by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, June 2020
"In our educational system, from our kindergartens to our prestigious universities, liberalism ... actively seeks to suppress opposing ideas ... [For] the left, this is no longer about principle. It is about power and control." -- me, See, I told You So, 1993
"[T]he nation is finally having its fill of Democrats. Now, you won't see evidence of that because the media will never report that ... You have to look at other signs: more [kids] being taken out of the public school system and being homeschooled. All of the signs of the American population rejecting wildcat, madcap liberalism are everywhere..." -- me, EIB, 9/12/17
Beneath the radar, danger lurks for the left. No, I'm not talking about Joe "lurker" Biden. I'm talking about the shutdown of their most important indoctrination feeder system -- American public schools. Dr. Anthony Fausi testified on May 12 that there's not much hope for schools opening nationwide by fall, either: "Even at the top speed we're going, we don't see a vaccine playing into the ability of kids going back to school this term," Fausi told senators. "We don't know everything about this virus, and we really better be careful, particularly when it comes to children ... [W]e better be careful [that] we are not cavalier in thinking children are completely immune to the deleterious effects." You see? They're doing this for the children.
Libs are, as always, using "the children" to keep their boot on the neck of the nation. If schools remain closed, many parents aren't able to return to work. This is part and parcel of the kill-the- economy ploy the Democrats are running right now, after Russiagate, Stormygate, Muellergate, Ukrainegate, impeachmentgate (and on and on) were all busts. They are pinning their hopes on the virus to save them from a second Trump term -- and to distract from the genuine threat (to them): Obamagate.
It's not going to work, and in the meantime, there is a hidden upside for the good guys. As National Review puts it, "With so many parents now in charge of educating their children, the statists are beginning to freak out over this exercise of liberty." And well they should.
A Business Insider article titled "Homeschooling Could Be the Smartest Way to Teach Kids in the 21st Century" outlines the advantages of at-home learning, including personalized instruction and more varied curriculums. Research has shown that homeschoolers have better standardized test scores and higher graduation rates than public or even private school kids. All this without the "toxic environment" and bullying often found in public schools.
Yet this trend infuriates the left, which despises homeschooling with a hot fury. Since their sworn mission is to inculcate young skulls full of mush with liberalism, they're not about to surrender any child to stay-at-home parents who actually want their child to learn the three R's, as well as, say, the truth about American history.
Liberals are sending up warning flares. Take "The Risks of Homeschooling" in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine. It showcases the views of Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard and Faculty Director of the Law School's Child Advocacy Program -- whose long titles hide a control freak. She wants homeschooling banned -- because, she says, it is "an essentially unregulated regime." Can't have that.
Get the disgust for homeschooling that Prof. Bartholet expresses in the Arizona Law Journal, where she sneers at the "religious ideologues who dominate the homeschooling movement." She thinks it's terrible that children are forced into lockdown with their parents all day, every day -- and not just during this quarantine. She truly believes kids being with parents is far more dangerous for them than the coronavirus.
[T]he rapidly growing homeschooling phenomenon ... poses [a threat] to children and society ... Many homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enble autonomous choice about their future lives. Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science. Abusive parents can keep their children at home free from the risk that teachers will report them to child protective services. Some homeschool precisely for this reason.
Got that? Homeschooling parents are knuckle-dragging Christian white supremacist child abusers. Actually, as reported by USA Today, it's the education system that is enabling teachers who abuse students in school. In a practice called "passing the trash", state education agencies across the country have been ignoring a federal ban on signing secrecy deals with teachers who have abused minors. They hide details of teacher-student sexual abuse and even pay the teachers to find new jobs working with children. "[A]s a result, schoolchildren across the nation continue to be beaten, raped, and harassed by their teachers while government officials at every level stand by and do nothing."
No surprise, then, that a survey of parents who homeschool by the National Center for Education Statistics [NCES] found that the most important reason for their decision to homeschool was "a concern about the environment of other schools." Second was "a dissatisfaction with academic instructions." Third: the desire for moral instruction.
Prof. Bartholet doesn't approve. She claims that homeschooled children are not "exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance" the way public school students are. By that she means: liberalism. She utters not a word of criticism of Drag Queen Story Hours or gender neutral unisex bathrooms found in public schools today. And with all her lip service for "tolerance", Prof. Bartholet displays a rabid intolerance for homeschooling.
By casting homeschooled children as the victims of their authoritarian, controlling parents, Bartholet has got it exactly bass-ackwards. It's the public schools that dictate the way a child sees the world, cramming their heads with leftist victimology and disinformation. The real victims are kids suffering in horrible public school systems, who can't read or write and cry themselves to sleep because their teachers have convinced them our planet is on fire and the poor starving polar bears are drifting to sea on melting ice floes.
I want you to think back and ask yourself if you have reacted angrily at me over the years when I have postulated that one of the real reasons behind day care was to get your kids out of your house and place them where government is in control. This goes back many years. Callers have objected, "But Rush, people have to farm the kids out. It takes two incomes to survive today." I've warned, "You need to be very wary of this."
Well, here comes the evidence. Of all the things to be worried about today, Elizabeth Bartholet at Harvard is worried that you have authoritarian control over your own kids, from the time they are born until they are 18. She considers that dangerous. She doesn't see a family living in your house. She sees a fascist mom and dad, with the kids as a bunch of prisoners. The fascist mom and dad are the problem, and the kids have to be rescued from them. From you.
Well, what the hell is school? It's the teachers and the administrators who are the authoritarians, while the students are powerless. The left controls education from preschool all the way up through college. They take charge of children at very young, impressionable ages and start teaching them lies, that Western civilization is corrupt, that evil Europeans arriving here is what led to every problem in the world, that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by evil slaveholders and everything that follows is illegitimate.
There's been a culture war being fought for decades in the classrooms to cast our Founding as a racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic event, that America is unjust and immoral by its veritable existence,that America has no moral authority in the world because of our original sin of slavery and our denying women the right to vote and our institutional and structural awfulness. This poison is being taught to children right now, at a school near you.
It's why I undertook to write the Rush Revere series, which is how I've gotten to know the homeschool crowd so well. They are salt-of-the-earth people. They have the same concern you do. They simply don't trust the public education system anymore. They worked hard to raise their kids, sent them off to public school, and were horrified at what they were being taught. So they -- by the millions -- decided they wouldn't put up with it.
If our side is really serious about restoring the country, the education system will have to be Mission One. Any genuine rescue of America will involve resurrecting genuine education. Right now, the system is in thrall to the narrow, grim, dreary, and joyless ideology of leftism. Because the left can never win in the arena of ideas -- they can only stamp out and discredit competing ideas and destroy the people who hold them -- they simply won't permit the discussion of ideas outside their dogma. There is no critical thinking taught. There is no curiosity allowed. There is no such thing as free inquiry.
To keep those wonderful gifts alive until schools are liberated from leftist propaganda, this is the perfect time to embrace homeschooling. Right now, parents have the opportunity to teach their kids critical thinking skills. Analysis, logic, and critical thinking are the secrets to obliterating the liberal agenda.
And that's why they hate homeschooling with a passion. The left fears critical thinking like a vampire fears the cross. Leftists rightly worry that independent thought will unwind and unravel the indoctrination that has been underway for too many years.
Elizabeth Bartholet shows us who these people are. They want to run their propaganda reeducation camps without interference from mom or dad. And they're ticked off that you can teach your kids facts and truth that Bartholet and her ilk will have to try to stamp out before it infects the general population.
It may already be too late, thank heavens, A new Real Clear national poll shows that a full 40 percent of families say they're more likely to homeschool after the lockdowns end. This is the greatest existential threat the left faces today. Do not doubt me.