taking back education

the national school board association is collapsing. well, there's a little dollop of good news and a path to a better way

if there is one little ray of sunshine in the dystopian scholastic hellscape of the last two years, it is this:

parents all over america got a good, hard look at what is being done to their children in schools.

they saw what was being taught

they saw what kinds of people they had left their children alone with

they saw the true colors of the teachers’ unions

and they saw the school boards and the school board associations for the unaccountable karen conclaves of tyrants, bullies, and lunatics that they are

and more and more, all over america, they rose.

this was the bridge too far. the parents have had it.

this is the vast middle that is generally not actively political, the families focused on work and on raising their children.

and they are not just angry, they are incandescent.

and they are right.

these tinhat despots woke up the momma bears and papa lions.

you do NOT survive that.

nor should you.

it is not easy to turn soccer moms and carpool dads into aggressive social activists.

it is not their nature and they have other stuff to do.

but muzzling their kids, subjecting them to alienation, indoctrination, and depriving them of education and then turning around and seeking to brand these parents as literal domestic terrorists when they complain?

well, that’s gonna do it.

yessirre bob it surely is.

and these chickens are coming home to roost.

and they are not happy poultry.

We’ve seen this coming for a while now, like a slow-motion train wreck. After the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration comparing parents to domestic terrorists and even suggesting the PATRIOT Act might be used to reign them in. That turned out to be the last straw for a lot of parents and maybe also for the NSBA.

The group apologized for the letter in late October but by that point the damage was done. Within days, five state associations canceled their membership in the national group. By early December the number of associations who’d left had climbed to seventeen. As of today the number who have left is at nineteen and the continued survival of the national association is very much in doubt.

this is helpful at a high level, but it’s the grassroots and the localities where this fight must continue.

there is a simple fact that cries out for redress:

we left our children alone for decades with an increasingly marxist and totalitarian group of evangelical indoctrinators. and they have run amok.

they have proselytized race, gender, and class war to our impressionable young ones and sought to induct them into collectivist cults and grievance cultures.

they have weaned them on self- hate, othering, intersectional division and conflict, and notions of gender, race, and health based original sin that demands contrition.

they instilled systems of imaginary structural oppression instead of encouraging and lauding achievement. self-improvement was shunted aside in favor of self-flagellation or self-pity.

they are not teaching they are preaching and their gospel is grotesque.

history has become hallucination. math is racist. children are dangerous disease vectors.

the teachers, the teachers unions, the curriculums, and the classrooms have become outlandishly toxic. not all of them, not every one, but an awful lot of them. enough that the system itself has become something overtly pernicious.

and it is time to take it back.

do not let this motivation fade. do not let this newfound engagement and organization falter. pick it up, push it further, make it count.

school choice should be the THE issue of the moment. break the monopoly, bring the market.

school boards cannot be reasoned with. teachers unions cannot be made to serve the children instead of themselves. governors that ban teaching critical race theory are great, but that which one can ban, the next can reinstate. that does not go away. you cannot slap a coat of paint on this and make it OK. it’s all rust and no boat. it’s time to walk away and start again.

choice and only choice is the solution.

fund the kids, not the schools. let students and parents select the education they desire. force schools to compete rather than granting them unaccountable monopolies that grow ever more expensive while providing ever less education and ever more indoctrination.

this is WAY past stupid. this is abuse.

you cannot trust the state to teach your children because its goals for them are not your goals for them.

education is not “too important to be left to the free market” it’s too important to be left anywhere near anything as irresponsible, ineffective, and self-serving as government.

it’s time to innovate. it’s time to thrive.

make school choice absolute. every kid gets money, spend it as you like. period. no rules, no accreditation, no “spend on government approved programs,” nothing.

sure, some people will do dumb things and things you don’t like. you may hate some of the schools and ideas they choose. so what?

the price of freedom is other people’s freedom.

what’s the alternative? education boards? approved teaching plans and teacher certification? you’ve just created the new commanding heights to control the system and limit choice, demand ideological inculcation, and prevent innovation.

and it’s not as if the existing system is working…

if you let the state decide what education is, you’re going to get statist education.

you’ve invited the vampire back in and he’ll drain you dry faster than you can say “ow, my neck!”

is this the end? no. this is the start. do we one day want to separate the idea of education and government altogether? sure. but in the real world, that’s not happening tomorrow. this could. and this is the leading edge of one helluva wedge to drive in. this will build the systems, the schools, the curricula that we need and make them responsive to us.

children will become customers, not chattel and the commanding heights of this system will be taken from these oppressive lunatics and be returned to those it is supposed to serve.

education, not indoctrination.

this cannot continue as it has if we are to survive as a civil society. you cannot have schools proselytizing poison.

and so we must change it.

if not now, when?

if not you, who?