McDonald: The dangers of education
Every American knows America’s schools are broken. Some Americans, mainly those on the left, prefer it that way. They see government monopoly on education as a means to an ugly end—total control of the population. Every left-wing movement is totalitarian at its core, so this should not surprise anyone. For those who see education as a means to a different end—instilling basic knowledge, critical thinking skills, and good values into the minds and character of American children—the government school system has become an enemy, one so dangerous that the only way to fix it is to destroy it.
In 2022 I posted a 12-minute clip of a full-length interview with Mikki Willis on my LinkedIn page that led to the erasure of my account: The Dangers of Education. The censors at Microsoft found that what I said in that interview to be so dangerous that they deleted me. I still defend what I said, and, in fact, believe it to be even more true today. Education, as it is managed by our government now, is failing in its original mission to educate. It is harming children. It is dangerous.
For years, the government school system has failed to teach. Test scores continue to decline. After the two years of school closures and lockdowns throughout the US from 2020 to 2022, American children performed worse on standardized tests than at any time in the past 20 years. This is not, as the Democrat party frequently argues, due to inadequate funding. The United States spends more money per pupil on education than any other country in the industrialized world, apart from Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. New York spends more than any other state--$30,000 per student, more than double the national average--yet it performs right in the middle among all states. In schools where children perform well, it is largely due to the efforts of parents who guide the learning of their children at home to make up for the lack of learning at school. No wonder home schooling has exploded, especially among black and Hispanic students, whose home-schooling numbers increased by 500% during the two years government closed the schools.
What the school closures revealed, though, was not only a failure to teach but also a concerted effort to indoctrinate children with leftist ideology and corrupt them with sick, perverse, and abusive lies. The release of videos by Libs of Tik Tok showing cartoonish government school teachers saluting gay pride flags and ordering students to pledge allegiance to Black Lives Matter exposed a dark side of the classroom that few parents were aware of. Newsfeeds of parents reading excerpts of explicit sex acts from school library or classroom textbooks at school board meetings shocked the conscience of every adult American, parent or not. We all knew that Johnny couldn’t read, but we didn’t know that he was being encouraged to wear a dress, change his name to Joanne, and declare himself (herself, theirself, itself?) a racist. And this is why education is now dangerous.
Education became dangerous because of centralization. Centralized government, media, and corporations led to the fear pandemic of 2020. Centralized education, controlled by a centralized government, led to the transformation of education into indoctrination. Of course, parents are also to blame. Adult narcissism and the now common hands-off approach to parenting provided a fertile space for toxic weeds to grow in the classroom, which many American parents see as a babysitting space of respite from the responsibilities of parenthood. “Don’t ask don’t tell” became the preferred approach to parent involvement in children’s education. The nation has only recently been forced to face the depth and breadth of rot in the government schools, leading to an educational revival not seen in generations.
The way to solve this problem of failed and destructive education is to destroy the system. That means a total decentralization of the government school system. It means a return to parental and community control over both curricula and the hiring and firing of teachers. It means the abolition of the teachers’ unions, which are a purely destructive force that serves no one’s interests but those of its members. This may require a transition to home schooling for many American children, so that the state is starved of the funding necessary to keep the unions afloat. The first step is to ensure every American child receives a school voucher that can be spent on any school or educational program, even a home school. In most cases, mom and dad would make much better teachers than what kids are getting at government schools today—why not pay them for their efforts? Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders just signed a bill introducing school vouchers throughout the state. Parents must combat their narcissism and re-assume their responsibility as parents, even if it means scraping by with a one-parent household income. Get rid of one car, downsize your house, take less expensive vacations…which is more important, raising a good child or living a comfortable life? You chose to have a child. Do what is necessary to raise him properly.
I see many examples of communities fighting back against the child abuse that now passes for education in this country. We can take back what is ours—the right and duty to educate our own children. We must abandon the government school system and the unions that back it up. We must support legislation that redirects funding away from government schools and back into the community where the money came from. Parents must step up. Grandparents must begin contributing to the efforts of parents who want to support real education. This country did not achieve greatness because of its government. Its success came from the hard work of American citizens at a community level. That is where the new educational system must be built.
Mark McDonald, M.D.
Co-host of the Informed Dissent podcast
Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis and Freedom From Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery
