As Mao Zedong took over China with his communist revolutionaries, he sparked one of the largest mass migrations of the 20th century. Between 1948 and 1950, an estimated 2 million Chinese refugees fled Mao’s regime and escaped to Taiwan and other countries around the world. While Mao was razing and restructuring Chinese culture and society, these refugees were able to begin new lives in safer and freer countries.

While the Chinese mass migration makes the history books, a similar 2-million-in-2-years migration is currently happening—across educational borders. An analysis published by Harvard’s Education Next Institute (EN) recently announced that, between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2022, “Our polling data indicate that district-operated schools lost 4% of student enrollments to other types of schooling between 2020 and 2022.” EN went on to say, “If that percentage is accurate, it means that nearly 2 million students have shifted from traditional public schools to alternative school arrangements.”

Individual examples of the recent dramatic shift in educational choices are not hard to find. While New York City (NYC) public schools have been steadily losing students over the past five years, they lost 10 percent of their remaining students during the COVID-19 epidemic alone. Those children are not expected to return, and the NYC public school system is now at a 15-year enrollment low. California’s state school system is at a 20-year enrollment low; over 270,000 students have left since COVID. Los Angeles alone lost more than 10 percent of students. The Chicago government school system is projected to have lost 100,000 students—more than 25 percent of total enrollment—by the end of the ten-year period between 2015 and 2025.

And states such as Michigan, Rhode Island, and Minnesota have all experienced drops in enrollment, continuing even after the initial COVID-19 year. Now, EN does caution that “the overall picture shows less change than media reports portray,” and that these trends do not constitute a “mass exodus,” but the statistics are nonetheless remarkably significant.

Harsh lockdown policies and virus mitigation measures have surely been significant in shifting the nation’s educational choices. According to Education Next’s analysis:

“In November 2020, Education Next polling data revealed widespread parental worries about the learning loss, social isolation, emotional distress, and physical inactivity induced by school closures, online learning programs, and other measures designed to prevent Covid spread.”

However, the presence of COVID-19 lockdown policies can’t be the only factor; EN also points out that when pandemic measures were relaxed, their polls showed a notable improvement in parent satisfaction. “By spring 2022 … parental distress had subsided.” Yet enrollments continue to decline. Something else must be up.

As the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) suggests, what started as “pandemic pods” during the thick of the crisis eventually became co-ops and “microschools,” which many families have found to work better for them than government schools. Catholic schools and private schools were more likely to remain open during the pandemic and thus received an influx of students. In short, FEE assesses, “Parents are recognizing that they have many more options for their children’s education and are continuing to abandon government-assigned district schools.”

This change is notably visible in EN’s data. Contrary to their government schools over the same two-year period, private schools (8 to 10 percent), charter schools (5 to 7 percent) and homeschooling (6 to 7 percent) all boasted shares of enrollment greater than when the pandemic started. And the enrollment numbers match the parental polls:

“Parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their child’s school if their student was attending a private or charter school rather than a district school.”

This change in the nation’s educational landscape has provoked a range of reactions from the nation’s leaders—on the one hand, no fewer than 18 new states over the past two years have passed laws broadening education choice. However, not all government officials have been as friendly to the widening school choice trend; the U.S. Department of Education recently considered instituting new hurdles for charter schools to receive government funds, inciting bipartisan protest and raising the hue and cry of even powerful liberal advocate Michael Bloomberg. Government reactions to parental choices will likely continue to unfold along one or the other of those two lines, and for Christians, who are commanded to pray for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), this is both a timely and an important area to focus on.

In a plummeting culture such as ours, educational choice is becoming increasingly imperative. Former governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, inadvertently expressed one reason why: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This is a stark departure from the biblical model of education, in which parents are responsible for teaching their children (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4). Schools help parents accomplish that goal; parents don’t abdicate their responsibility to the school system, and neither should that responsibility be divested from them by force of law.

When parents decide that their child would be better served by a private school, charter school, homeschooling, or online learning, it should not be the authority of the school district, local, state or federal governments to tell them otherwise. Doing so flips the biblical model on its head, and comments such as McAuliffe’s are foundationally wicked, because they imply that schools, not parents, are the ultimate authority over the education of children.

Education freedom should be championed in every state in the Union. Make no mistake about it, parents who want their children to attend government schools should be able to do so. However, the rising migration across educational borders—only accelerated by the the pandemic—also means “we, the people,” must work to reduce all barriers to education choices so that parents, not the government, are enabled to make the best decisions possible about their children’s development. This should be a consideration in picking candidates to vote for in this upcoming election, and in every future election we participate in.

Over the last few generations, Christianity has declined at a massive rate in America, with millennials becoming the first generation in American history with self-proclaimed Christians in the minority. Now, the culprit is becoming clear to everyone: Government. In particular, anti-Christian, anti-God indoctrination masquerading as “public education” has been the key driver of those trends.

While it is a widely held misconception that government schools became more secular as the culture did, the reality is that the “public education” system was always intended to turn Americans against God. Indeed, it was created for that purpose. And it has been phenomenally successful in pursuing that goal, with most Christian children abandoning the faith after more than a decade in a public “school.”

According to a massive report headlined “Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline” from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the record is clear on the issue. It is not urbanization, or more education, or the progress of “science,” or even more welfare spending, that has so thoroughly de-Christianized America and the rest of the Western world.

Instead, the data and the historical record show that the more tax money a secular government spends on “education,” the more the public will turn away from God. “Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education,” wrote AEI researcher Lyman Stone in his report, perhaps stating the obvious.

“Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious,” Lyman found. “It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.”

Other researchers have theorized that simply receiving more “education” could explain the trend away from faith and Christianity. However, researchers Raphael Franck and Laurence Iannaccone, who studied the issue in depth, noted that “higher educational attainment did not predict lower religiosity: More and less educated people are similarly religious.”

Similarly, the move toward cities and industrialization could not explain the trends either. Ironically, the two researchers found the opposite. “A more urban and industrialized population was associated with greater religiosity,” the report states, adding that even government welfare largely taking the place of churches supporting the poor did not explain the catastrophic plunge in religiosity.

Indeed, according to Lyman, who also cites other researchers, secularized education provided by government that banishes any mention of God “can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.” As he puts it, “increasingly secularized government control of education … can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world.”

This is exactly what Scripture warns of. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it,” reads Proverbs 22:6. Jesus warned in Luke 6:40, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” And yet American Christians continued to send their children to anti-Christian government schools.

The fruit is clear, too. Since 1960, the report says, the share of American adults who attend any religious service has plunged from half to about a third. Meanwhile, the share who say they are members of any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to just 62 percent. And the number of American who identify with any religion has plunged from over 95 percent to just 75.

This was deliberate, of course. “The decline in religiosity in America is not the product of a natural change in preferences, but an engineered outcome of clearly identifiable policy choices in the past,” the AEI report explains, again stating the obvious.

This writer has investigated those policy choices in depth. It began with anti-Christian Communist Robert Owen in the early 1800s, who created what whistle-blower Orestes Browson described as a “secret society” to promote the then-radical idea that government should “educate” children.

Horace Mann and John Dewey, the architects of America’s government “education” system, also used “public school” to wage war on Christianity and individual liberty. The outrageous 1962-1963 U.S. Supreme Court rulings against Bible and prayer in school merely formalized the revolution and put the final nails in the coffin.

Decades after sensible conservative leaders such as E. Ray Moore of Exodus Mandate began sounding the alarm and calling for Christians to leave government schools, even the Big Government neo-“conservatives” at the anti-Trump National Review have finally caught on.

“For religious conservatives who care about the fate of American culture, it cannot be emphasized enough that education is the whole ball game,” wrote Cameron Hildtich in NRO in an article about the AEI report. “All other policy areas amount to little more than tinkering around the edges.”

“The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state,” he concluded. “It simply will not do anymore for faithful Americans to drop their sons and daughters off at the curbside every morning for the government to collect as if they were taking out the trash…. the only real road to religious revival is the one that begins with each parent’s first step out of the public school’s doors.”

Finally, the fact that government schools have brainwashed generations of Americans against God and the church is becoming too obvious to hide. Whether it is too late to turn the tide in America and the rest of the West remains to be seen. But at this point, what is clear is that religious parents of all faiths must run for the exits of the government indoctrination system — now.

Illinoisans shouldn’t need a reminder of how committed Illinois politicians are to using tax dollars and government schools to indoctrinate other people’s children, but Governor J.B. Pritzker just gave them one last Friday when he signed the “LGBTQ” school indoctrination bill into law. This law, which takes effect in July 2020, requires that all children ages 5-18 in public schools be taught about the deviant sexual proclivities of men and women who have made some significant cultural contributions. Well, not all deviant sexual proclivities are included. Only the deviant sexual proclivities currently and publicly approved by homosexuals and cross-sex pretenders will be included—for now.

When the time is right, those who identify as polyamorous—er, I mean, “sexually non-monogamous”—or as hebephiles, ephebophiles, kinksters, zoophiles, or infantilists will claim their proclivities constitute a “sexual orientation” and will demand to have the “roles and contributions” of fellow deviants be included in curricula. They will one day rise up against the intolerant, ignorant, hateful bigotry that has resulted in their exclusion and oppression. And then those with other disordered identities—not necessarily sexual in nature—like “amputee-wannabes” (i.e., Body Integrity Identity Disorder) will plead for inclusion.

The reason all these groups will battle for the “roles and contributions” of people like themselves to be taught to our young, impressionable, and vulnerable children is that the central reason for teaching children about the disordered desires and deviant acts of cultural contributors is to normalize deviance. It happens in three ways:

1.) Exposing children repeatedly to a set of beliefs about, for example, homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation from age 5 on up desensitizes children to deviance.

2.) Positive portrayals of deviance from age 5 on up from teachers who are role models shape children’s moral views of deviance.

3.) When, for example, homosexuality or opposite-sex impersonation are associated with admirable qualities like achievement, creativity, intelligence, or bravery, the good feelings children have for these admirable qualities are transferred to homosexuality or opposite-sex impersonation. And that’s exactly what “progressives” seek.

Of course throughout human history there have been cultural contributors who experienced all manner of perverse and sinful desires and engaged in all manner of perverse and sinful acts, but historically teachers discussed only their contributions—not their perverse and sinful desires and acts. Now, however, a segment of the population has concluded that two forms of sexual activity are neither perverse nor sinful and are using government schools, tax money, and captive audiences to eradicate all dissenting beliefs.

Equality Illinois, Illinois’ foremost organization for promoting perversion, said this about Pritzker’s most recent offense against decency:

“We thank Gov. Pritzker for signing the Inclusive Curriculum Law and ensuring that LGBTQ youth will now see themselves in the history they are taught….” An inclusive curriculum can have positive, affirming benefits.

Since when is it the role of taxpayer-funded government schools to provide “affirming benefits” to children, and what specifically constitutes an “affirming benefit”? Before concluding that affirmation of homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation is a benefit, lawmakers and government-employed “educators” had to have concluded those phenomena are morally good, which is decidedly not their right to do in their professional roles when it comes to highly arguable moral issues.

Moreover, when teachers affirm the unproven, non-factual, subjective beliefs of the “LGBTQ” community, they are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) condemning the beliefs of many people of faith.

Another of Illinois’ sexual deviance cheerleaders, Mary F. Morten, board chair of the deceptively named Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, said this about the “LGBT” indoctrination law:

Gaining a greater knowledge and understanding of the contributions of various underrepresented communities benefits all of us. 

Does inclusion require affirmation of all beliefs, ideas, feelings, and volitional acts? Are those who identify as polyamorists, ephebophiles, zoophiles, and kinksters part of the “underrepresented communities”? Why should homosexuals and biological sex-rejectors be the only sexually deviant groups to “see themselves in the history they are taught”?

Equality Illinois claims it “builds a better Illinois…. where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.” Don’t believe them. They want to ride roughshod over people of faith and deride them as hatemongers.

Remember too that this brazen effort to use government schools to promote “progressive” sexuality assumptions and eradicate the beliefs of countless people of diverse faith traditions is bolstered by the efforts of not only Equality Illinois and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance but also by the Human Rights Campaign; the Illinois Human Rights Commission; the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, the National Education Association; and Pritzker’s recently appointed “trans” task force.

Conservatives, if you don’t have a plan to exit the state of Illinois, you’ve got 11 months to come up with a plan to exit Illinois public schools. The inept and corrupt miscreants who run the state want you to stay put for two reasons: 1. They want your money, and 2. If they weren’t able to kill your children in the womb, they want to corrupt their hearts and minds via government schools and your money.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Look-Whats-in-Store-for-Public-School-Students-in-Illinois_audio_01.mp3

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My goal in these next couple of articles is to make three basic points.

First, after every mass murder, whether at a school or nightclub or concert venue, conservatives write many excellent op-eds effectively addressing nearly every aspect of the tragedy. Unfortunately, too few Americans actually hear or read those commentaries. That failure in the information war continues to plague the nation.

Second, so many Republican politicians and candidates fear the “social issues.” Several days ago when a shooting took place in that Florida school, these “leaders” still failed to grasp the connection between a failing and corrupt culture and mass murder.

Third, in a terrific piece over at The Federalist, Stella Morabito asks a question about the public (government-run, taxpayer-funded) schools. Here is the title and lede of her article:

“13 Ways Public Schools Incubate Mental Instability In Kids”
The correlation between public school environments and the deteriorating mental health of children has been intensifying for decades.

Stella Morabito’s point is one I’ve been making for years when I have referred to the public schools as “Lord of the Flies child warehouses.” “Lord of the Flies” is a reference to a novel that has been made into a movie twice about 30 schoolboys who are marooned on an island where they attempt to govern themselves and instead become savages.

The long-running national discussion about bullying in public schools always raises the question to which few good answers are offered: Where are the adults in these schools?

The “child warehouses” part gets to the point about what constitutes a proper learning environment. It’s not complicated: no child can learn when the atmosphere is not conducive to learning. You can read more of my argument here.

Here is the opening of Morabito’s article:

Why doesn’t anyone investigate the toxic effects of today’s bureaucrat-run mega-schools in the wake of a school shooting? It’s high time we place a share of the blame there.

Apologists for these noxious systems continue to shift blame for their failures using the media, various left-wing lobbies, and the kids themselves as programmed mouthpieces for statist agendas like gun control. Meanwhile, they keep feeding the beast by mass institutionalizing kids.

The correlation between public school environments and the deteriorating mental health of children has been intensifying for decades. We ought to consider how these settings serve as incubators for the social alienation that can fuel such horrors.

First, consider how common it is for a public high school today to house thousands of teenagers for most of their waking hours for four solid years. (More than 3,000 students attend the Florida school where the most recent shooting took place.) During their time in that maze, kids learn to “socialize,” basically by finding their place in a school’s hierarchy of cliques.

This sort of pecking order dynamic tends to breed resentment, status anxiety, and social dysfunction. Combine that with the toxic effects of social media and family breakdown, and you’ve got a deadly brew. Public schooling is increasingly unhealthy for kids’ emotional stability.

You can read her entire post here.

To the second point: Conservative office-holders and candidates have no clue how to fight the information war and, therefore, have no ability to stand up for what’s right when it comes to the culture. In a recent op-ed at American Thinker titled “A Weak and Crumbling Foundation,” Deana Chadwell writes:

If we grew up certain:

· that God is just a convenient fairy tale;
· that the government’s purpose is to take the place of indulgent parents;
· that sexual desires, all sexual desires should be fulfilled ASAP;
· that people are just the evolutionary top of the food chain;
· and are merely animals and therefore expendable;
· that drugs are enlightening;
· that truth is nonexistent;
· and that, most important of all, utopia is within our reach because we know better than God how to organize a nation,

…then what do we do when we see even our most important leaders functioning as if there is no moral code? What do we think when the people we see as special turn out to be sexual predators? How are we to understand our misery when our children OD on opioids, kill themselves over Facebook bullying, or kill others just because they are angry or want to be famous? How do we handle it when we pray to the God we no longer believe in and get no response at all?

What do we do? Most people look around desperately for someone else to blame, or even better, some inanimate object to hold accountable. Ban guns! It takes no moral courage to blame a thing, but it takes massive internal fortitude to look in the mirror and blame the unsustainable ideas we’ve held dear now for several generations.

It’s hard to look at the slaughter of our children in a schoolyard, but we are still willing to kill them by the thousands in an abortion facility. It’s horrifying to see the damage wrought by social media, but we don’t have the stomach to face down our spoiled children and deny them access. It makes us sick to see the sexualization of our young children, but we’re too spoiled ourselves to limit our own indulgence in nearly pornographic television. We don’t seem to have the national backbone to admit our part in the destruction of our offspring.

. . .

And the screamers don’t follow up their hollering with careful thinking about what taking guns out of our society would look like. There are over 300 million privately owned firearms in this country. We understand — those of us who know anything about history — how important it is that we keep them. We know that all our other rights rest on the right to defend ourselves against tyranny. I’m not giving up mine without a fight, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. The confiscation of guns in America will be a bloodbath that makes Parkland look insignificant.

“The Parkland shooting proves that our culture is a disaster,” she writes, “not that our gun policies are. We need to be able to face that fact, or there will be hell to pay.”

Up next: A Case Study: Pro-Second Amendment Arguments Do Not Reach Enough Americans.

Have you ever heard of the “Values Action Team,” which is a subgroup of the U.S. House GOP Republican Study Committee? Somehow in all my years of paying attention (including working a stint on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress), it escaped my notice.

Here is how the subgroup has been described:

According to the RSC document describing its Values Action Team, “The goal of this group was to unite conservative Members with pro-family coalitions by establishing legislative goals, identifying key tasks for Members and coalitions to perform, and executing action items that would lead to conservative victories.”

Here’s the opening paragraph of a new press release:

Washington, DC — U.S. Representative Randy Hultgren (R-IL-14), Co-Chairman of the Values Action Team, today introduced the Parental Rights Amendment, H.J.Res. 121, to protect the rights of parents to raise, care for and guide their children without undue government interference unless there is proof of abuse or neglect.

It is difficult to image a better first impression made by a Congressional “subgroup” than the introduction of the Parental Rights Amendment.

For too long, local school districts thought they owned America’s children. It is past time for that to end. “Owned?” Yes, a family moves inside the boundaries of a district and the children are now subjected to the supervision of that governmental unit.

For decades, parents have had to check in with the government if they were planning to send their children to a private school or homeschool their children. Imagine what the Founding Fathers would say to that.

And it’s not just public education, but the government’s role in overseeing health care for minors.

“The freedom for parents to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children is an American tradition once established beyond debate,” said Rep. Hultgren. “Yet every day, families are broken apart by state actors who presume they are able to make a better decision for a child than a parent can. With recent state laws and court decisions threatening this American value, it is time parental rights are enshrined as fundamental rights and therefore protected under the Constitution.”

Here is the “Background” section in the news release:

Parental rights are not explicitly granted in the Constitution, which has resulted in an ever-growing number of conflicts with local, state and federal governments, and courts, seeking to intervene in parental decisions without a substantive justification or semblance of a showing of harm. That debate was reopened in 2000 when a Washington state law provided the authority for a third party to override a good parent’s decision regarding their children if it would be in the “best” interest of the children to do so.

Today numerous lower federal courts refuse to treat parental rights as deserving of protection as a fundamental right, and 35 states include disability as grounds for termination of parental rights.

And they provide a few examples:

• Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital’s ER disagreed with teenager Justina Pelletier’s primary care physicians at Tufts Medical Center that she suffered from mitochondrial disease. Instead, they said it was a mental illness, and the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families took her from her parents and into state custody. She was kept in the hospital’s psych ward and group homes for months. She was returned to her parents more than a year later, and her health still has not fully recovered.

• Following her birth in Missouri, baby Mikeala Johnson was taken into the foster care system because her parents are blind. When she was returned to her mother Erika 57 days later, they had forever lost important bonding opportunities, including Erika’s chance to breastfeed her baby early on.

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fields v. Palmdale held that “once parents make the choice as to which school their children will attend, their fundamental right to control the education of their children is…substantially diminished.” (emphasis added)

Here is what the Parental Rights Amendment does:

• Secures the tradition of parental rights as a fundamental right in the text of the Constitution.

• Secures the right of parents to choose the manner in which they educate their child.

• Guarantees the rights of a parent will not be abridged on account of a disability.

It is revealing that a Constitutional Amendment is called for. As with so many other moral issues, earlier generations operated by common sense. As common sense and common law became over-shadowed by countless statutes, big government was able to advance its agenda of making Americans its subjects, rather than their master.

On this topic, I would recommend a brilliant article by professor Anthony Esolen titled “Peonage for the Twenty-First Century.” That is peonage as in peon, little people dwarfed by the big people running the government. Excerpts of the article can be found here.

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Last time I presented some of the background about why I enjoyed Bruce Deitrick Price’s new book Saving K-12: A Citizens Guide to Improving Public Education. In this post, I will present a few examples.

Giving the background on a topic is easy. Choosing examples on that topic when there are so many within one book, is not easy.

“The Education Establishment has spent 100 years making public schools dumber,” Price writes. Ouch. He explains:

That’s a common impression which, after years of research, I could finally explain. John Dewey and his colleagues were in love with social engineering. In devotion to this passion, they were willing to throw almost everything else overboard.

Price writes that the “two most challenging questions in education are: why do public schools settle for so much mediocrity and inefficiency; and how can we fix the situation?”

Mediocrity? Here’s Price:

Please note, my harsh judgment of the public schools is not something I dreamed up. You hear about it in the media every day. The U.S. has 50 million functional illiterates (an unforgivable failure by self-proclaimed experts).

Our students don’t compete well on international tests. A brainy guy like Bill Gates studied the public schools and said, you know what, the schools are so bad they are a threat to the country’s future! In fact, Gates merely repeated what a huge governmental commission concluded in 1983 (the famous Nation at Risk report).

In part one I noted my weariness with the failure of the national school reform movement. This is from Bruce Deitrick Price:

If you look back, you can find that many smart, sensible people have been writing laments and alarms about public schools for a long time. The decade 1948-1958 witnessed the publication of at least 10 major books with titles such as Retreat from Learning, Quackery in the Public Schools, Educational Wastelands, and Why Johnny Can’t Read.

“So, we can take it as stipulated,” Price writes, “that the nation’s public schools ran wildly off the tracks, starting a long time ago.”

Are you depressed yet?

In the first two chapters, you’ll read:

1) Culture Wars

“American children wander forlornly in an alien landscape they know little about and understand less.”

2) Reading Wars

“The Education Establishment favors the theories and methods that lead to bad results, and this is most blatantly so in reading…. But why? The short answer, I believe, is because John Dewey and his followers were far-left ideologues. They thought leveling was a good plan.”

So much of the school reform movement’s commentary and analysis amounts to a blah blah blah aimed at not overly offending the educational BLOB. Those writers can then still seem friendly to a system that is not friendly to Western Civilization.

In chapter 6, Price brilliantly compares Common Core with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — both of which, he writes, are “bad to the bone.” “Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to Obamacare and Common Core” (I have only listed the headings):

1. Huge Federal Power Grab
2. Not a Response to Popular Demand
3. Incomprehensible by Design.
4. Public Excluded from Legislative Process
5. Dishonest Marketing
6. Media Complicit
7. Very Expensive and Would Get More So
8. Fundamental Transformation
9. Totalitarian Intent
10. Instant Train Wreck

In chapter 7 Price writes:

Take care of basic skills and basic knowledge, and everything else will fall into place. Unfortunately, our Education Establishment has spent decades building a fact-free school. Kids are kept busy all day but they are not expected to learn a lot.

Math. History. Methods. Common Core. Price covers a lot of ground in 180 pages. In the “About the Author” section at the end of the book, one of the endorsements reads “Bruce Price is one of the 10 people in the country who can explain what’s going on in education.”

Lenin asked his famous question in 1901: “What is to be done?”

Today in education, that question remains as hot and as urgent as an oncoming typhoon.

Oh, if Americans would realize the urgency…every year marks the end of the 12 years another group of kids has spent going from 1st grade through 12th.

Bruce Deitrick Price’s book is worth buying by those who appreciate reading the work of someone who doesn’t pull his punches. Click here for Amazon.com‘s page on Saving K-12.

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Every 12 years another set of children progress through America’s government-run school system. Those that graduated this past spring started twelve years before that as first-graders in 2005.

In 2005 I had the honor of serving as the president of the Family Taxpayers Foundation (FTF), a non-profit focusing chiefly on school reform — both curriculum and finance…a to z, soup to nuts.

Jack Roeser, the founder of FTF and a self-made millionaire, witnessed the disintegration of the public schools both academically and fiscally.

School reform became a passion for him, and it was for me as well. During the years that I headed-up FTF in the mid-2000’s, we tracked and reported the news on the school reform front and conducted an exhaustive study of Chicago suburban area school district spending. That study is worthy of a separate article — suffice it to say that the adults running the “public” schools (teachers and administrators) enjoyed yearly pay raises unheard of in the private sector even as academic performance stagnated or dropped.

What resulted from my tenure at FTF was weariness with the national school reform movement. So many of the experts that I agreed with didn’t seem to grasp the fact that their message was not reaching enough people, or that their progress in bringing reform to the system was relatively miniscule.

After I left FTF, I stopped paying attention to the school reform movement.

Then, in 2013 I read an article by Bruce Deitrick Price. Price’s writings have been posting at what is still one of the best websites, American Thinker, since 2012.

When an individual is weary with a political topic and or political movement, it’s not easy to revive enthusiasm for it. But Price’s writing did that for me. Why? There is a directness, boldness, and thoughtfulness that kept my attention.

Over the years when I have come across articles on American Thinker it is common for me to ignore the author’s name and just begin reading. Without fail, when I found myself in agreement with an article about American public education, and that old spark in me on the topic reignited, I’d scroll up to see who authored the piece…and it was Bruce Deitrick Price.

When I discovered that he had authored a book on the subject of education, it was an easy decision to add it to my reading list.

Saving K-12: A Citizen’s Guide to Improving Public Education.

It doesn’t disappoint. The cover reads: “What happened in Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them?”

The following is the summary of the book from the publisher’s page (with emphasis added by me):

Public schools are a vast money pit. Education officials seem to prefer inefficiency and mediocrity. We could have better schools at less cost. This book explains how.

Bruce Deitrick Price is the country’s most prolific and aggressive writer on education. He is good at explaining the root causes, the problems that typically occur, and the ideological obsessions that lead our Education Establishment astray.

This book presents 65 articles divided into 10 themes: Reading; Math; Weird Theories and Methods; Common Core; Historical Background; Guilty as Charged; Where Are Our Leaders; and What to Do Now. You can read the articles in any order and dip in wherever you want. This is pleasant reading about grim topics. If we don’t save the public schools, we’re not going to save very much else.

Here is the author’s short bio:

Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. He graduated with Honors in English Literature from Princeton and lived for many years in Manhattan where he ran a graphic design business. Along the way he was fascinated by the counterproductive practices so common in public schools. He founded Improve-Education.org in 2005.

In part two I’ll provide examples of Price’s “aggressive” approach as revealed in the book.

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For years conservatives have asserted that homosexuals are pursuing children, and for years homo-activists have mocked that claim. Due to either their profound ignorance or their commitment to deception as a tactic for advancing their pernicious goal of normalizing homoeroticism, homo-activists misrepresented what conservatives were claiming.

Homo-activists falsely claimed that conservatives were worried that they would try to “turn children gay,” when, in reality, most conservatives were claiming that homo-activists were feverishly working through every cultural institution to eradicate conservative views on the nature and morality of homosexuality. In other words, homo-activists were pursuing the hearts and minds of other people’s children.

The same goes for “trans”-activists who, like homo-activists and their ideological allies, are hell-bent on using public schools to pursue the hearts and minds of other people’s children.

These activists teach other people’s children that homoeroticism and biological-sex rejection (i.e., “transgenderism”) are phenomena to be celebrated.

They teach them that there is no difference between a marriage between a man and a woman and an anti-marriage between two people of the same-sex.

They teach them that expressing the belief that homoerotic activity or cross-dressing and bodily mutilation are wrong is equivalent to bullying and the cause of teen suicide.

They teach them that men can be mommies, and women daddies.

They teach them that to be loving, compassionate, and inclusive, they must lie by calling gender-pretending peers by opposite-sex pronouns, and they must be willing to relinquish their privacy.

They expose them to plays, novels, and essays with obscene language that depict deviant sexuality positively.

They teach them that every person who believes homoeroticism and co-ed locker rooms are wrong is hateful—which includes many children’s parents.

Christian parents charged by God to train up their children in the way they should go have no biblical warrant for placing their children all day, all year in schools that refuse to recognize the immutability and profound meaning of sexual differentiation, particularly as it relates to modesty and privacy.

No Christian should teach in an institution that requires them to facilitate the body- and soul-destroying fiction that humans can be born in the “wrong” body.

No Christian teacher should refer to boys and girls by opposite-sex pronouns. If they do, they teach all students that the “trans” ideology is benign at best, if not good. They teach all children that it is justifiable to participate in the grievous fiction that subjective feelings about one’s sex have greater value and import than does one’s objective, immutable sex.

Hawaii just issued guidelines that direct schools on how “trans”-identifying students should be accommodated. The guidelines include the false claim that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibit “discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.” They do not. They prohibit discrimination based on sex and sex did not then, nor does it now include “gender identity” or “gender expression.”

Here are some of the other guidelines:

1.) Schools should accept a student’s “gender identity” based on nothing more than his or her claim. No medical or mental health diagnosis or treatment is necessary.

2.) For students who will be pretending to be the opposite sex at school, there should be a meeting with school officials. Parents need not be included or notified about the meeting or the student’s opposite-sex impersonation. This directive applies to elementary, middle, and high schools.

3.) “Trans”-identifying students should be allowed access to opposite-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and hotel rooms on overnight school-sponsored trips.

4.) Schools should not require “trans”-identifying students to use single-occupancy restrooms or locker rooms.

5.) Schools may not share the true sex of “trans”-identifying students with students of the opposite sex whose privacy they are invading. Nor may schools share this information with the parents of students whose privacy is being invaded. So, a girl who pretends to be a boy should be able to use the boys’ restrooms—where boys use urinals—and no parents may be notified.

6.) Schools should make special accommodations for normal students who don’t want to share restrooms and locker rooms with peers of the opposite sex. In other words, normal girls will be forced out of girls’ restrooms and locker rooms so that boys with a mental disorder may use them.

7.) “Trans”-identifying students should be allowed to play on opposite-sex athletic teams.

8.) Students should be permitted to cross-dress at school.

9.) School staff and faculty should use the “preferred” pronouns of “trans”-identifying and “gender nonconforming” students.

Minnesota has just issued similar guidelines but include this startling statement regarding restrooms, locker rooms, and hotel accommodations for overnight trips:

Privacy objections raised by a [normal] student in interacting with a transgender or gender nonconforming student may be addressed by segregating the student raising the objection provided that the action of the school officials does not result in stigmatizing the transgender and gender nonconforming student. [emphasis added]

So, what exactly will happen if “trans”-identifying students feel “stigmatized” when normal students of the opposite sex don’t want to share restrooms or locker rooms with them? Will normal students be forced to share private facilities with persons of the opposite sex?

The purportedly Catholic governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) just signed a bill into law requiring schools to allow co-ed restrooms and locker rooms, and requiring teachers to refer to “trans”-identifying students by opposite-sex pronouns. The government is requiring teachers to speak falsehoods to and in the presence of children. Will theologically orthodox Christians comply? Will they bear false witness by pretending that boys are girls or vice versa? Will they render unto Caesar that which is not Caesar’s?

These things are happening in public schools all around Illinois, and where they aren’t yet, they will be soon.

Unfortunately for the countless children and teens who attend public schools, the 2017/2018 school year is just around the corner, and like dirty old men in trench coats lying in wait to expose children to sordid things, so too await public school administrators and teachers to do likewise. Unlike perverts who lurk in darkness, however, these government employees have no shame. They do their dirty work of exposing children to wickedness openly and call it “love.”

Listen to this article read by Laurie HERE.

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A concerned parent sent me this. It’s the school newspaper for Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School in Falls Church, Virginia. Among the other hard hitting pieces of journalism targeted at children, ages 11-13, is an article on “transgender rights.”

The article explains how Obama “improved the lives of transgender people by fighting the discrimination against them,” but all of that is now in jeopardy because of President Trump. The next article delves into the intricacies and wonders of various forms of gender identity, including “transgenderism,” “non-binary,” “bigender,” “agender,” “demigender,” “genderfluid,” and “genderflux.” I’m obviously more innocent and naive than the typical middle schooler these days, so I’d never even heard of some of these. For anyone else who may be curious, here’s how the last three types of genders are explained to an audience of pre-pubscent kids:

Demigender: Demigender refers to people who partially identify as one gender. Demigender people may also identify as partially a different gender. Examples include demigirl, or someone who partially identifies as a girl; demiboy, or someone who partially identifies as a boy; demiagender, meaning someone who identifies as partially agender; and more broadly, deminonbinary, or someone who just partially identifies as nonbinary. 

Genderfluid and Genderflux: Genderfluid refers to someone whose gender changes between any of the above categories. For example, someone may feel female one day, male another day, and agender the next day. Similarly, genderflux refers to someone whose gender changes in intensity. This typically means that someone’s gender will fluctuate between agender and a different gender, which could be binary or nonbinary. For example, someone might sometimes feel completely female, sometimes demigender, and sometimes agender.

Did you get all that?

Someone can partially not have a gender, while the other part of them has three genders, and the third part is a futon. These are the notions being implanted in our kids’ heads in their public schools. The average 7th grader in America may not be able do basic arithmetic without a calculator or name the Allied Powers during WW2 or understand the difference between “there” and “their,” but you can bet he’ll be able to identify 112 different genders and explain them in terms explicit enough to make a grown man blush.

If we have not yet reached a point where a mass exodus from the public schools is warranted, when will that point arrive? Are we waiting until they start bringing in nude hermaphrodites to teach sex ed? I suppose even that wouldn’t be enough incentive for some of us. “I can’t shield my kid from what’s going on out there!” “Be in the world, not of the world!” “Naked she-males are a part of life! I can’t keep him in a bubble forever! He’s 9 years old, for God’s sake!”

Look, I know that public school may really be the only option for some people. There are single parents of little economic means who find themselves backed into a corner where government education appears to be the only choice. And if a parent can’t or won’t homeschool, a private Christian education can be prohibitively expensive. Not only that, but some Christians schools are as bad as, or worse than, the average public school. Abandoning the public school system is not an easy thing, and it presents many hurdles that, right now, may be impossible for some people to get over. The collapse of the family unit, not to mention our recent economic woes, have contributed to creating a dependence on public education. Not everyone can break free all at once, I realize.

But we should certainly all agree, at this point, that public school is not an option for those of us who have another feasible option. We should agree that public school is a matter of last resort and necessity. We should agree that public education is inherently hostile to true Christian values, and for that reason it is not anywhere close to the ideal environment for our kids. We should agree on these points. But we still don’t, incredibly.

I had this discussion on Twitter recently, and it prompted several emails from Christian parents who appear to believe that kids should still be sent to public school, even if there are other valid options available. They suggested that, somehow, the sort of madness outlined above could present faith-affirming opportunities for our children, and we would actually be depriving them of something if we did not give them access to those opportunities. They claimed that public school is a “mission field” where our kids can be “salt and light” to their friends. They said that it’s not fair to our kids or our communities if we “shelter” them. They suggested that somehow it’s our children’s duty to minister to the pagan hordes. They said that “the system” needs our kids.

A few responses to this rather confused point of view:

First of all, “the system needs our kids” is just a weird and creepy statement. It reminds me of something someone would say on Black Mirror or the Twilight Zone. Here’s the truth about “the system”: It’s not my job to give it what it needs. Even less is it my kid’s job. There’s nothing in the Bible that says we must dedicate ourselves to maintaining a government-run education system at any cost. My first responsibility is to my family, not to the community or the school system or my kid’s classmates. I will never put the interests of “the system” above that of my own children. Whether “the system” lives or dies is not my concern. My family is my concern. I have an obligation to them, not to the local superintendent.

Second, anyway, if I did put my kids in “the system” for the sake of “the system,” I’m not the one making the sacrifice. I’m forcing my kids to make it. At least face what you’re doing. When it comes down to it, the burden of public schooling is something your child will have to shoulder, not you.

Third, yes, my kids will eventually be exposed to all kinds of strange and terrible things. As much as I’d like to keep them shielded from the evils of the world forever, I know that I can do no such thing. The question is not whether our kids will be exposed to this or that depravity, but when and how and in what context? Are you prepared to trust the school’s judgment on when Junior is ready to learn about concepts like “transgenderism”? Do you trust their judgment on how he learns about it, and what he’s told about it? If you do, I suppose you aren’t even reading this post right now because you’ve been in a vegetative state for the past 30 years.

Fourth, when a kid is sent to public school, he’s expected to navigate and survive and thrive in a hostile, confusing, amoral environment, basically untethered from his parents, 6–8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, for 12 years. Is a child ready for that challenge by the time he’s 5 years old? Is he ready at 8? At 10? No. Our job as parents is to “train them up in the way they should go,” equip them with the armor of God, fortify them in the truth, and then release them into the world. That process has not been completed in conjunction with them first learning how to tie their shoes. I mean, for goodness’ sake, most adults can’t even manage to withstand the hostilities and pressures of our fallen world for that amount of time. And we expect little kids to do it? That’s not fair to them. It’s too much to ask. Way too much. They aren’t equipped, they aren’t ready, they aren’t strong enough, and they will get eaten alive.

Let’s take just this one example of the gender insanity. Our kids, in public school, will be in a world where concepts like “transgenderism” and “demigenderism” are normal, healthy, cool, and rational. They’ll be in a world where even recognizing basic biological realities is considered bigoted and oppressive. They will be in this environment literally from their first day in kindergarten. Can a child spend his entire young life in such an atmosphere and emerge on the other end with his head still on straight? It’s possible, I suppose, but you’ve never had to do that. I didn’t have to do that. I went to public school, but it wasn’t as bad as it is now. So I would be asking my kids to live up to a spiritual and mental and moral challenge that I myself have never endured, and I’ll be asking them to do it every day for 12 years, starting sometime around their 5th birthday.

Not fair. Just not fair.

Fifth, related to the last point, your child is not ready to be a missionary. He cannot be a “witness” to others until he himself has been properly formed in the faith. It’s no surprise that most of the young “missionaries” we commission and send forth to minister to the lost souls in public schools quickly become one of the lost souls. We don’t need to sit around theorizing about whether the missionary approach to education is wise or effective. We already know that it isn’t. The vast majority of the parents who think their kids are being “salt and light” to their peers in school are simply oblivious to the fact that their little Bible warriors have long since defected and joined the heathens. You can hardly blame the kids for this. They’re just kids, after all. They aren’t warriors. Warriors are trained and disciplined. Children are neither of those things. I imagine this is why St. Paul didn’t travel to Athens and Corinth recruiting toddlers to help him carry the Gospel into pagan lands.

Education is supposed to prepare a child to carry the torch of truth.  That is, he’s supposed to be ready to carry it once his education has been completed. This should not be a “throw them into the deep end to see if they can swim” strategy. They can’t swim. You and I can barely swim, morally and spiritually speaking, and we’re adults. Do you expect your child to be more spiritually mature and morally courageous than you?

Now, I do fully believe, ultimately, that our job is to be lights in the darkness. I make that very argument in the last chapter of my book:

All I know is that God put us here to be lights in the darkness, and however dark it gets, our mission does not change. Dostoevsky wrote that stars grow brighter as the night grows darker. So the good news is that we have the opportunity to be the brightest stars for Christ that the world has ever seen, because we may well live through its darkest night. 

But a flame must first be lit, stoked, and protected before it is the bright, raging fire that we all must be if we expect to survive in this culture. Our children’s education is supposed to facilitate that process, not interfere with it. Our children should be fires for Christ because of their education, not in spite of it. We can’t compartmentalize the “spiritual” part of their upbringing, reserve it for evenings and weekends, and allow the lion’s share of their educational experience to be dominated by humanism, hedonism, and godlessness. Education is not supposed to work that way. And it doesn’t really work at all that way, as we’ve seen. Or, if it does work, it is only in cases where the child possesses an almost superhuman level of maturity, intelligence, and moral courage. And maybe some children really are almost superhuman in that way. But most of them aren’t, yours probably aren’t, and you probably aren’t. That’s just the reality of the situation, and we have to deal with it. I find it ironic that so many parents who expect their children to “face the realities of the world” have not faced it themselves.

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This article was originally posted at TheBlaze.com