My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students’ development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently.

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home.

One of my favorite projects that I assign each year is to my 10th grade students, who do in-depth research on any culture of their choosing. It culminates in a day of presentations. I encourage them to bring in music, props, food—whatever they need to immerse their classmates in their specific culture. A lot of my students give presentations on their own heritage. A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was one of the best days that I can remember. She was proud to share her story—she had struggled with homesickness—and her classmates got a lesson in empathy. Now, my students simply prepare a slideshow and email it to me individually.

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren’t even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that’s forbidden. Younger children are expected to follow the “mask off, voices off” rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other’s houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical.

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

Around this time of year, we start planning for the prom, which is held in June. Usually, my students would already be chatting constantly about who’s asking who, what they’re planning on wearing, and how excited they are. This year, they’ve barely discussed it at all. When they do, they tell me that they don’t want to get their hopes up, since they’re assuming it will get cancelled like it has for the past couple of years.

It’s the same deal with universities. My students say, “If university is going to be just like this then what’s the point?” I have my own children, a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son, who have spent almost a third of their lives in lockdown. They’ve become so used to cancellations that they don’t even feel disappointed anymore.

I think all of my students are angry to some degree, but I hear it most from the kids who are athletes. They were told that if they got the vaccine, everything would go back to normal, and they could go back to the rink or the court. Some sports were back for a while but, as of Christmas, because of the recent wave of Covid-19 cases, club and varsity sports are all cancelled once again. A lot of the athletes are missing chances to get seen by coaches and get scholarships.

I try to take time at the beginning of class to ask my kids how they’re doing. Recently, one of my 11th grade students raised his hand and said that he wasn’t doing well, that he doesn’t want to keep living like this, but that he knows that no one is coming to save them. The other kids all nodded in agreement. They feel lied to—and I can’t blame them.

What’s most worrisome to me is that they feel deep worry and shame over the prospect of breaking the rules.

Teenage girls are notoriously empathetic. I see that many of my students, but especially the female ones, feel a heavy burden of responsibility. Right before Christmas, one of my brightest 12th graders confided in me that she was terrified of taking her mask off. She told me that she didn’t want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying.

What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven’t had to wear masks at school and haven’t seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule?

But I am expected to enforce the rules.

At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends. We kept hearing, “They’ll be fine. They’re resilient.” It’s true that humans, by nature, are very resilient. But they also break. And my students are breaking. Some have already broken.

When we look at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of history, I believe it will be clear that we betrayed our children. The risks of this pandemic were never to them, but they were forced to carry the burden of it. It’s enough. It’s time for a return to normal life and put an end to the bureaucratic policies that aren’t making society safer, but are sacrificing our children’s mental, emotional, and physical health.

Our children need life on the highest volume. And they need it now.

Stacey Lance

It is now a quantifiable fact that school closures do more harm than good. We have test scores, increased suicide rates, mental health decreases, and more warning signals from the New York Times to the Democrats. We know that prolonged closures adversely affect our children and that the unions in Chicago and elsewhere pushing for remote learning are doing everything they can to keep children out of schools.null

While the mental, academic, and social health of all of our children is important, there is a demographic of students who suffer the most: Children with special needs.

Students who fall on the autism spectrum, students who need accommodations, and students who generally just need extra support in the classroom are now left without because there is no classroom to be in and no help at home. While no one knows their child and his or her needs better than their parents, and the parents can provide some support at home, there are very talented, very well trained professionals at school who have dedicated their lives to helping these students get the most out of an education system that is built for the average, everyday kid – not the kid with exceptionalities.

Sometimes, these professionals and the services a school district provides are the only things standing between a student with special needs and the system leaving them behind.

This isn’t just about coursework, either. School is sometimes the only other place besides home where a child learns social cues, human interaction, and healthy emotional development. I’ve written about this before, but it’s especially true for these students. You have to have human interaction outside of your family in order to develop socially and emotionally, and for many students with needs beyond what the average student requires, school is the place where not just their social and emotional development, but indeed their very understanding of even basic social cues, can occur.

Students who are on the spectrum, for example, can struggle a lot with this. Others, kids with physical barriers like poor vision or hearing, need to be trained to pick up on things that most kids can easily interpret. Then, there are professionals in speech development who can offer the training students need to overcome speech barriers – training that parents may struggle to teach or may not have time to give in the midst of everything else that is part of parenting.

If you have never had the opportunity to work with or see some of these children in a school setting, what you have not witnessed is both the struggle that can take place and the absolute perseverance of these children. They fight, at times much harder than anyone will ever truly know, and when they find their success and achieve their goals it is one of the best moments you can witness in a child’s life.

But unions are pushing to close schools again. They defy the science. They defy the data. These are people who are fine with kids learning remotely or not learning at all (and, oftentimes, there isn’t much difference) because teaching while people are getting sick is just such a hassle.

Remote/virtual learning is not an education plan. It is, at best, a temporary solution that can be implemented on a school-by-school basis. It is not something that makes sense for entire school systems to adopt long term or for unions to push for. It actively hurts our kids, and while some can handle it in the long run, our most vulnerable children suffer when these decisions are made. That is unacceptable for a profession that is supposed to be serving these children.

Joe Cunningham

Readers likely are familiar with the bleak state of American higher education. The U.S. spends more per student than most of its peers, yet comparative-academic-proficiency studies from the Pew Foundation and others consistently rank us in the middle or bottom rungs. Literacy rates are lower today than in 1840, well before the imposition of compulsory public education. University campuses have become pedagogic citadels of woke-ism. What is less understood is the degree to which these same forces have invaded the nation’s primary and secondary public schools.

From Loudoun County to Cupertino, the K-12 public-education system is subverting our shared welfare. A vast array of public and private forces—legislatures, teachers unions, school boards, curriculum providers, and monied special-interest groups—are working in unison to advance a worldview hostile to traditional American values. The evidence for this is legion, and reveals itself in three interconnected threats: sex and gender theory, critical race theory, and replacement parenting.

Sex and gender theory comes in many guises but is centered around the separation of biology from personal identity. This messaging begins in kindergarten, where children are sometimes exposed to cartoon instructional books like Who Are You?: The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity. Teachers tell impressionable children, “Babies can’t talk, so grown-ups make a guess [about their gender] by looking at their bodies.”

This is followed in later grades with books like My Princess Boy and Jacob’s New Dress, and graphical tools like “The Gender Unicorn” to cement the illusion that chromosomes and body parts are irrelevant. At the same time, state legislatures are passing non-discrimination laws allowing students to access school bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identity. Teachers are being ordered to use students’ preferred gender pronouns under threat of dismissal, furthering the lie that biology is irrelevant.

But an equally dangerous goal of sex and gender theory is to sexualize children. What was once known simply as “sex ed” has morphed into “comprehensive sexuality education.” Teaching tools like “It’s Perfectly Normal,” a book meant for ten-year-olds, contain realistic depictions of fully exposed child genitals and sex acts.

Schools today not only promote child sexuality, they facilitate off-campus sex-related medical services for their minor charges. Under California’s Assembly Bill 1184, recently signed into law by Governor Newsom, the first time parents are notified that their child has received such “sensitive services” could be when the bill shows up in the mail.

Then there’s critical race theory, the now-ubiquitous subject that galvanized Virginia’s “domestic terrorists” (parents) and kept Terry McAuliffe out of the Governor’s Mansion. Why the uproar? As Virginia’s parents discovered, CRT is a thinly veiled form of cultural Marxism.

As first reported by Christopher Rufo, in Cupertino, light-skinned elementary school kids are taught to “deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to power and privilege.” Similar kinds of exercises are occurring across the nation. Under CRT, representative democracy and capitalism are taught as tools of white patriarchy. Indeed, the tactics employed to advance the CRT worldview reminds one of the Soviet era joke, “The future we know. It’s the past that keeps changing.” An example is the “1619 Project,” which, although widely discredited, is being pressed into service by public schools in an effort to “reframe” the Declaration of Independence, the War of Independence, and the Constitution as racist machinations of the oppressor class.

Finally, there is replacement parenting, otherwise known as social & emotional learning (SEL). While parents may have resigned themselves to schools acting in loco parentis, SEL takes it to the extreme. Far from being concerned with cultivating traditional conceptions of character and virtue, the goal of SEL is to “mitigate the interrelated legacies of racial and class oppression in the U.S. and globally.” It seeks to “critically examine root causes of inequity” and develop “justice-oriented, global citizens.” In furtherance of these aims, schools have assumed the authority to engage in woke therapy sessions through topics like “self-awareness,” “relationship skills” and “responsible decision making.”

As SEL advocate Dena Simmons put it, “What’s the point of teaching children about conflict resolution skills, if we’re not talking about the conflicts that exist because of racism or white supremacy?” But SEL goes even further: It invades the recesses of a child’s inner life and records what’s discovered there through intimate surveys, family-life assessments, and class exercises designed to achieve doctrinal assent to the ever-evolving demands of social justice.

What’s behind all this? It’s not a secret. The purpose of public-school education is to indoctrinate future generations into a new orthodoxy, a replacement worldview for the beliefs that animated previous generations of Americans. Sex-ed promoter SIECUS, for example, openly advertises its aim: “Sex Ed for Social Change.” This new orthodoxy is religious in nature, with its own dogmas and practices. Metaphysical claims are supported with appeals to “ancestral” and even pagan roots. California’s version of CRT (“ethnic studies“), encourages teachers to guide children in chants to Mayan and Aztec deities. Utterly rejected, of course, is anything resembling the biblical worldview upon which all of western culture developed and advanced, along with its derivative concepts: the nuclear family, liberal democracy, capitalism, and equal protection under law.

If politics is downstream from culture, and culture from people’s personal beliefs, then America’s public schools turning into ideological indoctrination camps is a flashing red signal. How long our civilization can survive such intellectual and moral nihilism is open to debate. But as Lincoln is said to have warned, “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

In 1943 the Supreme Court was asked to decide if public schools could force children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This was in the middle of the Second World War, a time of fervent patriotism. Notwithstanding, writing for the majority, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word their faith therein.” Perhaps it’s time that public schools were reminded of this.

Mark R. Schneider is a California attorney and founder of the non-profit Protect Our Kids, whose mission is to educate parents about the scope and dangers of the public-school system.

Another school shooting … this time at a high school in Michigan.

Remember when these incidents used to be horrifying, and big news? They’re still every bit as horrifying for the individuals involved. But they’re no longer news. Other than more fodder for totalitarian media and government to say it’s time for mass gun confiscation. (Good luck with that, tyrants).

Since government-run schools are either unable or unwilling to ensure even minimal safety — for DECADES now — then why don’t we defund them all? And let parents and innovators in PRIVATE education figure out better ways. Millions of us are mortally petrified at even the mention of the word “flu”. Aren’t these schools way, way more dangerous?

#ShutThemDown

America’s crumbling education system is in the news. On October 5th, Joe Biden managed to disgorge some dismal indicators as to the future prospects of America’s youth compared to the rest of the developed world.

Joe didn’t quite say it, but America’s kids, the product of an obscenely well-funded school system, rank last in the developed world in reading, writing, and math, making homegrown imbecility a far more pressing problem in modern-day America than homegrown terrorism.

Yet conservatives have kept insisting, throughout the Covid lockdowns and quarantines, that kids were missing out on an education because they were out of school.

To paraphrase Joan Rivers, how can you miss out on a rash? (When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her music, the great, late, lady Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.)

A particularly startling fact caught my attention in the Economist . “At 15, children in Massachusetts, where education standards are higher than in most states, are so far behind their counterparts in Shanghai at math, that it would take them more than two years of regular education to catch up.”

This last fact is enormously telling and alarming. It tells you that America’s best schools and students can’t compete with the world’s best.

As the author further quipped cynically, “American children came top at thinking they were good at math, but bottom at math.”

There’s no doubt that American kids are drowning in self-esteem. As someone who had warned, in the early 2000s, about unrealistic, dangerous levels of self-esteem—I would contend that inflated self-esteem and narcissism not only mask failure, but create pumped up nihilists, ready to unleash on their surrounds, unless met with palliative praise.

Yes, self-esteem is the royal jelly upon which America’s children are raised. Our child-centered, non-hierarchical, collaborative, progressive schooling has produced kids who do not believe they can and should be corrected; and when corrected lash out in anger or bewilderment.

Indeed, to listen to our university students speak—is to hear a foreboding amalgam of dumbness and supreme confidence combined. Yet they are often high achievers in the kind of schools “tailored” for just such sub-par output. The achievement Bell Curve has been skewed.

With welcome exceptions, the young can hardly string together coherent, grammatical sentences. They open their mouths and out tumble nothing but inane, mind-numbing cliches and banalities spoken in gravelly, grating, staccato tones. Vocal fry, the linguists call this loathsome sound.

Once upon a time, linguists would have sent our Eliza Doolittles for elocution lessons. Make her sound less rough, more refined.

Eliza, of “My Fair Lady” fame, was treated paternalistically, no doubt. Pedagogic paternalism can be fixed; not so a student’s studied ignorance. And these days, the Kardashian-style guttural growl is considered precious. Linguists name it and study it, instead of crushing it.

In fairness to the kids, anyone under 50 seems to be similarly afflicted: This cohort can’t use tenses, prepositions, and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase, or conjugate verbs correctly. Has anyone noticed that the past perfect tense is dead in our country? People will relate that they “had went” to school or “had came back from the cinema.” Pidgin English is what the young, high-school graduate now speaks.

Inanities and redundancies make their way into compositions, too, where sentences are audaciously prefaced with, “I feel like”:

“Like, I want to give back.”

“Like, I want to make the world a better place.”

“I feel like, it’s important to love myself” (teaching textbook narcissism).

“I feel like, we need to unite.”

“Like, follow your passion.”

Hallmark cards are edgier, more original, and intuitively truer than the monolithic minds of America’s young, and those who’ve raised and taught them.

Clearly, people even more illiterate than the students are setting these sub-standards, giving kids A’s for output that showcases an inability to distill, summarize and generate ideas, and ethically cite sources. In use is only the most rudimentary, emotionally evocative language, for lack of a solid, ever-accreting vocabulary, higher-order thinking, and proper restraint in effect.

As to restraint: Not coincidentally, an asphyxiating hysteria simmers beneath the surface of the prose to match the vapid vocabulary, whereby breathy figures of speech are deployed to fit a febrile, emotionally overwrought state-of-mind:

“Unbelievable, incredibly embarrassing, amazing, OMG!” In short, exclamatory utterances.

As to edginess: America’s young have not been given the analytical tools with which to question received opinion. And, in tackling the “tyranny and arrogant authority” tied to Covid and Critical Race Theory, the kids have been mostly establishment-compliant: 40% of millennials favor the suppression of insensitive speech. It is the oldies who’ve stood up. Young people have, sadly, been readily inclined to accept and follow authority’s orders at all time.

Language mediates thought—and actions. You cannot express or develop worthwhile thoughts without a command of the language.

I feel for the kids. They are not to blame. Their arrogant ignorance, inculcated in schools, is carefully cultivated and then reinforced with incontinent praise from pedagogues and parents alike, from K to university.

Progressive schools and teachers—overseen by teachers’ unions—are responsible for the quantifiable rot; for the monument-smashing, monumental ignorance among America’s youth.

As to the formative figures in the child’s life. More shocking numbers: “Less than half (48%) of all American adults were proficient readers in 2017. American fourth graders (nine-to ten-year-olds) rank 15th on the Progress in International Literacy Study, an international exam.”

“And only 12% [of us] are considered by the country’s health department to be ‘health-literate’. Over one-third struggle with basic health tasks, such as following prescription-drug directions.” The numbers come via the Economist.

Conservatives like Candace Owens have equated keeping kids out of school with keeping kids dumb and compliant. How is that so, if schools are producing kids this banal, boorish and bossy?

**

WATCH: “American Kids Come Top At THINKING They’re Good At Math, But Bottom At Math, Reading, Writing”

Gabriel Gipe, AP Government Teacher, Inderkum High School: “I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries…Scare the f*ck out of them.”

Gipe: “I’m probably as far left as you can go.”

Gipe: “I post a calendar every week…I’ve had students show up for protests, community events, tabling, food distribution, all sorts of things…When they go, they take pictures, write up a reflection — that’s their extra credit.”

Gipe: “So, they [students] take an ideology quiz and I put [the results] on the [classroom] wall. Every year, they get further and further left…I’m like, ‘These ideologies are considered extreme, right? Extreme times breed extreme ideologies.’ Right? There is a reason why Generation Z, these kids, are becoming further and further left.”

Gipe: “I have an Antifa flag on my [classroom] wall and a student complained about that — he said it made him feel uncomfortable. Well, this [Antifa flag] is meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable, so if you feel uncomfortable, I don’t really know what to tell you. Maybe you shouldn’t be aligning with the values that this [Antifa flag] is antithetical to.”

Gipe: “Like, why aren’t people just taking up arms? Like why can’t we, you know — take up arms against the state? We have historical examples of that happening, and them getting crushed and being martyrs for a cause and it’s like — okay well, it’s slow going because it takes a massive amount of organization.”

Gipe: “I think that for [left-wing] movements in the United States, we need to be able to attack both [cultural and economic] fronts. Right? We need to create parallel structures of power because we cannot rely on the state…Consistently focusing on education and a change of cultural propaganda. We have to hit both fronts. We have to convince people that this is what we actually need.”

Gipe: “There are three other teachers in my department that I did my credential program with — and they’re rad. They’re great people. They’re definitely on the same page.”

Gipe: “Sacramento, as a city itself, is incredibly diverse. But we’re surrounded by a bunch of right-wing rednecks.”

[SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Aug. 31, 2021] Project Veritas released shocking new video today of California AP Government teacher, Gabriel Gipe, boasting about politically indoctrinating his students at Inderkum High School.

Lyrics from Pink Floyd’s song seem to be talking about Critical Race Theory, i.e., what passes for “education” in today’s thought control mills, government-run schools:

We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason