Part 4: The Penultimate reason to Defund and Abandon Public Schools
Part 4: The Penultimate reason to Defund and Abandon Public Schools
Dateline: November 9th, in the Year of our Lord 2022.
Back in the day, I had a leftist 9th grade public school civics teacher who told us, among other things, that when [then president] Reagan started a nuclear war, we might as well ride our bikes toward the nearby military base so we could be “annihilated quickly." Our school was full of military kids who left class and joked about how radical he was during our locker banter between classes.
Now, that old liberal ideology has given way to a new pagan religion with the public school as its temple. The single most sobering "reason" that public schools are beyond redemption is not about a reasoned ideology at all. Nor is it the imposition of woke ideology through the administrative state as mentioned in part 1. The greatest reason to leave the public school is the atheistic, humanist religion, and the paideia of this religion, that now dominates every public school at some level. This religion has a zeitgeist-- or a fully orbed but mercurial pressure coming from everywhere in the school's social fabric. Parents cannot fully imagine the pressure their children face. Now, when 9th graders leave the classroom, the pressure to conform to the leftist rhetoric goes with them. The zeitgeist embedded in your children's friends, classroom culture, hallway banter, playground games, and approving smiles from the teacher can only fully be experienced by our children who are entangled in this system.
The hallway, of course, connects your children to other children who then connect on social media-- where the circles enlarge and the message is curated: Be woke or be exiled from the evening group texts, Instagram, or discord chain. Social media is the great multiplier that takes your local high school into your home, and that's more influential than many parents realize. Even if the Red State school does not directly try to "wokeify" a child, the underlying message will be "you need to affirm the identity of your friends-- that's the loving thing to do." This "love" lever is, of course, no more true than encouraging a friend to stay on a train that's about to derail. But, a false paideia is powerful enough to make a lie sound like the truth.
The rolling revolution we're now encountering rides on what Paul calls "the spirit of the age" -- or as he expounds in Ephesians 2: "following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience." This spirit, or power of the air now permeates our public schools.
In parts 1-3 of this series, readers appreciated the suppositional dialog. While I tried to make that format work for this final installment, I could not. It was simply too serious and too real to suppose. In this final installment, the real human cost to your children is taken from a few sources-- including the Epoch Times, Alliance Defending Freedom, Breakpoint, City Journal, and The Federalist, among others.
Here are just a few of countless stories-- and these are not corner cases. I used Red State examples to make the point about its ubiquity. Ask around. The pressure is real.
In Florida, The Perez Family received a call out of the blue that their 12 year old attempted suicide in the school bathroom. The full story was the conservative Catholic family had not been told the school was secretly encouraging her to "transition". The family said she showed no other signs of such a thing at home. Until the attempted suicide, no one told the parents anything about how they were counseling her at school. Wrestling with the discord between home and school, she attempted to hang herself in the bathroom. [Alliance Defending Freedom]
In Maine, a student identified as HB talks about the environmental pressure in schools. “It’s gotten to the point where it’s kind of annoying, because they’re plastering it all over their walls,” he said of the school’s pro-LGBT messaging, which includes “posters showing gender pronouns on how you should address one another.” “Some of them just, like, go crazy about all the pronoun stuff. Like, I could hear them in class talking about it.” “I hope it’s just the trend and people will eventually get over it,” he said. “But with the amount of people that are doing it, it’s probably not going to be over for a little bit.” [Jackson Elliott, Epoch Times October 8, 2022]
In Kansas, the district attempted to force Teacher Pam Ricard to use a student's "preferred pronouns"-- a story repeated around the country. We can imagine how many teachers just conform rather than fight these rules.
In North Dakota, 12-year-old Rebecca has faced unrelenting pressure from friends to announce an LGBT identity. But a few years ago, she was sexually abused by another girl close to her in age. Among young girls, it's a common trend for friend groups to suddenly all announce an LGBT gender identity because it's cool. Rebecca experienced this pressure at a vulnerable time: "The other girls that I'm around in school say that they're gay or lesbian, and they are trying to force me to be like that, too." [Jackson Elliott, Epoch Times October 8, 2022]
In Tennessee, "Aneshka" is a 17 year old queer activist. She hosts an "ally week" to teach "their" classmates how they can support their LGBTQ peers. Speaking of new rules that require parent notification of sexual content in school, "It felt kind of like turning something that's a fact of history, and life, and my life, into something secret or taboo. It was very much like this odd sense of: So, I'm not allowed to mention myself?" This type of attitude drove her to create a variety of student lead activities out of reach of the legislation passed in the state. [Chalkbeat, Kalyn Beisha, April 2022-- an advocate of LGBT activism in schools]
The well-publicized case in Ashburn, Virginia, albeit more of a purple than red state, a 14 year old girl was raped at one school in the bathroom by a cross-dressed boy who had been reassigned from another school where he did the same thing. The district covered it up. There's more to the story. It seems the girl may have planned the bathroom meetings with the boy, though the whole situation is clouded and unclear. Rather than make the story less concerning, parents should find it more concerning. The movement to de-gender is actually creating highly sexually charged environments where kids of all types are using or getting caught up in a confused sexual environment. Innocence has long been lost.
Ask anyone who works or administrates a school-- the single biggest influence comes from other students, especially when adults encourage it. As a seasoned educator of a k-12 school, I've watched the innocence of students in 4th or 5th grade slowly erode as they pass through into high school. As Emerson once said, "I pay the school master, but it's the school boys who educate my son."
All of this leads to what has been called social contagion-- made powerful with teens who are depressed or isolated. Ironically, the popular trans slogan is secretly shared by millions of teenagers: “I just want people to know that I exist.” The allure is particularly strong for those who already struggle to fit in. Those claiming a trans identity are “three to six times” more likely to be on the autism spectrum than the rest of the population: Johnson calls this the “autism factor.” [From Breakpoint, November 7th]