Mama, What's a Drag Queen?
Schools and television are pushing some creepy and weird things onto kids, and it's not okay
The fight over k-12 education has come to such a fever pitch the school board members are being recalled from their positions even in deep blue cities like San Francisco. The reaction from school officials has been harsher than anyone could have expected, going far beyond simply ejecting concerned parents from school board meetings (which was only step number one).
School officials in California and New Jersey were caught mocking and belittling parents concerned over school closures. In Michigan and Arizona school administrators were caught making lists of undesirable parents and monitoring their social media.
If treating parents like criminals for showing up and voicing their outrage was step one, the natural step two was to actually turn these parents into criminals.
But what has parents so up in arms? What has teachers, administrators, and big government so ready to man the defenses?
In many ways the situation that parents have found themselves in is like the frog in the pot of boiling water. But, modern biologists will tell you that the allegory of the boiling frog is based on a myth, that as the water gets too hot, the frog will realize that something is wrong, and leap to safety. Similarly, many parents are now waking up to the reality that their kids are not being brought up in a way that they like.
This goes beyond concerns over the efficacy of how kids are being taught (though that certainly is a factor). These debates transcend prior ones over common core or SAT standards. Many parents are rightfully angered about the things that are being poorly taught, or the things that aren’t being taught at all. But, what is now angering parents the most is what is being taught in the place of these things.
The real fuel behind current educational reform movements is not academic, but moral. This is true for two of the top three issues that parents are most concerned about. It could be argued that concerns over covid restrictions leveled at school children are purely academic (though I believe there is a moral component in this as well in the Platonic sense) but there is no argument that once parents started paying attention to the problems in academics, their eyes were opened to a host of issues far worse than confusion when it comes to adding sums.
Covid restrictions forced parents out of complacency by putting them at the direct center of their child’s education, often watching over their child’s shoulder or listening from the next room as kids attended remote learning. And, what they witnessed horrified them.
The quality was bad. Under remote learning test scores fell across the board which led to widespread demands from parents to reopen schools. Parents had woken up.
So when children (many of whom remained forcibly masked) started to return to the classrooms, is it any surprise that their parents were paying closer attention than they had in the past? The culture had shifted.
These are parents who may have been involved in their children’s education before, trends of parent participation before the pandemic were strong. But now parents who were used to casually perusing their kids’ homework and reading assignments were now looking closer. And, what they were seeing much different than anything that they had seen before. Radically different.
The culture had shifted among teachers as well.
The debate over transgender bathrooms dates all the way back to the Obama days and schools in places like Fairfax County, Virginia and the State of California were incorporating radical gender theory into curriculum not soon after. Pushback against California’s curriculum changes led to a book on crossdressing for kindergarteners being pulled, but the basic framework remained. The water got a little hotter.
It’s not hard to see why more parents didn’t have their hackles raised over the issue earlier, polling at the time showed most Americans relatively divided on the issue. But, opinions since that time seem to have shifted.
These are views that didn’t shift on their own. They changed in response to repeated incidents of sexual violence perpetrated by people who identified as transgender, often against children, and often taking place inside of bathrooms. In fact, one of the pieces of evidence cited by the National School Board Association in their letter to the Department of Justice naming concerned parents as domestic terrorists was a man who was arrested on camera at a Loudoun County, Virginia public school board meeting.
As it turns out, the reason that the man joined other concerned parents at the school board meeting that evening was to speak out against transgender restroom policies because his own daughter had been raped in a campus bathroom by a boy claiming to be “gender fluid.” The boy was quietly transferred from school to school, where he was able to commit multiple sexual assaults. He was later removed from the sex offender registry.
In Southern California, parents were outraged to learn that gender-bending camp counselors had spent the night sleeping in the same cabins as students of the opposite biological sex at a school sponsored event.
More and more, parents are learning with shock exactly what their children’s schools are allowing to happen. But, these things are not happening in a vacuum. These events are all occurring with an intellectual cover that allows these schools, and the predators utilizing them, to justify taking radical steps. And, it is a mindset that they are intent on passing on to the students under their care.
More educators are pushing for material directly related to sexuality, especially abnormal expressions of sexuality, to younger and younger students, even in private schools.
Another method that teachers employ to manipulate students is to try to create and feed into an adversarial relationship between parents and their children. Like Satan whispering to Eve that forbidden knowledge was being kept from them, hoarded away jealously by an overbearing authoritarian with the wrong ideas about what’s right.
One example of this is “book banning.” The sell from teachers packages these two powerful notions together; the idea that these “banned books” are powerful tomes, and that even if they are actually the trash that their parents claim to be then these parents are effectively belittling their children when deciding in what instances they wont be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Despite the fact that many of the books targeted are written by mal-adjusted adults for the purpose of communicating their own values to impressionable minds.
So, are the kids alright? Well, it depends on which metric you’re looking at. Academically, it is a wash. Teen scores in history and mathematics have remained relatively unchanged for the past decade-and-a-half. But at the same time, national identity is at an all-time low, with only 31% of teens asked in a Harvard poll responding that America is the greatest country in the world. This is the product of a largely anti-western point of view that we are beginning to see dominate interpretations of history, many of which have their roots in Marxist dialecticism.
Despite sex education that has come to essentially endorse and promote hook-up culture, along with a pop-media that does the same, teens are actually having less sex than their previous cohorts.
Pro-celibacy movements are actually gaining steam amongst teens, while at the same time religiosity and the desire to have children are both dropping.
How do you make sense out of this seemingly conflicting data? The reality is that kids of any age are not blank slates. Plato was closer to the truth than Locke; humans, and all animals, come into this world with inborn knowledge that comes from the basic consistency and discernibility of the universe, and the functions of our form within it. This is true for both physical principals, and moral ones as well.
Saint John Henry Newman said “Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” And evidence proves him out. But a thing which is trained is strengthened, and a thing which is not trained becomes atrophied, and is more likely to fail.
There is a two-fold problem facing young people. The most immediate problem, though threat is the more accurate term, are the educators who actively seek to poison their minds with racial animosity that has it’s roots in Soviet propaganda and sexual messages often concocted by pedophiles for the purpose of making kids more vulnerable to confusion and abuse.
But perhaps the longer-term problem is what has gone missing: an education in virtue ethics based around moral absolutes.