Conservative parents know they can pull their kids out of bad schools, right?
It is actually really easy to do this.
The following video was making the rounds on conservative social media earlier this week…
…and if you’re at all plugged into the scene then you’ll know how common this is. A parent goes before a school board or a county education panel and reveals some horrible depredation to which their child has been subject in a public school—public masturbation or pornographic curricula or a pervert teacher trying to educate the kids in how to chemically sterilize themselves and live as the opposite sex or whatever. During the heady earlier days of the pandemic you also saw a lot of parents complaining online that their three-year-olds had been reduced to tears by having to wear masks for eight hours a day, etc.
It’s all very awful and moreover all very believable. Broadly speaking, public education is like this. It’s just the way it is. It’s not rocket science: Progressives have had pretty dominant control of public education for decades, and so we shouldn’t be surprised to see very progressive ideals playing out in school, from comprehensive child-masking to the increasingly aggressive sexualization of young children. You’re just going to see a lot of that in public education and we should not be surprised to see parents, or at least conservative parents, responding to it.
But one thing I surprisingly never hear as part of these vignettes is something along the lines of, “I have removed my child from this school. The environment is too dangerous for him.” That really never seems to happen. And you have to wonder why. I mean, if your kid’s being exposed to toxic, harmful, poisonous things at school—things that could physically and emotionally cripple and scar him for life—why is your first response to, you know, wait a few months for the next school board meeting and then go before it to complain to the superintendent? Why isn’t your first response to get him out of that environment immediately, like on the same day?
I suppose one could imagine a bevy of responses to this. “We don’t have the time or ability to pull our child out of school and (put him in another school/a private school/homeschool him).” “We don’t want to take him away from his friends.” “We think it’s important to stay and fight.” Do not all of these excuses seem kind of pathetic? This is your child and he is being actively targeted and exploited by people and by ideologies that pretty explicitly want to harm him. It is rather beyond me why anyone could ever come up with any justification for leaving your kid in such a place.
I am somewhat reluctant to ascribe motives here, but if I had to guess I would say there is a combination of laziness and ideological apathy at play in these decisions. Many people probably simply don’t want to put any more effort into their children’s educations, and moreover at bottom they don’t actually care all that much if their child is affected and consumed by these types of ideological systems. Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but “a boy masturbated in front of my daughter in school and I just left her in that school,” if that’s what happened, doesn’t invite a whole lot of other interpretations.