Dakota Beacon

Ho-hum. Another day, another story about a school subverting parents’ authority and messing with a child’s mind.

Today Breitbart reported a story, this one from California, about a parent’s torment by a tag team of school teachers and Child Protective Services when this mother was told at a meeting with the teacher that her 14-year-old daughter (I did say “daughter”) was “trans fluid”. She uses the “unisex” bathroom . . . oh, and she has a “new name”. How cool is that?

So the mother, who first broke down in tears at the meeting with the teacher and then – because she referred to the girl as “she” and used her “former” name – had to defend herself in another meeting, this one with Child Protective Services, who asked the girl and her brother if they wanted to be taken out of the home. In the end, CPS dropped the “case”. Sorry for all the quotation marks.

There is a whole lot wrong with this, obviously. We can start with the teachers. Our schools are not turning out well-educated children. Kids are not learning to read and write properly, if at all, they know nothing of our country’s history. Most of them probably still can’t find Texas on a map and they are inept, in most cases, in math. Forget “science”. Maybe that’s not even a thing anymore.

Yet they find time during the school day to counsel other people’s children to question their sex, undermine parents’ teaching and authority and obviously their religious beliefs. In the case of this little girl, they began by inviting her to a so-called “Equity Club”, a thinly-disguised LGBTQ group, where she was encouraged to identify as “gender fluid”. The parents found out when the girl, following completion of 6^th grade, informed them she thought she was bi-sexual.

Any problem with this so far? Well, it developed further. In the middle of 7^th grade, the parents were summoned to a meeting at the school where they were caught in the act of using the girl’s birth name and the pronoun, “she”. This was enough to bring on the swarm of bees from CPS. I suppose that if they were falling short of kids to supply to medical experimentation or the sex trade, that might have been the end of that family, but fortunately they must have had their full quota that week because the take was cancelled. (Am I being ungenerous here? I don’t care.)

What a mess! How did we even get here? I know – I have said this before. A child’s mother belongs at home. A child is best educated at home through high school and we should shut down the public school system. Home school is the ideal, the best for the child. No one needs a second income. If there is a single mother, a divorced parent, the other parent ought to cover the whole tab. That alone might keep some families intact and discourage “fluid” marriages and “fluid” parents. Raising one’s child is absolutely the highest and best purpose for the life of a parent, bar none. No career outside the home, no business in the home, is nearly as important as being a parent to a child. There is no substitute in a child’s life for a parent devoted to his upbringing and care.

There are many different ways to home school a child. A parent who feels challenged by the prospect can find great support with other parents and also with packaged learning materials from a number of excellent sources. By using these the child will have a far better academic education that he would have in a public school. He will also avoid being tempted to sell himself to the “vaccine” lady for a slice of pizza or an ice cream cone at a pop-up “clinic”. He will not have someone telling him he is really a girl if he’s a boy, or a boy if she’s a girl, or trans-fluid if they can’t decide. He will be free, on the other hand, to develop his own special talents, whether for music, math or perhaps writing or art. Our kids were “un-schooled”, learning something different every day, taking field trips, working together on projects at home. They completed their high school courses through correspondence simply because their dad and I wanted them to earn high school diplomas. They got A’s throughout their high school courses, by the way. We don’t need schools to teach our kids at all.

There are other means for those who do not accept this responsibility. The first is to campaign night and day for federal, state and local vouchers so they can choose any school they wish for their kids and change at will. This makes education into the market place it should be, where there is true competition for whatever the parents’ values demand.

If you are unfortunate enough to have a child in a public school, or really in any school, do what my mother did when she was dissatisfied with the schooling my little sisters were getting. Go there and sit in the back of the classroom all day. Watch what is going on. If you see something wrong you can intervene before it gets out of hand. If they have an “Equity Club” you go and attend its lunchtime meetings. If you don’t want your child told he’s living in the wrong body you can stop it dead in its tracks. I know, I know. All you career moms out there can’t get the day off. So get together with your kids’ classmates’ parents and school-pool. Instead of dropping the kid off, one person should take off the afternoon or morning and take turns monitoring the classroom. Bring a yard chair – they won’t like it and won’t make it easy. My mom took her embroidery hoop and embroidered napkins, I believe. Take a magazine if you like, or a crossword puzzle, but keep one eye on the teacher. In a classroom of 30 kids, there are probably 15 kids whose parents give a dam. That means an average of 30 parents who really need to take responsibility. You should all be able to get a personal day off every couple of months, right? Or do a morning and an afternoon shift arrangement.

Any school that does not permit a parent to quietly observe from the back of the room should not get that parent’s tax dollars. And, on that point, if you take your kid out of that school they lose a good deal of money. Just file that away for thought.

It appears as though we might have to do away with Child Protective Services altogether. These programs and agencies were once set up because someone perceived a need for them. Perhaps there was and still is a need, but it seems that now they are doing way more harm than good. Harassing parents, undermining their authority, subverting kids’ beliefs and breaking up families are not public service. It is getting obscene, literally. Parents are now fearing the agencies they are paying taxes to support, teachers are using these agencies to insinuate themselves into their pupils’ families and up-end the family unit, along with that family’s religious and political beliefs.

We can only blame the parents for this. Seriously. Who else can we blame? If parents, whose chief responsibility is to their children, aren’t stepping up why would we not expect these twisted, highly motivated and dedicated teachers to continue in their cursed pursuit? Parents need to use the leverage they already have and create more for themselves through one or more of the aforementioned means. Monitor every minute of the school day – don’t wait for the counseling session, don’t wait for the PTA or the school board meeting.

I just cannot summon much respect or sympathy for these parents when, having turned their kids over to a stranger to raise, suddenly appear at a school board meeting with steam coming out of their ears, banging the podium and screaming hoarsely at the school board president and pointing their fingers at these teachers.

There are and have always been great and caring teachers. I have had one or two in my lifetime. Not many, but one or two. I am grateful for them. But the vast majority look at their job as a crummy job they don’t seem to like, they have contempt for the parents who pay for them and see the kids as something to mold into whatever they personally prefer. The best of them do not stay in the business. Years ago I wrote an obituary for the gifted teacher Jaime Escalante, who tried to teach ghetto kids calculus – and succeeded magnificently – only to be driven out of the American school system by its corruption. I have known some good teachers who couldn’t stand it and moved to other professions. Escalante just moved back to his native Bolivia, where education and real teachers were still valued. We all know of teachers who are great examples. They are the minority.

Think of the harm done to the psyche of this one young girl – a sixth grader. Even though she is now in a normal school setting and back to using her own name, she will never be the same. Think of the stress in that family, the undeserved, unnecessary stress, the threat of their children being taken away (and to what?). This is horrific. This family has been damaged by this teacher. How many others has she impacted in this way? Multiply this story by thousands, tens of thousands. Meanwhile the kids aren’t learning English, history, math or geography. The only grammatical term they’ve probably ever heard is “pronoun”.

It needs to be stopped. Our education system is in tatters and needs to be totally scrapped and re-imagined. No one needs a teacher coaching him or her to be a different sex than he was born. No one needs CPS threatening to kidnap their children. No one should be spending precious, irretrievable hours of his life addressing a panel of morons and miscreants at a school board meeting. Dissolve the school boards. Institute voucher systems and close up all public schools. Allow – no – require – parents to take responsibility before the damage is done. Make them choose their kids’ schools, let the schools compete for the parents’ trust. Right now these public school teachers respect no one.  And, like all statists, they ahbor the family unit - it represents a resistance to totalitarianism.  Can't have that.

This can be fixed, unlike some other things in life. We can begin by ending the Department of Education – at every level. Parents have been delegating parenthood and it is time they stopped. A parents who suddenly find out that for the past couple of years their daughter has been using the boys’ bathroom get no sympathy from me.