One of the best ways patriotic parents can save their country is by pulling their children out of government schools.
A couple weeks ago, my 10-year-old son and I were discussing climate change at the dinner table. He loves science, all of it, from chemistry to anatomy to astronomy. He has a collection of books on all sorts of science-y stuff, scattered all over the house, from the living room to the dinner table, to his desk and spilling over onto his bed. Oftentimes, he carries a couple books around, like toys. If we go out, he might take his biochemistry and microbiology books, and he’ll sit in the back seat and read aloud, after which he’ll annoyingly quiz his parents. So it’s no surprise that he’d want to talk about climate change. He had most likely been reading about it.
My son’s interest in science emerged after my wife introduced him to the Basher book series. My wife found the series as part of her never-ending quest for homeschool curricula. The first book she bought him was on the periodic table, and thanks to the creative way the elements are presented in the book, my kid was off and running, rambling nonstop about radon and hydrogen.
My son didn’t always appear to be a whiz kid. He entered public-school kindergarten with a speech impediment. He required speech therapy, which he got. He also required maturity, so he repeated kindergarten.
But his second go-around in kindergarten went swimmingly. We wondered if it was just a result of the repetitive content, or if his genius was finally starting to manifest. After he entered first grade, he excelled there as well. His teacher said he was ahead in nearly all subjects. In some subjects, he was ahead by three grades. But he did have some “problems,” she told us. It was his behavior. He didn’t like doing classwork. However, it wasn’t because he didn’t know the content. When she sent him to the principal’s office to finish it, she said he did so rapidly, especially if recess was coming up. And it was correct, she added.
This sparked conversations about our son’s education. We knew the one-size-fits-all government-school system was mediocre at best (later on, I learned it was much worse than that). At the time, I already believed government schools weren’t designed for boys, with their requirement of sitting still for hours inside and constant need for following instructions, many of them seemingly invented just to create obedient citizens. I not only had a boy, but one who was abnormally energetic, dangerously rambunctious (he scraped himself in school multiple times), in possession of a voracious appetite for knowledge, and gregarious to a point that caused his very introverted parents to reconsider ever taking him in public. We knew that soon “public school” would prove an impediment rather than catalyst to unleashing his genius.
Then in March 2020, Covid-19 hit the world. The playgrounds were taped off, schools shut down, and teachers were passing out “learning packets” out on the curb in front of the school. At home, my wife was trying to connect with teachers online. But it wasn’t working. For starters, the school district’s online “learning” system wasn’t working well, for various reasons. Worse, now my son went from doing some busy work to all busy work.
After a few weeks of that nonsense, we withdrew him completely. There were two parents to one child, and we both worked flexible work schedules. We figured we could handle it. And we did, and by “we,” I mean my wife. She even added a Bible-reading session in the mix. At one point they built rockets and papier-mâché volcanos that erupted in our backyard.
Fall enrollment came around, and again we were idling at a crossroads. By then, we already knew the Covid “mitigation” edicts that trickled down to our local health department from the ivory towers of the federal government “public-health” institutions yielded very little public health and were causing more harm than good. We lived in a Montana town with just under 10,000 people, and with a 100-mile buffer of rural prairie on all U.S. sides. A couple hours east was the town newspapers had dubbed the “the middle of nowhere.” But despite our isolation, our little prairie town was not spared the Covid madness disease that bewitched the world.
But my wife and I were still — naively — holding out hope that sanity would prevail. I had spent years as a reporter in our town. I knew many of the leaders and teachers in the school district. They were moral, seemingly sensible people who genuinely cared about students. They couldn’t possibly continue perpetuating policies that were sure to cause harm, we thought.
We were wrong. For starters, the school district required kids to wear masks. The data was already clear that tissue and cloth masks didn’t restrict microbial aerosols, and that healthy children were at near-zero risk from Covid. This was enough reason for us to pull him out of the government-school system. But my son insisted on going. He wanted to play with other kids. We felt for him. So, we played along, letting him learn the hard way. This was a kid who couldn’t even keep his mask on for a few hours on a plane.
My wife still has a video of him on his first day, his head resting on his desk, him crying, a mask hanging off his face, all snotty and damp. He had just learned that even at recess, he would have to “social” distance.” All upsides had faded.
That was the last time my son ever stepped foot inside a government school. A lot has changed since. For starters, I begin working for The John Birch Society and moved my family across the country. And my wife is now fully dedicated to homeschooling our son. We’ve made his education a priority, and although we make do with less, we are creating a richer future.
Our brilliant Founding Fathers were homeschooled by their parents or tutors. They also spent significant time with their parents, from education to working on the farm or in the shop with them. Many went on to attend institutions of higher learning established by Christians to perpetuate Christian-based education, institutions such as Yale and Harvard. There were no government schools in America for a long time. And that was key to creating the most prosperous, freest nation ever.
That’s all changed now. For more on how American education has gone wrong, I recommend TNA’s education special reports, here and here, as well as the book Crimes of the Educators.
I’ve learned a lot since my son first attended kindergarten. The crux of it is that government schools are causing harm to our children and they’re designed in a way that quashes the genius all children are born with. The architects of government schools, people such as Horace Mann and John Dewey, were socialists who sought to create little socialists that would grow up into big adult socialists and turn America into one big, happy socialist utopia.
Government schools have wasted generations of American genius and are a leading reason for the chaos and national self-hate destroying our society today. Government schools are a major reason the United States is no longer on the promising path it once was.
The good news is that more than 1.2 million children have been pulled out of American government schools just in the last two years, which has regime propaganda outlets such as The New York Times freaking out. Thanks to the recent push of racist ideologies such as critical race theory and sexually perverted ideas, it’s become easier for parents to justify saving their children.
The recent plunge in test scores has not helped the government school cause, either. “Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades,” reads the lead to a September 1, 2022, Washington Post article. The falloff is blamed on the “pandemic’s toll.” Recent academic declines happened at all performance levels. This is very bad, especially since even before Covid, there was not one academic category in which more than half of government-school students were proficient, according to the Nation’s Report Card.
So, yes, enrollment is plunging. But not fast enough. In a perfect world, the schools would be emptied out tomorrow and the Department of Education shuttered for good.
But not all patriots are convinced. Many still hold out hope for government-school reform. When I talk to friends or family members about the dangers of government schools, one of the most common responses I hear is, “Yeah, but our school district is different. We have sane and good teachers. There’s no CRT in our schools and no perverted books in our libraries.“
First off, perverse books such as Gender Queer and Body Music have been popping up in school libraries without any notice, so you have no idea when your child’s school is next. And remember the insanity of Covid Mania? Nearly every single school district in the nation implemented social distancing, masking, and long shutdowns. They did this despite opposition from parents, and even teachers. Every district had opposing voices saying the measures would hurt their students more than the disease.
Yet the insanity marched on.
How come?
Covid Mania proves that having a district staffed by sane and reasonable people is not enough to overcome the machine. The machine put so much social, emotional, and psychological pressure on educators that there was no way to resist. Many educators retired out of protest. All that did was take them out of the battle.
No matter how local and isolated your town and its school district is, if it has any connection to the Department of Education, the machine will have its way. When the corrupt CDC made its blanket recommendations, they were followed down to the underpaid nurse in Middle of Nowhere, Alaska. When the Department of Education pushed its No Child Left Behind or Every Student Succeeds Act, they were implemented from schools in Washington D.C. to those in Rudyard, Montana, despite the large segment of educators who had no love for it. When the most powerful Marxist teachers’ unions insisted that schools remain closed, that’s what happened, despite massive protests from parents across the country.
The machine is centralized “education.” By the time you break it, assuming it can be done at all, your children and grandchildren will already have been ground down by it. No matter how rural or different your district is, it’s not as safe as you think it is.
I started this article with a story about the time my son and I were discussing climate change at the dinner table. He knows the prevailing narrative on climate change. We don’t shield him from it, either. What we do is tell him the other side of the story. He also knows the truth that there is no consensus among scientists that humans are causing catastrophic environmental damage, only a global fascist-type coordinated campaign that keeps the masses from knowing about them. He knows that the climate has been changing long before any factories or internal-combustion engines were imagined. And he’s not losing any sleep worrying that the planet will fall apart in a couple years.
How does he know this? Because he’s homeschooled. At home, he reads and hears both sides of this debate.
At home, he’s free to pursue his interests more than he was before, and that has led to him learning more than we can ever teach him. He also receives a sane, moral education on other topics, including sex and gender. As his parents, we know when he’s ready for that. We don’t shy away from any topic. And we make sure he develops godly morals and the ability to think rationally.
We are raising a child who can think, a child who’ll be confident about who he is. The world needs smart, dangerous men, because the future is shaping out to be dangerously stupid.
I’ll finish with this: The freest nation to ever exist was created by brilliant men educated at home. The most oppressive nations today mandate government education.
Saving our children from government schools is perhaps the most important act of patriotism Americans can take.
If you’d like to get your child out of government school, but aren’t sure where to begin, whether you’re interested in homeschool or private school, the JBS’s Save Our Children From Public Schools action project exists to help with that. Check it out here.
