Americans have spoken with their refutation of the Division, Exclusion, and Inequality religion taking over our culture and our schools. Parents rejected leftist gender ideology, critical race theory, and pornography in our schools to support girls-only locker rooms and their hard-won Title IX sports. But the war is far from won.
To preserve our traditional (read, Christian) values, we must examine how we arrived where we are today. We can celebrate our small victories against the Bud Lights and Targets, but the fervent battles for the hearts and minds of our children continue inside our schools.
According to a Times article about the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card), “For the first time, a third of eighth-grade students scored below basic in reading, meaning they lack the ability to make ‘simple inferences and interpretations’ about a text. Lower-performing students received the worst reading scores in the past 32 years.” (Italics the author’s.) But children do learn in school that cutting off body parts will somehow make them feel whole.
We currently spend more per student than almost any other country to achieve these discouraging results. Why are we fighting to preserve such a spectacularly failing institution, while the world sprints past us?
Because we’ve been schooled to think school is good. That’s the resounding mantra we all ingested during our own K-12 indoctrination—16,000 hours of training. They say it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, and our schools have effectively mastered us into submission, servitude, and steadfastness. Like a new religion. The school religion.
Schools are where we all learned to trust the experts, the educators-as-high-priests, so it’s nearly unthinkable to repudiate the efficacy or validity of our factory schools and teachers.
For decades, schools have catechized us in college prep and career readiness (read: financial success). This new creed replaced the God of the Bible and The Golden Rule with Money and Darwinism (“survival of the fittest”). Where in previous decades America revered integrity, independence, self-sacrifice, entrepreneurship, and innovation, now the culture praises money, focusing on self-esteem, standardization, institutions, and career. Economic pursuits replaced character development and encouraged delaying family. This devalued the family, relationships, and community. And the money is all-important now in our culture. It’s the new god to be worshipped – in music, the media, everywhere. Even Speaker Mike Johnson “has sympathy” for congresspeople breaking the law with insider trading. Money and success are now woven together like two beams of a crucifix.
No wonder parents happily sacrifice their children on the school’s altar, despite all obvious dangers. Save the schools, or my child will not succeed!
As parents witnessed the perverse nature of our school/religion, the pornography, abysmal academic performance, and abject ignorance about what’s true, their dogmatic faith in that sacred fiction has recently, finally, dislodged, and we can (and should) criticize our schools.
The teacher's unions’ Marxist principles directly contradict traditional American values, but with their market stranglehold, they can afford to ignore our condemnation. Inflicting that evil doctrine on impressionable minds is their second incentive to preserve their institutions. (Their primary is, of course, money.)
We are now in a race to see who converts the culture first, but if we continue submitting our children for their indoctrination, we will soon reach the tipping point where our own offspring will vote down the Second Amendment for a surveillance state. They will ignorantly “choose safety over freedom and have neither.” (HT: Ben Franklin.) And while laws may countermand the Marxist mantra, ideological teachers don’t heed the law. Religion is funny that way.
The future is uncertain, and foundational transformation is the only way to prosper. That’s why Trump’s proffered tax credits for families with school-aged children offer a viable solution. Putting government funds (and oversight) into private school options only serves to expand governmental reach, which is what got us into this mess in the first place. Government has always been at odds with Christianity. Tax credits might afford parents more flexibility to raise and educate their children without the strings of government coercion, the failed paradigm of our schools.
The most radical idea in education is reverting to first principles, i.e., training the student to teach himself. This is how education used to work, before we began our modern factory school experiment. It is how the genius founders – those autodidacts who devised our representational republic that so few of our citizens currently acknowledge – became educated.
The education revolution begins with recognition that it doesn’t take an “expert” to train a child to be an adult; parents should do that. Most parents are smarter than their children’s teachers and have values to impart to their kids. Academic outcome for the homeschooled child has no correlation to the parents’ level of schooling. Ultimately, all wisdom is self-taught or goes unlearned, and children need wisdom more than they need to drill math facts, memorize dates, or learn about lubrication and same-sex attraction.
Parents want a better path forward for their children’s futures and their families, and home education offers that, but only by remaining independent of governmental overreach and the religion of money. Many parents still feel enslaved to the system and its past self-proclaimed glory, blindly following like the Jonestown settlers.
Independent-minded parents choose home education instead to foster in their children a devotion to truth, appreciation for wisdom, and the love of freedom, as much as to reject the cult of our modern schools.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to dismantle the Department of Education and ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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