8 Ways Public Schools Could Further Radicalize When They Finally Re-open

The long-term shutdowns of schools have caused a lot of people to clamor to ‘Open the d-mned schools!’ as one governor put it in an op-ed. Let’s be careful what we wish for.

By Stella MorabitoAPRIL 1, 2021

We ought to ask ourselves what public schools will look like and feel like once radical educrats and politicos agree to reopen them. I think schools will re-open across the board, but only when our ruling class is good and ready for that.

The big question is what the Wuhan-induced closures seem to accomplish for these elites and what sort of school-scape they have envisioned for the future. What will the student body look like? The parents of public-school students? The curriculum?

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think we can infer eight negative outcomes down the pike after a long period of politicized school closures that were never justified by medical science. I imagine our ruling elites will be happy with such outcomes. We should be prepared for the following.

1. Even More Peer Pressure to Conform

Our famine of social connection will likely spark a greater tolerance for blind conformity. There has been a mass starvation for peer connection among students. Many have been numbed by the drudgery of online learning with no outlets through sports and clubs, no human contact with teachers and peers.

Parents are also starving for a place their kids can engage with others during the workday. So might they now be willing to swallow anything for some relief?

There’s a phrase attributed to Lenin: “The worse, the better,” which means that the more misery people feel, the better it is for the success of communism (or perhaps the “great reset”). The longer people suffer in isolation, the higher the toll and more susceptible they are to depression and self-harm. So after a long period of social deprivation, they may become far more willing to conform under the slightest of social pressures, no matter what’s asked of them.

2. Less-Engaged Parents

There has been a marked increase in homeschooling during the past year’s school closures, as well as a huge uptick in positive attitudes towards homeschooling. Parents who are now fleeing online public schooling may well continue homeschooling after government schools re-open.

In addition, affluent parents (including elitists who promote school closures, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom) are simply sending their kids to private in-person schools. All of these trends mean that a significantly larger percentage of the student body will consist of kids whose parents are less engaged. As Will Collins recently pointed out in an article at The American Conservative, this means fewer parents to push back against radical agendas in the schools.

3. Accelerated Left-Wing Radicalism

“The pace of left-wing radicalism will likely accelerate,” in the schools, Collins states. After all, school boards have been busier than ever renaming schools (including those named for Abraham Lincoln) and introducing radical curriculum changes even while closed for real business. Illinois now requires teachers to indoctrinate students in leftist propaganda of critical race theory and gender ideology, among other things.

Against this backdrop, we can only surmise that once parental involvement has been effectively curtailed after a “reset” of more than a year, public schools will have far less parental pushback against curricula like the 1619 Project, critical race theory, dysfunctional math, white privilege workshops, mandatory transgenderism, and the like. School board accountability will precipitously plummet with fewer engaged parents in the system.

4. Harder Fight for Decent Families

Engaged parents who hope to swim against the tide in the public schools may find they are not up for the fight. They and their children are certain to be increasingly marginalized, particularly as radical reformers push a new ideology meant to abolish another “systemic” social problem: “family privilege.”

If such a concept takes off, we have to imagine workshops, similar to “white privilege workshops,” that would require students to confess their confess guilt for “unearned” family privileges such as going on family vacations or having live-in siblings or private gatherings around the dinner table.

The potential for setting kids against their family-privileged peers is great. And that means more bullying. As kids try to fit in, they could also become estranged from parents whose values conflict with radicalized teachings.

5. Converting Students Into Activists

Schools will increasingly use students as agitators for “social change.” The curricula will be saturated with ever more radical propaganda. As propaganda expert Jacques Ellul has noted, the entire purpose of propaganda is to stir people into action.

We already saw a lot of programmed agitation before the Wuhan virus shut down schools and businesses. For example, in recent years public schools have had students participate in gun control marches and climate crisis strikes during school hours.

As students are deprived of content knowledge while exposed to ever shriller talking points of identity politics and political correctness, they naturally become more alienated, more atomized, and therefore more conditioned to a mob mindset. In a school setting, it’s easy to pressure students to follow the lead of their leftist peers and teachers to participate in street theater. There’s loads of historical precedent for using youth to march for social change, including the Komsomol League in the Soviet Union and the Red Guard in Mao’s China.

6. Longer School Hours

School hours will increase, bleeding into mandatory summer school and other programs to keep kids in schools as long as possible. Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently released his “Five Point Plan for Reopening Schools,” which includes the need for making up for lost time in order to “level the playing field.”

This opens the door to the idea of a nationally mandated summer school. As an old saying goes: There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

Extending school hours — and years — is an old agenda item. For many years, the National Education Association union (until just recently) posted on its website a call to making schooling compulsory to age 21 if students don’t satisfactorily complete graduation requirements. There is also the push to lower the compulsory school starting age and even to make preschool mandatory.

7. Increased Isolation Even Back at School

More enforced conformity could actually breed more alienation and isolation than pre-COVID. The shutdowns are causing spikes in depression and even suicide among students who cannot tolerate the isolation.

Imagine, however, what would happen when the physical isolation ends, but a more insidious form of mental isolation takes place. As children undergo the coercive thought reform programs of critical race theory and transgender ideology, their minds become poisoned with hatred towards America and one another. This creates a sense of anomie—loneliness when in a crowd—that’s bound to create even more stress.

8. More School Invasion of Children’s Private Life

More anxieties among youth will give educrats more excuses to invade a child’s private mind with “socioemotional learning.” Elitist educrats can sell a cure for the stress they’ve cultivated in their newly opened hyper-Orwellian schools: the attractive idea of social and emotional “learning” (SEL). Advocates of SEL claim the curriculum will help students function better emotionally and relate better to their peers, but it depends heavily on data mining children to assess and affect their feelings and family attitudes.

The long-term shutdowns of schools have caused a lot of us to clamor continuously to “Open the d-mned schools!” as one governor put it in an op-ed. Let’s be careful what we wish for.

Radical education reformers have been intent on keeping schools shuttered despite widespread public outrage over the closures and despite the fact that serious risks from COVID are known to be extremely low for youth. Whatever their real reasons, they can’t be good for kids or parents. But it seems more than plausible that these prolonged school lockdowns could be a windfall for social engineers who can use the shutdowns to push for radicalized agendas upon re-opening.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist.

NEW DATA SHOWS HOMESCHOOLING EXPLOSION!

March 29th, 2021
by Alex Newman

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirm earlier polling results showing an unprecedented explosion in the number of families choosing to educate their children at home, free from government indoctrination, sexualization, forced masking, and dangerous dumbing down. Homeschooling rates grew fastest among black Americans.

The shift has been enormous. By the fall of 2020, the overall number of homeschooling families doubled, Census data show. In the Spring of 2020, just over 5 percent of families were educating children at home. By the fall, homeschoolers grew to represent over 11 percent of all American households with school-age children.

According to Census.gov, the number of homeschooling families grew rapidly from 1999 to 2012, but remained relatively steady at around 3.3 percent for years. “However, the global COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new interest in homeschooling and the appeal of alternative school arrangements has suddenly exploded,” wrote the bureaucracy, which tracks population data and more.

Using a nationally representative sample of American households, the Census Bureau's “Household Pulse Survey” compared data from the spring of the 2019-2020 school year with results from the fall of the 2020-2021. In late April and early May, about 5.4 percent of U.S. households with school-aged children reported homeschooling. By late September and early October, that number surged to 11.1 percent.

That enormous growth was an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling in the number of U.S. households that were homeschooling compared with the previous school year. Because homeschool families are often larger on average than government-schooled families, the percent of school-age children being educated at home is estimated to now be well over the 11.1 percent — potentially 5 million children or more.

Just to be sure that families doing government school at home did not misreport, the Census included a clarification making clear that virtual learning through a public or private school was not to be considered “true homeschooling.” Experts said that means the surge in homeschooling may have been even larger than reported. Unfortunately no data from the bureau was available from before the pandemic.

In some states the population of homeschoolers became almost 10 times larger. Massachusetts, for instance, went from having just 1.5 percent of children being homeschooled to more than 12 percent in that short period. In Alaska, the number went from 10 percent to almost 28 percent. And in Oklahoma, the numbers went from about 8 percent to over 20 percent. Florida's numbers also grew to almost 20 percent of families choosing to educate at home.

Self-described black Americans were far more likely to pull their children from government schools than any other group measured in the data. “In households where respondents identified as Black or African American, the proportion homeschooling increased by five times, from 3.3% (April 23-May 5) to 16.1% in the fall (Sept. 30-Oct. 12),” the Census Bureau revealed. Lower-income Americans were also more likely to pull their children out.

Analysts said more research would be helpful to understand the changes. “Future research will likely reveal what portion of those families who began homeschooling during the past year will continue on with it into the future,” wrote Dr. Brian Ray, who leads the National Home Education Research Institute. “If a significant portion stay with homeschooling, more noticeable changes lie ahead regarding public favor toward homeschooling and parent-led home-based education’s impact on individual children, families, and society.”

The news is not new. In fact, The Newman Report noted in September of 2020 that survey data from Gallup revealed a doubling in homeschool numbers. At the same time, this blog also reported in December that government-school districts across America were seeing catastrophic declines in the number of victims enrolled in their indoctrination centers, with some districts losing over 10 percent or more in one year.

Of course, government and government-school proponents want Americans to believe that the surge in home education is solely due to COVID-19. The reality is far more complex. One of the many things COVID did was expose for parents the madness and child abuse taking place in government schools, while at the same time showing parents the benefits and possibilities of homeschooling.

Governments' totalitarian responses to COVID19 decimated small businesses and economies around the world. But there has been a clear silver lining. With every day that passes, more and more families are fleeing the dangerous indoctrination centers that identify as educational institutions for the safe sanctuary of homeschooling and good private schools. Hopefully the exodus will continue to grow.