The Schools Are on Fire; Time to Get the Children Out

The system is destroying American children and the nation itself. It cannot be reformed. Instead, it should be abandoned.

An elementary school classroom in Orange, Calif., on March 11, 2021. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Commentary 

This is part 22 in a series examining education in the United States. 

Imagine the school building is on fire, and your precious children are trapped inside. You can hear the blood-curdling screams growing louder. The flames are getting bigger, and the heat is getting hotter. Your heart races.

Even standing outside looking in, you feel your children’s terror and pain. No matter how hard you try to tell yourself it will all be OK, you know they’re in mortal danger.

You look around frantically, searching for somebody—anyone, really—to do something—anything! “Somebody do something!” you shout. But there’s no response, and you hear no sirens wailing in the distance.

In fact, nobody is coming to rescue your children—certainly not the arsonist politicians or the education establishment who set the building on fire in the first place. It finally dawns on you that if you don’t act soon, catastrophe is inevitable and your children are doomed.

What do you do?

If you said circulate a petition, lobby your legislators, or run for school board, you’re obviously not a parent yourself.

Anyone with a child will tell you that there’s only one possible thing to do in a case like this: Run inside, grab your loved ones, and run from the fire until you can’t run anymore. Then, sound the alarm and wake the town.

The time has come to treat this situation like the deadly threat that it is. If you still have children in a public school, or if you know anyone with children trapped inside, act like the building is on fire—because it is!

In fact, it’s much worse than that. Unfortunately, even the burning building isn’t an adequate analogy for the horror that’s being perpetrated against children in government schools today.

A fire will merely harm your children physically. That’s bad enough, of course—and it’s happening. But physical wounds can be healed. This is much worse.

As this series on public “education” should’ve made clear by now, government schools are indeed harming children physically—think transgender “treatments” involving hormones and surgical mutilation, for instance, or the epidemic of suicide, drug abuse, physical fights, and other plagues.

The quack methods used to “teach reading” are literally doing physical harm that can be observed in brain scans, producing a lifelong handicap in millions of children as described in part 5 of this series.

Even more ghastly than the physical trauma, though, is that the schools are destroying children mentally, emotionally, academically, spiritually, culturally, morally, and more.

Consider: The government’s own data show less than a third of its child victims are proficient in any core subject, based on the government’s own absurdly dumbed-down “standards.” In some districts, government data show that there are virtually no students capable of reading or performing basic mathematics. And “academics” are ostensibly the raison d’etre of public schools.

While the victims of government schools may not be competent in reading, math, writing, science, or history, they can tell you all about “intersectional oppression,” “global citizenship,” “gender” ideology, and the supposed dangers of alleged man-made global warming purportedly caused by the gas they exhale.

Polls show America’s youth are rapidly moving away from the values of liberty and the Christian faith of their forefathers and toward “woke” socialism that threatens to destroy not just children and their families, but even the nation and civilization itself.

Socialism has been marketed to public-school victims so successfully that, combined with a fake history curriculum demonizing America and concealing the barbarism of tyranny, more than two-thirds of millennials in polls say they will vote for socialists.

All over the country, tiny children are taught that they should “choose their pronouns,” that they may have been born in the wrong body, and that irreversible surgeries and hormone “therapies” can help them become their “true” selves. “Transition” plans and hiding them from parents are now the norm.

This monstrous situation is the latest peak of the insanity, but ever-more outrageous abuses and atrocities will be perpetrated against American children—at least if the adults in the room, parents who love their children more than anyone on the planet, don’t put a stop to it.

At this point, it should be obvious that everything good and dear is in mortal danger.

Reform?

The question of “reform” often comes up in discussions on how to address this existential crisis. Can’t the burning building just be reformed?

Whether it be abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and Common Core or reining in the teachers’ unions and banning critical race theory or gender ideology, countless ideas have been proposed. Many have even been tried.

For decades, conservatives have squandered millions of dollars on “public-school reform.” For almost two years, conservatives have been showing up at school board meetings to complain. Countless great teachers have tried everything to protect their students.

And yet, nothing works. The system continues to devour children by the millions as the extremism in the classroom escalates and the Biden administration deploys the FBI to terrorize concerned moms.

That’s because the “system” is a hydra with many heads: Neutralize or chop one off, and it grows right back while the others work together to continue devouring the youth.

Talking about “reform” is to answer the wrong question.

It’s like asking how to reform cancer; it’s a silly question. Nobody wants their cancer “reformed.” Rather, they want it cut out and annihilated before it does any more damage.

Talk of “reform” also illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding about what has happened. Government schools aren’t “broken,” as commonly argued by conservatives. Rather, they’re working very well at their intended purpose: fundamentally transforming America by dumbing down, indoctrinating, sexualizing, collectivizing, and weaponizing future generations, as this series has documented extensively.

Even the arguments for a public-school system itself fail the smell test.

Suggesting that the government must control education because a handful of parents may not be able to afford to send their children to school, one of the most common claims, is preposterous.

Apply that same thinking to grocery stores and instantly the absurdity of it becomes clear. It’s true that grocery stores and food are important. And it’s true that there are some people who can’t afford groceries.

But it hardly follows from those two facts that government should create a network of “free” (tax-funded) grocery stores that will determine what, when, how, and even if children will eat. Then, imagine those free grocery stores feeding their “customers” toxic waste, and you get a sense of the situation America finds itself in with “education.”

Outside of the most brainwashed victims of communist dictatorships in Cuba or North Korea, everybody can see the stupidity of such an idea.

And yet, it’s the same essential idea that underpins the trillion-dollar-per-year atrocity that is the government-controlled education-industrial complex.

The notion that the public should desire “standardized” children, where everyone learns the same thing at the same time in the same way is so outrageous that it almost doesn’t need to be addressed. What other industry would that be tolerated in? Talk about “putting all your eggs in one basket!”

Even if those who created the system had been well-intentioned, socialist programs never deliver on the promises they were founded on and always produce failure.

Get Them Out!

The key question, then, is what to do. For parents, the answer should be obvious by now: It’s time to remove your children from these abusive environments and get them a real education, either at home or in a high-quality private or Christian school.

All of the data shows home-educated children are running circles around their government-“educated” peers on everything from academics and socialization to careers and tolerance. The National Home Education Research Institute has been compiling the data for decades.

For most families, home education appears to be the gold standard. Nobody loves your children as much as you do, and nobody is in a better position to provide the personalized, loving, and unique instruction that will help them grow into well-educated adults capable of self-government.

In a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the money, virtually any parent—even those with no high-school diploma—can do a much better job than government schools. In fact, it’s easy to make a compelling argument—only half-jokingly—that doing nothing at all would be better than forcing children to endure 12 years of what passes for “education” in public schools today.

Aside from home education, there are thousands of private schools across the nation doing a wonderful job. Options exist for everyone: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, classical, experimental, and many more.

However, there are more and more private schools—including “Christian in name only” options—that are overpriced replicas of the government’s woke indoctrination centers. Buyer beware.

Pastors, priests, and rabbis should be sounding the alarm, too. Decades of research from the Nehemiah Institute shows the vast majority of Christian children in government schools will leave the faith by the time they get through K–12 indoctrination. That’s no accident.

When I declared publicly for the first time that I thought parents should remove their children from public schools, a number of leading American conservatives I spoke with hesitated.

But times have changed. Just in the past few years, a who’s who of conservative leaders has called on parents to remove their children, and the idea has moved from the fringe into the mainstream of conservatism.

The late talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh, whose show reached an estimated 18 million people per week, regularly used to call on parents to remove their children from public schools.

Responding to a New Jersey statute requiring LGBT indoctrination of public-school children, one of the most prominent contemporary evangelical leaders in the world, Franklin Graham, also urged parents to pull them out in an interview on Todd Starnes’s radio show.

Even Donald Trump, as president of the United States, repeatedly warned parents to protect their children from the “progressive indoctrination” in what he described as “failing government schools.” In fact, he identified this indoctrination as the cause of the unrest and polarization tearing the nation apart.

Other prominent conservative leaders who have called on families to exit the system in recent years include Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, James Dobson, and many more. Across America, more and more pastors are urging their congregations to ditch government schools, too.

Increasingly, prominent minds have even called for abolishing the system entirely. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger argued that the system was unconstitutional. Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, citing government schools’ growing hostility toward Christianity, made a similar argument last year.

Even some of America’s leading educators have made the case for smashing the system. Late New York City and New York State teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto, for many years, called on people around the world to demolish government education entirely.

Ironically, key leaders of the education establishment itself are starting to see the writing on the wall. American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten complained last year that conservatives have been trying to drive families out of public schools into private alternatives.

Millions of families have fled the system in recent years, and millions more will flee in the years to come as awareness spreads.

Reimagining the System

What America needs isn’t more “conservatives” on impotent “school boards,” though there’s no harm in running for school board once one’s own children are safely out of the system.

What’s really needed is to rip the destructive government-school monopoly out by the roots and start again from scratch.

Instead of a new education “system,” Americans should seriously consider returning to the 17th and 18th-century paradigm that produced the best-educated, most literate population anywhere on Earth at any time in human history. In short, what’s needed is a “non-system.” Freedom works.

Abolishing government indoctrination centers wouldn’t undermine education one bit, any more than abolishing collective agriculture in the Soviet Union ended farming or food production. It would make it drastically better.

There will be other battles ahead. For example, there’s an effort right now to get private schools and even home-educating families dependent on tax dollars so they can be controlled. There are even efforts to ban home education entirely—efforts that, following Adolf Hitler’s example, are gaining traction across Europe and are even being peddled by busybodies and tyrants in Ivy League law schools who think they know how to raise your children better than you.

For a century, conservatives, Christians, and those who love America have been fighting a losing battle against the weaponization of government “education.” No matter how many millions of dollars are wasted in the fight, the situation keeps getting worse.

It’s time to stop playing a rigged game on the education establishment’s battlefield using its rules. American parents should flee the system and build parallel institutions like their country and their liberty depend on it—because they do.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.