The Morning Briefing: Educators Are Nervous About Kids Being Away From Public School Indoctrination During Shutdown

We Have Come for Your Children

The past couple of months have certainly been a time of many adjustments for a lot of Americans. Some of us — like myself — haven’t really had our daily routines upset. My child is finishing up college and heading into whatever the real world will look like after.

Parents with younger children who are in school, however, have had new reality thrust upon them. Their kids are home, restless, and still need to learn. Twentieth-century technology is making it easier to set up online learning, but that can still be a little glitchy. There are a lot of teachers who aren’t very tech-savvy, which can bog down the process.

Either way, many parents are becoming more involved in their kids’ daily education than they’d perhaps ever planned to be.

Whether reluctant or enthusiastic new homeschooling parents, they’re going to be on the job for at least the rest of the school year. Who knows what is going to happen in the fall? We’re all hoping for the best, but many experts predict a second wave of infections in the fall, which could further disrupt school schedules.

All of this time away from the public school indoctrination mills is making some modern educators nervous. Mustn’t let the wee ones get too much exposure to mom and dad now, after all.

We were only a couple of weeks into the shut-down stuff when the Washington Post published an article written by a former teacher and education bureaucrat titled “Homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children.”

As the coronavirus pandemic closes schools, in some cases until September, American children this month met their new English, math, science and homeroom teachers: their iPads and their parents. Classes are going online, if they exist at all. The United States is embarking on a massive, months-long virtual-pedagogy experiment, and it is not likely to end well. Years of research shows that online schooling is ineffective — and that students suffer significant learning losses when they have a long break from school.

Modern American public educators are always touting studies that claim they need to get their indoctrinating leftist paws on our children as early and often as possible. To hear them tell the story, a kid doesn’t stand a chance unless they get passed directly from the womb into the hands of strangers and left there until they finish college. My book Don’t Let the Hippies Shower examines and mocks this at length.

All of this hands-on parental stuff has the indoctrination machine terribly skittish. They fear that all of the brainwashing will be lost.

Harvard Magazine just published a piece covering an idea being pushed by some lunatic named Elizabeth Bartholet, who is calling for a ban on homeschooling now, which Paula wrote about yesterday:

It’s ironic at a time when 56 million children in the U.S. are being homeschooled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that Harvard Magazine would publish an article calling for a ban on homeschooling.

The article by Erin O’Donnell, headlined “The Risks of Homeschooling,” sets up one straw man after another to make the case that the government must step in to protect children from their own parents—who are presumed guilty and ill-qualified to care for their own children.

Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, told the magazine that homeschooling deprives children of their right to a “meaningful education.” She cites no law that requires a child to receive a “meaningful” education (because there is no such law in the U.S.) but defines it thusly: “But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.” (Nothing about reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic in her formula, it ought to be noted.)

Paula easily debunks Bartholet’s nonsense, which is unhinged and rooted in that academic disdain for church-y, family types.

What’s got some educators nervous is that they might be exposed. We may soon find out that American kids can, in fact, do very well without eight hours away from their parents every day and having their minds molded by some of the most far-left ideologues in the country.

Maybe we should ban Harvard instead.

I Feel Ya

Don’t have the volume too loud for this. I warned you.

I’ve watched this 10 times and it just gets better every time. pic.twitter.com/AwzdPUGBFQ

— luke i am your mother (@MommaUnfiltered) April 19, 2020

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Smells Like Onion

CDC Releases Instructions For All Americans To Make Their Own Hospitals https://t.co/aaAQS67uMc pic.twitter.com/WmBsGc5Gl0

— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 19, 2020

The Kruiser Kabana

Ancient Historical Artifacts – Virtual Tour – Your Museum from Homehttps://t.co/aj7KZ1Jv0R

— Joy of Museums 🌐 (@joyofmuseums) April 20, 2020

I don’t remember if we’ve done this one before but it’s a good way to start off the week.

I’m slowly reopening my mind.

___

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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear every Tuesday and Friday.