Lee Duigon
Supposed conservatives, of all people, are beating the drum to re-open the public schools and get the kiddies back into the classroom lickety-split. Even if weird and awkward things have to be done to protect the children from the Chinese Communist Doomsday Virus—“they’ve got to go back to school! Got to!”
Why?
Millions of school-age kids and college students today are learning at home, learning online. Why send them back to the same public schools that these same conservatives have denounced, and rightfully so, as indoctrination centers? Why send them back?
Because, we are told, the kids need the “socialization” that public school provides.
I was teaching in a middle school, one day in the 1990s, when I had to send a boy to the principal’s office for repeatedly disrupting the class. Let’s call him Andre. Not long afterward, the principal buzzed me to the office, too. He was going to meet with Andre’s father, and he wanted me to participate.
This man had to take off work and hustle to the school because his son wouldn’t behave. “He was never like that before,” he said. “But he has been, since he got in with that bad crowd.”
A few days before, Andre and his friends seriously vandalized a teacher’s car. The principal confirmed that up until this new school year, Andre hadn’t been a problem. Now he was acting up all the time. “We have to break up that group,” said the principal, “and we need you to help us.”
“You leave it to me,” the father said. “Andre won’t be running with that crowd anymore. I’ll make sure of that.”
But these commentators! Were they never kids themselves? Have they totally forgotten what it’s like to be one?
As a boy I did many things I shouldn’t have done. Some of them were dangerous. All of them were wrong. And who encouraged me to do them, dared me to do them, and did them with me?
Other kids! My age-group peers at school.
That’s who performs the schools’ “socialization” function. Other kids.
But what is the No. 1 lesson that public school teaches?
That your age-group peers, and not your boring old family, are the most important people in your life; that their approval is what, above all things, you simply have to have; and you should do just about anything to get it.
They teach conformity. You dress as your peers dress, you like the same movies, TV shows, music, and video games that they like; and what they do, you do.
A long-time childhood friend of mine, when we were in high school, dropped his old friends and took up with a set of drug abusers and delinquents. Nothing his family or his friends could do could dampen his hunger for his new peers’ approval.
He died of a drug overdose in his twenties. I still miss him today.
With so many students now homeschooling in America, because the public schools are closed, we’ll never have a better opportunity to wean our people off the moral and academic disaster that is public education.
Look and listen. We’re already paying a ruinously high price for allowing our children to be “taught” by imbeciles and Marxists.
Don’t let the price get any higher.
I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in for a visit; a single click will take you there. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .
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E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net
