I mentioned school indoctrination

So, this fall, virtual class discussions will have many potential spectators – parents, siblings, etc. – in the same room. We’ll never be quite sure who is overhearing the discourse. What does this do for our equity/inclusion work? (Thread)

— Matthew R. Kay (@MattRKay) August 8, 2020

If you read the short thread and its replies – especially from teachers – you have another piece of evidence to what I asserted regarding education just being one of many products produced jointly through schools.

Just to clarify, “indoctrination” is not necessarily bad or good itself, but is bad or good depending on what is being preached. The real question here is not what, but by whom.

The party that is both most interested in the healthy attitudes of the child, is in the best position to judge a child’s needs, and is through the natural order the first responsible party is the parent, not a hired teacher.

That is to say, the family (and thus, the children) are under the natural dominion of the parents: the mother and the father. It is both their option to teach cultural attitudes as well as their obligation since it is they who have elected to create the family in the first place.

Only when the responsibility toward children fails should we consider overriding the parents. But again, we come to the question not of whether we should override parents, but who should do the overriding, as well as who decides what failure even is.

It can be correctly argued that there is a benefit to public schooling in that, since children are compelled to attend, a third party is able to catch things such as neglect and abuse. Indeed, as a public school teacher, I have witnessed cases of both along with the resulting interventions. But before we begin praising our school system for this, we must ask, why does this responsibility fall to the agents of the state?

Where are the extended family members? If the nuclear family suffers problems, the next in line should be correcting them, on up, only arriving at the state after all else has failed. We look to the mandated reporting of public school teachers to heal a deeper wound, which is our social atomization. There is no extended family to step in and correct errant parents because the extended family is neutered and moot. There are no patriarchs empowered to safeguard their whole family.

Looking at the twitter thread again, some teachers do, in fact, view the parents as ideological opponents that stand in the way of them properly molding the minds of youth. Parental observation is therefore a danger to the “progress” of the culture and one of the central missions of the Prussian model – to create good “citizens,” even if it means upending the natural order. Parents are “failing” their children if they are not fostering the correct ideological attitudes – with the “correct” attitudes being determined by the teacher (again the question of whom)

Just as an aside – Many teachers clearly view the repression of deviant behaviors or opposition to the ideological paradigm of the new social justice to be working actively against the “good.” Never once do thinkers like this consider that social structures exist the way they do for good reasons, or that encouraging a child to engage in deviant behaviors could actively harm their personal and social outcomes.

But we would never have to extract our children from such dangers if our society wasn’t in such a predicament regarding who has both the option and obligation to rear children. Since education is just one of the products of public schools, it is time to recognize that we are outsourcing much more than the education of our children, we are outsourcing other things that we as parents have an obligation to provide.

Optimates rise!

I’m an independent author. You can support me by buying my books, and you may get some entertainment and information out of them as well!