It is graduation season. This academic year (and the one preceding it) has been rough on students and parents alike. If you have not been paying attention here are a few examples of what we’ve learned is taking place in your local public school. (For the sake of brevity I left out the issues of masking and forced vaccination with an experimental drug. I don’t want to go from preachin’ to meddlin’ as my Baptist friends used to say.)

RACIST INDOCTRINATION

• Critical Race Theory (CRT), which holds that American institutions and culture are systemically racist and categorizes people as either victims or oppressors based on skin color is being taught in K-12 schools across the country. 
• In Cupertino, Calif., an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
• In Springfield, Mo., a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.”

GROOMING

• This week it was reported that at least 135 teachers had been charged with sex crimes in 2022 alone. 
• The Santa Barbara Unified School District turned students over to an activist named  Jennifer Freed. Her program gathers students into circles alongside adults to share intimate details of their lives. Ms. Freed is a “certified astrologer & psychotherapist” who tells people she can understand them based on “cosmic DNA.” Some circles focus on the sex lives of the high schoolers. “I had great sexual experiences with guys in junior high and high school,” Freed said in an interview with the popular sex tips podcast Sex With Emily. “We do an after-school group for young women called Sexual Wisdom, and one for guys… they bond to each other as educators and learners, because as they get a consciousness about their power of being sexual beings.”

This is not a post-COVID phenomenon.

• A draft report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education concluded that far too little is known about the prevalence of sexual misconduct by teachers or other school employees, but estimates that millions of children are being affected by it during their school-age years. That report was done in 2004. 

• Extrapolating from data collected in a national survey for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000 it is estimated that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee from 1991 to 2000. Those figures suggest that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests,” contended Carol Shakeshaft, who is a professor of educational administration at Hofstra, in Hempstead, N.Y.

• Ms. Shakeshaft also wrote this report about sexual abuse in schools in 2003. She concluded with this statement, “The actions . . . of policy makers and administrators indicate that they care more about the rights of adults than the safety of children. As a result, educator sexual abuse continues to be a component of life in schools.” [emphasis mine]

It took until this Spring for one state—Florida—to say, “You know, maybe, we should hold off on discussing sexuality with kids until after they hit fourth grade” and even that tepid step was considered controversial in much of the country. Almost as bad as the wailing agains the law were the reactions of people who think delaying the sexual grooming of children by public employees until kids turn ten years old is a victory.  

Violence

From a November 2021 article in Education Week:

• There have been 116 school shootings since 2018 in which at least one person killed or wounded
• 67 people have been  killed and 210 wounded in school shootings since 2018

The criteria for school shooting used by Education Week are more restrictive than other collections. It includes only those incidents that take place during school hours or events, on school property, and in which at least one individual is wounded by a bullet.

• In Anchorage, Alaska, fights and assaults are making up more of the suspensions issued so far this year. 
• A brawl and stabbing in an Annapolis, Md., high school led to seven juvenile arrests. 
• Pupils damaged elementary classrooms in Vermont (Vermont!) overturning furniture and supply bins.
• In Shreveport, Louisiana, a group of fathers are now taking shifts greeting students at the high school after 23 students were arrested in a one-week period.

ACADEMIC FAILURE

• In a Baltimore high school, a GPA of 0.13 places you nearly in the top half of your class. 

• Remember this television special from 2006? I do. It delivered this line from a high school student in an “above average” New Jersey high school, “I don’t think we’re stupider.” My family was two years into homeschooling when I watched that show. I was wondering if I had made the right decision to homeschool. That sixty minutes of television convinced me I was on the right course. 

• Anecdotally, in the last month, I’ve had conversations with recent college graduates who are teachers where I had to help one teacher pronounce the word “Chevrolet” and help another teacher read the number 106,713. Both were earnest young women who probably went into teaching because they want to help young people. Unfortunately, they are part of the recently miseducated who need remedial help themselves. Neither one teaches in a “bad neighborhood” or a “bad school”. 

Stand Up, Speak Out, Comply?

Some mothers have caught a whiff of the stench emanating from their local school and reacted. These mothers (right after picking up their children from school)  have shown up to school board meetings and delivered heated denunciations of school board officials. They have taken to social media to decry what a hellhole the public school their child attends is. Right after they get home from dropping their little one off at the abominable and malicious school they start typing on their public diaries (I can’t believe my son’s school is. . . )

A (very) few fathers have shown up to school board meetings and made rousing speeches about the racist, pro-pedophilia stance of the teachers at their local school Then the next morning they’ve made sure their children are up on time so as not to be late for class at that same school. 

A friend of mine has called that the Stand Up-Speak Out-Comply routine. Give a speech that goes viral then send your kid right back to the clutches of the institution you just condemned. The likes and views on Social Media let the parents know they made a difference. 

Yes, I know. I go too far. I paint with too broad a brush.  It has been widely reported that parents have removed over one million students from public schools and not all the schools are bad I’m assured.  

Let me tell you something.  To me, one million kids leaving public school and  the ”Not all” argument sound like good reasons to burn down the entire public education system. 

Listen to yourself if you are someone who makes that argument:

“Not all teachers are queer.”

“Not all teachers are groomers.

“Not all teachers are hot for racist indoctrination.”

“Not all teachers were “C” average Education majors.”

“Not all teachers send their own children to private school.”

Imagine listening to me telling you when my step-father was dying of lung cancer  that “not all” of his cells were malfunctioning—his legs and arms were working fine.  Imagine thinking that one million people giving up a free service is proof the service is good. 

Why are we paying for this? 

The Making of a Radical

Outside of funerals for loved ones the worst day of my life was the day I spent visiting Baltimore public schools. Schools that looked like prisons where the students and staff were treated like inmates. Burned out buildings where kids were still attending class. Everyone I met in those schools were so stressed and traumatized it was obvious they needed counseling. I’m still haunted by what I saw and I was only there a day. 

When I got home from Baltimore that evening I wept from anger. It was an acute expression of emotion I can’t compare to any other I have felt. I sat on the carpet in the middle of our living room in our tiny apartment crying. My wife was bewildered. She couldn’t get a coherent word out of me. It was hard for me to express that though I was crying (a rarity for me) what I really was feeling was the desire to mount a .50 calibre gun on our sedan and stage a John Brown, Harper’s Ferry-style raid on the city government of Baltimore and a like one on the state government in Annapolis. Short of that I wanted to punch a hole in every wall of our apartment.

Rage crying. It is an experience I wish for all of you. I would love for you all to tour northeastern schools so dark and hermitically sealed that flies still live and fly in the middle of January. It would do you a world of good to walk down a unlit, littered, stairway with graffiti lining the walls not knowing if an English professor awaited you at the bottom or two hardened 15 year olds with knives. Picturing your daughter spending 40 hours per week in such a place would help your moral vocablulary. 

These are dung pits into which we throw children and it is not a mishap. It is a policy fundamental to upholding the two income, American Way of Life.

The greater horror is that our children don’t stay in the dung heaps. After twelve years in the pit the children are still alive. Many of them make it out to face the next decades of their lives with nothing to show for it other than the emotional and physical scars they earned in the suffocating darkness.

We can fix it, I’m told. We need more teachers who look like the students. We need to fund the parents not the schools. Choice. Vouchers.

Maybe some or all of that would work. I doubt it but maybe so. Parents are running for school board seats and winning. That is good news but are these, the recently somnolent, ready to negotiate with teacher’s unions? Are they ready for the necessary firings and lawsuits that will follow?

There needs to be many, many firings and jail sentences and maybe even some public floggings first. We can get to discussing vouchers and school board policy after we’ve run out of pink slips.

The Part Where I Meddle

Please use the summer break to figure out how to get your children out of public school. You may have to rearrange your finances. You may have to move to a smaller home. If you are feeling like that is not a sacrifice you can manage, get a TikTok or Twitter account and watch all the videos of public school teachers posted by @libsoftiktok. I won’t even attempt to describe what you will see because management would have to censor this essay. If you watch a couple of those videos with the phrase “everyone, when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” at the front of mind then I think you will find the strength to make a change. 

The rest of us need to step up and make a play as it’s said in sportscaster parlance.

Are you a homeschooler? Can you take in one more child from a family or single mother who can’t? Are you someone who can finance a homeschool family to take in more kids? Do it.

Do you know non-crazy, non-predatory, literate, and numerate teachers? Can you start a cooperative to pay those teachers to teach kids from a small group of families? Do you own a facility where this can take place? Do it.

Personally, I will be your Booker Washington if you’ll be my Julius Rosenwald. Together those men made the Tuskegee Institute the leading college for blacks in the segregated South. After Washigton’s death, Rosenwald created a fund that eventually founded almost 5,000 schools for blacks across the Jim Crow South. I believe we can recreate that spirit for the benefit of all school age children. I believe we must.

©Wendell Talley. All Rights Reserved.

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