As mentioned on the show, here's Inez Stepman's piece, '"Get You Kids out Of Public School”: This is The Right’s Greatest Opportunity in Decades. Will We Take It?'
We are standing on the precipice of the biggest education revolution in generations.
As schools refuse at union behest to reopen full-time instruction in the fall, parents are flooding into alternative options like homeschooling and pandemic “pods.” For the first time in modern political memory, there is likely to be an exodus from public schools.
It will not just be the worst-served in poorer neighborhoods, to whom most school choice programs are geared, that leave. It will also be middle-class and wealthier families. This presents the biggest opportunity for domestic victory the Right has had in 70 years—if the Republican Party does not squander it.
William F. Buckley, Jr. may have started the conservative lament about the direction of higher education and academia in 1951, but the Right has only recently woken up to the political dangers of the elementary and secondary system. Perhaps this is because, in many ways, the common school system first implemented in the 19th century has, in the past, been an Americanizing, patriotic, and assimilatory institution.
But as it has done to so many institutions in American life, the Left’s long march has turned public school’s purpose upside down and inside out. Far from inculcating Reagan’s “informed patriotism,” today’s public schools now teach young citizens an outsized vision of America’s faults and a twisted, false view of her remarkable strengths.
While textbook information is proprietary, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History has long been a staple of high school classrooms, now bolstered by the 4,500 (at minimum) schools that have adopted the 1619 Project curriculum—a curriculum even the Project’s author now acknowledges is not factual history, but anti-American polemic.
There’s an inverse relationship between civic knowledge and the now-fashionable opinions that America is a racist and sexist country. Among people under 45, only one in five can pass the extremely basic U.S. citizenship exam given to naturalized immigrants. But half of that generation are convinced that America is a racist country and 40% disagree that we should be proud of our history.
There can be little doubt that the effect of public schooling today is far from its original purpose of forming citizens capable of living in a self-governing republic. But for decades, despite a robust private school sector, two million homeschoolers, and dozens of limited school choice programs, public school has remained the default option for 90% of American students. That may be about to change.