On and off for two years, children have been relegated to ‘Zoom’ education. They have been locked down from participating in usual interpersonal activities in school and outside school. It is the teacher’s unions who have foisted this horror on children, and the media has gone along with it. With the rise of child mental health issues and suicides, they now are changing their position.Of course, to hear their reports …well…see for your self their malarkey.
Elites’ Election Year Education Epiphany
Pivot Underway David Leonhardt NYT headline: “No Way To Grow Up; For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.”
“American children are starting 2022 in crisis. I’m not sure that many people fully grasp the depth of it.”
David Axelrod: “The Chicago Teachers Union is about to vote to walk out rather than return to classrooms amid Omicron surge. I hope every teacher reads this column. What our kids have suffered thru long absences from classrooms already has had a devastating impact.”
FOX headline: “MSNBC panel pummels ‘failure’ of remote learning, asks why ‘conventional wisdom’ took so long to agree”
Townhall: “Fauci Says Its ‘Safe Enough’ for Schools to Reopen While Teachers Unions Push for School Closures”
Psaki: “We want schools to be open, the President wants them to be open…”
Not Buying It Matt Walsh reply: “We do grasp the depth of it. We’ve been saying this for two years but people like you ignored us and now you’re pretending this was some kind of epiphany you had on your own.”
“Millions of parents across the country have expressed frustration and despair throughout the pandemic at remote learning and its harm on their children. Last year, media outlets like the New York Times and Politico framed the debate over school reopening in partisan terms, accusing Republicans of pouncing on it as a political wedge issue.”
Common Sense Aggregate: “No crap, some have been saying this for a year but were branded as terrorist. This will most likely be my 1 issue vote in ’22. D’s and unions must be held accountable”
If parents vote this as their main issue, it is very likely the potential landslide is larger then can be imagined.
If only the following speech could happen, what an incredible difference it would make in our public uneducation system!
A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give.
By Dennis Prager.
To the students and faculty of our high school:
I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people.
I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country.
First , this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships. The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity — your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American.
This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans. If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity, race and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America, one of its three central values – e pluribus Unum, “from many, one.” And this school will be guided by America ‘s values. This includes all after-school clubs. I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.
Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism — an unhealthy preoccupation with the self — while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry and more. If the only extracurricular activities you can imagine being interested in are those based on ethnic, racial or sexual identity, that means that little outside of yourself really interests you.
Second, I am uninterested in whether English is your native language. My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible. The English language has united America ‘s citizens for over 200 years, and it will unite us at this school. It is one of the indispensable reasons this country of immigrants has always come to be one country. And if you leave this school without excellent English language skills, I would be remiss in my duty to ensure that you will be prepared to successfully compete in the American job market. We will learn other languages here — it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English — but if you want classes taught in your native language rather than in English, this is not your school.
Third , because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning’s elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for Hollywood events than for church or school. These people have their priorities backward. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.
Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school’s property — whether in class, in the hallways or at athletic events. If you can’t speak without using the f -word, you can’t speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission, plus epithets such as “Nigger,” even when used by one black student to address another black, or “bitch,” even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few your age to instinctively distinguish between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.
Fifth, we will end all self-esteem programs. In this school, self-esteem will be attained in only one way — the way people attained it until decided otherwise a generation ago — by earning it. One immediate consequence is that there will be one valedictorian, not eight.
Sixth, and last, I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda. No more time will be devoted to scaring you about smoking and caffeine, or terrifying you about sexual harassment or global warming. No more semesters will be devoted to condom wearing and teaching you to regard sexual relations as only or primarily a health issue. There will be no more attempts to convince you that you are a victim because you are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual or not Christian. We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately fortunate — to be alive and to be an American.
Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you.
Alex Newman: False History Taught in Schools Incites Children to Hate America
The history taught in public schools is “a complete and total reversal of reality” and the root cause of the civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis that has spread across the nation, said Alex Newman, an author, and award-winning international journalist.
President Donald Trump said during the Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore on July 3, “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains.”
“The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump said.
“He hit the nail right smack on the head. That’s what I’ve been arguing for years,” said Newman, co-author of the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”
“Now, when i say [what’s been taught is] a complete and total reversal of reality, that’s what i mean,” he told The Epoch Times‘ “Crossroads” program. “It’s not hyperbole, that’s not exaggeration.”
He said what defines American people as Americans are principles enshrined in the country’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and that everyone is endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights,” Newman said.
Interview with Alex Newman starts at 14:47.
However, the history taught in schools has been replaced by a historical narrative that reverses those principles, claiming that the country’s founding principles were “slavery, oppression, racism, white supremacy,” and similar things, Newman said.
An example of U.S. history reversal is a New York Times series, called the 1619 Project, created by New York Times reporter Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones, whose opening line of an essay that won her a Pulitzer was, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”
According to the 1619 Project, America was founded in 1619 when a group of 20 Africans, who were considered to be the first enslaved Africans in British America, arrived in the colony of Virginia.
Despite this criticism, the series, which posits that America was not founded on the basis of liberty in 1776, but on the basis of slavery in 1619, has become school curriculum that is taught across America, Newman said.
According to Hannah-Jones, the notion is that racism and evil are embedded in the very DNA of America, Newman said. Since DNA cannot be changed or removed, “and so what she’s really saying—as the mullahs say in Iran—’Death to America.’ You’ve got to kill America to get rid of this horrible DNA,” Newman said.
“This could not be more wrong,” because America’s founding fathers wanted to abolish slavery as it was incompatible with the country’s founding principles based on Christian values, Newman said, adding that Thomas Jefferson fought a war against slave catchers in North Africa, and James Madison, the father of the Constitution, “loathed slavery” and expressed this view on many occasions.
Almost every civilization or culture has practiced some form of slavery at a certain point in its history, Newman said.
Rewriting American History
Mount Rushmore
The consequence of teaching wrong and reversed American history to children is that “our children hate America” and “they’re burning down our cities,” Newman said.
One of the most popular history books in the United States is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” which is a key text in schools and has sold more than 3 million copies, Newman said.
Dr. Mary Grabar, a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, exposed Zinn’s distortions of American history in her book, “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America.”
Zinn portrayed Christopher Columbus as a “genocidal monster” in his book, according to Newman, who added that Grabar already knew that Zinn’s book was biased when starting her project. However, Grabar wrote in her book that “even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied.”
Reading Columbus’s own diaries shows very clearly how Columbus was mischaracterized by Zinn. Columbus wanted to bring the Bible and Christianity to people, Newman said, and was inspired by his religious belief to embark on his journey.
“The truth, I believe is much more powerful than lies” and this is our big advantage, he said.
“Anybody can go look at the primary source documents, and investigate these things for themselves, and see what really happened.”
Chinese Communist Party Applauds 1619 Project
Red Guards, high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book,” parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Since the May 1966 launch of the Cultural Revolution at Beijing University, the Red Guards were instrumental in Mao’s recapture of power after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. The movement was directed against “party leaders in authority taking the capitalist road.” The Red Guards went on rampage in Chinese towns, terrorizing people, particularly older ones. (Photo by JEAN VINCENT / AFP) (Photo by JEAN VINCENT/AFP via Getty Images)
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been openly celebrating the 1619 Project,” Newman said, because through propaganda, brainwashing, lies, indoctrination, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare, Americans can be convinced to hate their own country and dismantle it from the inside. Then America’s economic or military power will no longer pose a threat to the CCP.
Americans will just “burn their own country up and that’s what we’re seeing right now,” he said. “It’s incredibly dangerous.”
The CCP, which understood this principle, launched the Cultural Revolution, one of the key elements of which was wiping out China’s true history, Newman said.
“China was this incredible civilization with thousands of years of the amazing, incredible history that contributed so much to humanity,” Newman explained, so the communists “were burning books, and they were pulling down statues and setting libraries on fire and murdering people who knew real history so that they could start from a blank slate.”
Everything prior to the communist revolution was branded “evil, backward, uncivilized, barbarous, and so on,” he said. “Everything post-Communist Revolution was wonderful and glorious, and all the rest of it.”
Comment: Children are not the only ones that have been taught a false history. When you listen to adults quoting a famous line from a movie that is supposed to be based on actual events in history, the propaganda is succeeding.
In a speech, given at Hillsdale College, the Secretary of Education stated,
“Education is the means by which we secure the God-given blessings of liberty,”
Secretary DeVos further, said,
“The COVID crisis has laid bare a lot about American education,” DeVos said. “Parents are more aware than ever before how and what their children are — or are not — learning. And far too many of them are stuck with no choices, no help, and no way forward.”
Her position is the government has no right to usurp the role of parents. She feels the family should be embraced as a sovereign sphere and to remember that the family predated government altogether.
“The family is not only an institution,” DeVos said, “it’s also the foundation for all other institutions. The nuclear family cultivates art, athletics, business, education, faith, music, film — in a word, culture. And just as the family shapes its culture, it also shapes its government.”
It is her position that schools exist to supplement families and not to replace the family.
She is going to focus expanding a robust school choice program where parents have control over how their tax dollars are spent on the education of their children. Their educational tax dollars should should follow their children wherever they want to learn.
A survey by RealClearOpinion found 3 out of 4 families, with children in public schools sought full school choice, including 73 percent of black families and 71 percent of Hispanic families.
With this large a percentage, one must wonder why such practices are not in place. The answer is the National Education Association(NEA). The very thought of parents making educational choices for their own children is abhorrent to the association. In fact, it is the NEA that has kept children out of in-person school attendance this fall. They thoroughly enjoyed this past spring where they were paid their full salary, while sitting home, and wanted to continue.
Frankly, when one considers the curriculums currently in place, children were better off having their parents work with them or finding online tutoring assistance.
For those who may not remember, Secretary DeVos’s confirmation hearing was one of major contention. It was because of her stance on school choice and the NEA’svehement objection to her nomination. schools are funded based on student “population”. When parents awaken to the reality of their child’s abysmal school and seek to move their child, the school loses dollars.
From a personal perspective (education is in my ‘wheelhouse’), I have been pleased with the majority of her tenure. Beside school choice, she is the one cabinet member who submitted a reduced budget. If we are fortunate enough to see 45 re-elected, it is my hope she remains in her position.
A California school district announced that what “appeared to be a noose” was found hanging from a tree in front of home within the district. Local police concluded it was not a noose, but a rope swing for children. The school district swiftly responded. They did not close the investigation but moved on from the non-incident, by imposing race education and “anti-racism” goals on students and staff.
The Piedmont Unified School District in Piedmont, California sent a message to parents, students, and staff in mid-September notifying them that although the intent of local rope swing was “innocuous,” the district would be discussing “systemic racism” and “identity privilege.”
While using labels such as “dominant”, the district, further, informed families they must “apologize” for the incident.
Further, they stated;
“While it is unlikely that most of us will replicate this particular act, it is likely that those of us with identity privilege have caused harm ‘unintentionally’ to those with non-dominant identities,” the district wrote. “Rather than absolving ourselves of responsibility, we must listen, reflect, apologize, and do better when we are told that the impact of our actions does not align with our intentions or perceptions of ourselves.”
“Any reminder of the history of lynching and the abuses and murders of Black people in the United States causes harm and trauma to the BIPOC community,” district leadership wrote.
The noose/swing provided the district with the opportunity to promote their racial equity curriculum. The curriculum’s goal is to provide “equitable outcomes for students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”
Basically, the home owners are guilty of providing their progeny with a rope swing. Some “Karen” took it upon themselves to report it to the school district. The school district then went into overload and reported these, innocent unknowing, people to the police. Although the police found a swing, as is the policy of progressives, they had to turn this into an incident to institute their we are all racists re-education policies. Now the people must apologize. To whom, I am unclear.
Further, the school district can now make sure those who are not performing well receives an “equitable outcome” meaning they will be passed from grade to grade until they graduate with minimal knowledge. Hmm, they will know how to get by by declaring, when things do not go their way, they are being discriminated against by the racist society.
As with so many foundational standards, the standard of “equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcome” is now passé. All non Caucasians are guaranteed an equal outcome. This equal outcome is a setup for failure when they leave academia. This equal outcome comes at great expense to the country as a whole.
The pushing of “equitable outcome” is not new. It has, merely, been placed on steroids to reinforce the country is systematically racist agenda.
This article may, supposedly, be satire; however, teacher’s unions are making outrageous demands before agreeing to return to work. As a caveat, not all teachers agree with all of the politics of teacher’s unions. Those teachers seem to have no impact. Either they are not vocal or just go along.
Not Satisfied With Just Having Summers Off, Teachers Push For Fall, Winter, Spring
July 20th, 2020
U.S.—Studies have shown teachers are the laziest people on the planet, only working nine months and doing absolutely nothing for three months of the year. What’s more, when they do work, teachers wander into school at 7 and go home at 2, having done nothing all day but press play on Bill Nye the Science Guy VHS tapes.
But having summers off isn’t enough for the ungrateful public “servants”: teachers are looking to leverage the pandemic into getting the other three seasons off too.
“I am just way overworked having to go in nine months out of the year,” said Mrs. Mosley, a third-grade teacher from Seattle. “Can’t we get the fall off? And when winter rolls around, I mean, it’s cold. Who wants to go to work in the winter? This is the problem with capitalism: you have to work for food and money.”
“And don’t get me started on spring: it’s so nice outside. Forcing teachers to work in spring is tyranny of the highest order. It’s like, um… hang on, let me think of a literary reference.”
She pulled out her phone and googled “fictional villains.”
“It’s like Voldemort in Harry Potter!” she said finally.
Teachers’ unions are, of course, still demanding that the teachers be paid for their 12 months off.
The facts are teachers do not work a full nine months. They have 7-10 days for Christmas Break otherwise now known as Winter Break. They receive five days for Spring Break. Add in the monthly “teacher work day” where they often just chit chat about the difficulties of their students. We must not leave out the declared Federal and State/Commonwealth (there are four) days off. Next we have parent conference dayswhere very few parents show up. As with other employers, they receive personal days and sick days. Adding all those days together, teachers only work eight months, or less, per year. Yes, evenings often see them performing work for their jobs; however, many people who work twelve months per year, do the same.
The point is these individuals chose to be teachers. No sentient individual, who chose this profession, is unaware of the demands. Every single one of them goes through “student teaching”, giving them an up close, on the job, view of what they will be dealing with. It is past time for push back against an organization who cares less about students and more about themselves and a political agenda.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, which in the current crisis means we must use the fact that our universities have shown themselves to be petri dishes swimming with anti-American ideologies, combined with pre-existing trends, to lance this particular cultural boil.
Let’s be clear: Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.
They will say that we oppose academia because we are stupid Neanderthals, just like Trump is (That’s Lie #2 in my new book!). No. We would be stupid to let this undead institution on. This entire wokeness idiocy is the result of hack academics peddling half-baked theories that justify the consolidation of elite power at the expense of those of us who don’t live on the diploma dole. The bizarre language – “We must struggle to decolonialize the cisnormative paradigm to purge the structural racism caused by the male gaze and amplify whiny, entitled voices” – and the performance art aspects of the media-friendly insurrection – notice how they only get frisky in jurisdictions where they can count on the pinko mayor to hold back the constables and on the local DA to merely slap their wrists? – is all a direct result of indoctrination in the colleges that we normal people support.
Why should we do that? We have no moral obligation to subsidize a generation of brats.
Now, the only thing really keeping academia attached to the body politic like the institutional deer tick that it is was the widespread and baseless belief that our universities are somehow our culture’s crucial repositories of knowledge and learning. But it’s kind of hard to argue that when it belches forth graduates who decide to show that black lives matter by toppling statues of Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
If these bozos are considered “educated,” I’ll stick with the allegedly ignorant. At least someone without an Ivy League degree can give me a hand changing my oil or, you know, defending the Constitution with a rifle.
On the plus side, I like my chances in a revolution sparked by a generation that thinks words can be violence. And since none of them ever heard of Ft. Sumter, because that’s actual history instead of grievance tallying, none of them are hip to the fact that Democrats are already 0-1 on starting fights over their bizarre and repellant racist dogmas.
This decision to use academia’s institutional credibility as a cultural chamber pot comes at just the wrong time. Video and computer technology was already making the old giant lecture hall model obsolete even before the bat soup flu. You get the same level of loving personal attention staring at a iPad in your house as you do staring at the TA 100 yards away from you in a behemoth lecture hall, and you don’t have to breath in either the viruses or the scent of old Pabst wafting off of the unwashed bodies of your fellow students.
And adding insult to insult is the idea that you have to pay upwards of $50,000 or more a year for the “college experience.” The Porsche experience is nice, but most people still choose the Chevy experience. You get there either way – just the latter way you aren’t impoverished for the rest of your life.
Of course, because it’s the Ivy League – that same institution that brought us the Wall Street collapse, Iraq, and a society where the nonsense scribbled down in White Fragility is not immediately laughed out of polite company – we have now Harvard demanding full tuition for the 2020-2021 academic year conducted completely by video learning. It’s basically a public confession that the whole point of the place is getting admitted – as long as at the end of a few years you get a diploma reading “HARVARD,” who cares what goes on during them?
Over-priced, inefficient, and not merely useless but actively detrimental to society – yeah, I’m sold on academia as currently constituted. So, let’s take this opportunity to burst this societal pimple.
First, defund the universities. All the kids love the defunding, right? Let the schools compete in the market. Sure, some marquee schools will flourish – there are always going to be rich daddies willing to pay the premium to send Kaden or Ashleigh to a four-year party on some leafy campus. But it’s going to force the other schools to provide value or die. Good riddance.
Second, tax the endowments. The Ivy League is really a bunch of hedge funds pretending to be schools anyway. Now, it would be tempting to redistribute the endowments to schools that have less money and watch these people scamper away from the socialism they pretend to love like roaches from a kitchen light – shouldn’t they pay their fair share? The problem is that it would be a lifeline to the colleges that will fail, and we want them to die. The taxed money can go to buy weapons to sink ChiCom subs.
Third, student loans need to come from the school and to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. A school is going to be a lot less eager to say, “Sure, go ahead and major in Norwegian Feminist Dance Theory” if they are on the hook when their ardent young scholar can’t get a gig that can pay back the sticker price.
Fourth, enforce not merely free speech on campus but ideological diversity. Diversity is good, right? Okay, in a country where half of it thinks Trump rocks and more than half dig Jesus, having a faculty and administration where literally no one publicly confesses to doing either is UNSAT.
And fifth, we need to stop falling for the notion that our colleges occupy some sort of intellectual, and even moral, high ground. They don’t. They are populated by greedy, malevolent, and stupid people who have done incalculable damage to their students morally, intellectually, and financially, and we should hold them in contempt.
Somehow, along the way, we were sold the impression that college was the gateway to a special caste to which we should aspire. We need to reject that condescending and pretentious notion, and tell academia to kiss our aspirations.
Instead, we must push the Mike Rowe vision of a society where you don’t need a bachelors degree to shift paper from Box A to Box B in a cubicle. The fact is that our lame public teacher unions have done such a crappy job that employers are forced to look for a college diploma to get some shaky assurance that the prospective candidate possesses the basic skills that a high school diploma should attest to. We need to make high school great again. For many, many people, college is a waste of valuable time and money. Every kid should not go to college.
This is our chance to undo one of America’s biggest mistakes in the last century, allowing academia to metastasize into the societal tumor that it has become. Technology and economics were already gut-punching this flabby punk before both the double-strike combo of the pangolin pandemic panic and the woke insurrection revealed that not only did the emperor have no clothes but he wasn’t packing much to speak of besides.
It’s going to fight for its life, and its play will be – surprise – more blood money from us to keep it going. But it has been revealed as yet another undead leftist institution, staggering on long after it should have rested in pieces. Let’s take this opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of academia as we know it.
AuntiE says: With my great powers, I can see everyone rolling their eyes at yet another education thread from me. It is my firm belief education/academia is one of the most important issues facing our United States. We cannot continue with this downward spiral in the education of students!
Next month marks the beginning of the 2020/2021 academic year in several US states, and pressure is mounting to reopen schools even as the COVID-19 pandemic persists. Florida, for example, is now considered the nation’s No. 1 hot spot for the virus; yet on Monday, the state’s education commissioner issued an executive order mandating that all Florida schools open in August with in-person learning and their full suite of student services.
Gratefully, this virus seems to be sparing most children, and prominent medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics have urged schools to reopen this fall with in-person learning. For some parents, fear of the virus itself is a primary consideration in delaying a child’s return to school, especially if the child has direct contact with individuals who are most vulnerable to COVID-19’s worst effects.
But for many parents, it’s not the virus they are avoiding by keeping their children home—it’s the response to the virus.
In May, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued school reopening guidelines that called for:
Strict social distancing tactics
All-day mask wearing for most students and teachers
Staggered attendance
Daily health checks
No gym or cafetaria use
Restricted playground access and limited toy-sharing, and
Tight controls on visitors to school buildings, including parents.
School districts across the country quickly adopted the CDC’s guidelines, devising their reopening plans accordingly. Once parents got wind of what the upcoming school-year would look like, including the real possibility that at any time schools could be shut down again due to virus spikes, they started exploring other options.
For Florida mother, Rachael Cohen, these social distancing expectations and pandemic response measures prompted her to commit to homeschooling her three children, ages 13, 8, and 5, this fall.
“Mandated masks, as well as rigid and arbitrary rules and requirements regarding the use and location of their bodies, will serve to dehumanize, disconnect, and intimidate students,” Cohen told me in a recent interview.
She is endeavoring to expand schooling alternatives in her area and is currently working to create a self-directed learning community for local homeschoolers that emphasizes nature-based, experiential education. “There is quite a lot of interest,” she says.
According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 60 percent of parents surveyed said they will likely choose at-home learning this fall rather than send their children to school even if the schools reopen for in-person learning. Thirty percent of parents surveyed said they were “very likely” to keep their children home.
While some of these parents may opt for an online version of school-at-home tied to their district, many states are seeing a surge in the number of parents withdrawing their children from school in favor of independent homeschooling. From coast to coast, and everywhere in between, more parents are opting out of conventional schooling this year, citing onerous social distancing requirements as a primary reason.
Other parents are choosing to delay their children’s school enrollment, with school districts across the country reporting lower than average kindergarten registration numbers this summer.
School officials are cracking down in response.
Concerned about declining enrollments and parents reassuming control over their children’s education, some school districts are reportedly trying to block parents from removing their children from school for homeschooling.
In England, it’s even worse. Government officials there are so worried about parents refusing to send their children back to school this fall that the education secretary just announced fines for all families who keep their children home in violation of compulsory schooling laws. “We do have to get back into compulsory education and obviously fines sit alongside as part of that,” English secretary Gavin Williamson announced.
When school officials resort to force in order to ensure compliance, it should prompt parents to look more closely at their child’s overall learning environment. Parents have the utmost interest in ensuring their children’s well-being, both physically and emotionally, and their concerns and choices should be respected and honored.
After several months of learning at home with their children, parents may not be so willing to comply with district directives and may prefer other, more individualized education options. Pushed into homeschooling this spring by the pandemic, many parents are now going willingly, and eagerly, down this increasingly popular educational path.
AUNTIE SAYS: Hurray for these parents taking back their responsibility for their children. One excellent thing has come from the forced quarantine of citizens.
