hours a day throughout their most formative period.

Stop letting them win by default. Here’s what we should do: Fund schools for real. Take the amount of money each public school spends, per student, and put it under the direct control of parents. Parents can use their slice of education money to pay for private school tuition. If they want to support a home schooling cooperative or buy private lessons instead, let them do it. Also give them the choice to forgo that money and send their children to public schools by default.

Laws should be made simultaneously to protect homeschools, religious schools, charter schools and the like from government interference, but it always happens. For this reason, some people will not want to take the federal money, and that is their choice. If they give it up without sending their children to public school, public schools do not receive this money by default.

Teachers in public schools hate this possibility, and it is one of the best arguments for doing it. It is certainly not without precedent: Nevada, a purple state, adopted this precise policy six years ago. It only stopped because of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and a bad ruling by a state judge. But decisions can be overturned, and we have 49 other states to work with.

Try to think of education from first principles. Suppose we don’t have a school system at all and need to create one. Would you really choose to create a system where your children would spend eight hours a day in the mostly unsupervised hands of ideologues who preach against your country, your values, your religion, your race and, in many cases, you personally? ?

Would you make this system the default option, where the only way out is to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year? Money that the average person doesn’t have?

Of course not. Yet that choice is the decision we make every year when we choose to keep the public school system as it is. It’s time to make a new decision. It’s time to go big. It’s time to raise our next generation with the education and values ​​we want for them. It’s time to break the system.