Brad Thompson has an interesting article [1] up over at Substack that you should probably read.
On September 28, Terry McAuliffe shocked voters in Virginia and around the country when he said in a gubernatorial debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Virginia voters understood immediately the meaning of McAuliffe’s statement. The aspiring repeat Governor seemed to be saying that parents do not and should not have a “right” to determine what their children are taught in school, which means that America’s Education Establishment (i.e., the state and federal departments of education, teachers’ unions, teacher-training institutions, school board associations, textbook and curriculum companies) has the “right” to determine the content of your child’s mind.
The moment was clarifying. In an instant, all of the particular education issues that Americans have been debating for the last few years (e.g., mask mandates, online learning, Common Core, CRT, transgenderism, pronouns, bathroom policies, and pedophilic pornography, etc.) became secondary to a more fundamental question: Who should determine the cognitive content of America’s children, parents or government officials? More to the point, the question is: Do parents have an unalienable right to determine how, in what, and by whom their children will be educated, or should the government have that right?
It’s no secret what happened in Virginia as a result of that question being put forward, as such. It’s also no secret Terry McAuliffe has always been in the pocket of the Clintons. You may remember Hillary Clinton telling us about the education of children belongs to the village?
The result of all of this at least in the short term was that Terry McAuliffe got sent packing. I wouldn’t worry about him. He’ll be on CNN before the end of the year.
But here’s the thing; When government gets its hands on something, everything about that thing becomes political. Example, when government runs healthcare, every healthcare decision becomes political. So it is with education. As soon as we turned the education of our young over to the government, the exclusion of parents from that process was inevitable. And since the educational system is lorded over these days by the radical left, it’s not hard to determine which way the curricula would increasingly lean.
Already it’s to the point where we have high school graduates who can’t read their own diplomas but they know all about global warming and they know all about how racist this country is. In fact it’s been that way for decades now, more prevalently in the big cities where the leftists hold increased sway. Such has been the effect of the government running our educational system.
The American Left (aided and abetted by some conservatives) believes that the government, not parents, should determine the content of a child’s mind—their ideas, their principles, and their values. A few weeks after McAuliffe’s tone-deaf faux pas, two authors writing in The Washington Post summed up the Left’s position in the title of their op-ed: “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents should have neither the right nor the authority, according to the Post’s writers, to determine the ideas taught to their children. This task should be left to the “experts”—to the experts of the Education Establishment. The authors go on to claim that “education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of their parents.” The question never addressed by the authors, however, is what happens when young people want to think for themselves and learn about ideas different from those taught by the government?!?! This option is, of course, strictly verboten.
I take exception to Thompson calling some of these people conservative. They are not. They might be Republican but that’s another matter.
And remember I mentioned government-run health care? Watch this:
Writing at Politico, three professors of medicine denounced what they called “The Dangerous Legal Illusion of ‘Parental rights’.” The authors announced that “When it comes to society’s interest in protecting children, the legal precedent is unambiguous: The rights of parents come second.” But the question is, if parents’ rights come second when it comes to protecting or educating their children, then whose rights come first? And the authors’ answer is obvious: society’s rights, the government’s rights, the rights of the public-policy experts trump those of parents.
I have been saying it for years now, the worst mistake we ever made as a country, a culture, a people, was to turn the education of our young over to the government. That statement has never been more obviously true than it is right now.
I’ve been asking for the last couple of weeks what the Hot tar and feather torch and Pitchfork moment is going to be for the American people. One can hope that Terry McAuliffe being handed his backside in a sling over his comments is an indicator on all of this. But that’s still an open question.
It’s interesting. I’m old enough to remember events 30 years ago when we had a group of people coming up through the educational system who told us that we should question authority without hesitation. Now that these same people are in authority, particularly in the educational system and I point directly to places like Harvard UC Berkeley, the NEA, for example, we are told that anyone who questions that authority needs to be silenced, and they certainly should have no right to determine what their children are taught. In short the inmates are running the asylum these days. The results are eminently predictable.
We had best hope that the vote in Virginia is more, far more than just an eddy current in the prevailing wind from the left. If it isn’t, we can kiss America goodbye.