Educators Are Nervous About Kids Being Away From Public School Indoctrination During Shutdown

The past couple of months have certainly been a time of many adjustments for a lot of Americans. Some of us -- like myself -- haven’t really had our daily routines upset. My child is finishing up college and heading into whatever the real world will look like after.

Parents with younger children who are in school, however, have had new reality thrust upon them. Their kids are home, restless, and still need to learn. 20th-century technology is making it easier to set up online learning, but that can still be a little glitchy. There are a lot of teachers who aren’t very tech-savvy, which can bog down the process.

Either way, many parents are becoming more involved in their kids’ daily education than they’d perhaps ever planned to be.

Whether reluctant or enthusiastic new homeschooling parents, they’re going to be on the job for at least the rest of the school year. Who knows what is going to happen in the fall? We’re all hoping for the best, but many experts predict a second wave of infections in the fall, which could further disrupt school schedules.

All of this time away from the public school indoctrination mills is making some modern educators nervous. Mustn’t let the wee ones get too much exposure to mom and dad now, after all.

We were only a couple of weeks into the shut-down stuff when the Washington Post published an article written by a former teacher and education bureaucrat titled "Homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children."

As the coronavirus pandemic closes schools, in some cases until September, American children this month met their new English, math, science and homeroom teachers: their iPads and their parents. Classes are going online, if they exist at all. The United States is embarking on a massive, months-long virtual-pedagogy experiment, and it is not likely to end well. Years of research shows that online schooling is ineffective — and that students suffer significant learning losses when they have a long break from school.

Modern American public educators are always touting studies that claim they need to get their indoctrinating leftist paws on our children as early and often as possible. To hear them tell the story, a kid doesn’t stand a chance unless they get passed directly from the womb into the hands of strangers and left there until they finish college. My book Don’t Let the Hippies Shower examines and mocks this at length.

All of this hands-on parental stuff has the indoctrination machine terribly skittish. They fear that all of the brainwashing will be lost.

Harvard Magazine just published a piece covering an idea being pushed by some lunatic named Elizabeth Bartholet, who is calling for a ban on homeschooling now, which Paula wrote about yesterday:

Paula said:

It's ironic at a time when 56 million children in the U.S. are being homeschooled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that Harvard Magazine would publish an article calling for a ban on homeschooling.

The article by Erin O'Donnell, headlined "The Risks of Homeschooling," sets up one straw man after another to make the case that the government must step in to protect children from their own parents—who are presumed guilty and ill-qualified to care for their own children.

Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, told the magazine that homeschooling deprives children of their right to a "meaningful education." She cites no law that requires a child to receive a "meaningful" education (because there is no such law in the U.S.) but defines it thusly: "But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints." (Nothing about reading, writing, and 'rithmetic in her formula, it ought to be noted.)

Paula easily debunks Bartholet's nonsense, which is unhinged and rooted in that academic disdain for church-y, family types.

What’s got some educators nervous is that they might be exposed. We may soon find out that American kids can, in fact, do very well without eight hours away from their parents every day and having their minds molded by some of the most far-left ideologues in the country.

Maybe we should ban Harvard instead.

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How ‘Grievance Studies’ Corrupt Academic Scholarship

America’s colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from the new coronavirus offers opportunities for a bit of remediation.

Let’s first examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.”

The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for “Areopagitica,” a speech delivered by John Milton to the British Parliament in 1644 in defense of free speech.

Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within the humanities.

They call these fields “grievance studies,” where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth, but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.

The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology; anthropology; gender studies; and queer, sexuality, and critical race studies.

In 2017 and 2018, authors Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian started submitting bogus academic papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass peer review and be accepted for publication.

Acceptance of dubious research that journal editors found sympathetic to their intersectional or postmodern leftist vision of the world proves the problem of low academic standards.

Several of the fake research papers were accepted for publication. The Fat Studies journal published a hoax paper that argued the term bodybuilding was exclusionary and should be replaced with “fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance.”

One reviewer said, “I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article, and believe it has an important contribution to make to the field and this journal.”

“Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” was accepted for publication by Affilia, a feminist journal for social workers.

The paper consisted in part of a rewritten passage from “Mein Kampf.”

Two other hoax papers were published, including “Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks.” This paper’s subject was dog-on-dog rape.

But the dog rape paper eventually forced Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay to prematurely “out” themselves. A Wall Street Journal writer had figured out what they were doing.

Some papers accepted for publication in academic journals advocated training men like dogs and punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them to sit in silence on the floor in chains during class and to be expected to learn from the discomfort.

Other papers celebrated morbid obesity as a healthy life choice and advocated treating privately conducted masturbation as a form of sexual violence against women.

Typically, academic journal editors send submitted papers out to referees for review. In recommending acceptance for publication, many reviewers gave these papers glowing praise.

Political scientist Zach Goldberg ran certain grievance studies concepts through the LexisNexis database to see how often they appeared in our press over the years. He found huge increases in the usages of “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” “critical race theory,” and “whiteness.”

All of this is being taught to college students, many of whom become primary and secondary school teachers who then indoctrinate our young people.

I doubt whether the coronavirus-caused financial crunch will give college and university administrators—who are a crossbreed between a parrot and jellyfish—the guts and backbone to restore academic respectability.

Far too often, they get much of their political support from campus grievance people who are members of the faculty and of diversity and multicultural administrative offices.

The best hope lies with boards of trustees, though many serve as “yes men” for the university president.

I think that a good start would be to find 1950s or 1960s catalogs. Look at the course offerings at a time when college graduates knew how to read, write, and compute, and make them today’s curriculums.

Another helpful tool would be to give careful consideration to eliminating all classes, majors, and minors containing the word “studies,” such as women’s, Asian, black, or queer studies.

I’d bet that by restoring the traditional academic mission to colleges, they would put a serious dent into the COVID-19 budget shortfall.

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Frustrated with homeschooling, parents declare: Class dismissed

It was music class that finally drove Melissa Mawn over the edge.

She was already dutifully arranging her quarantine workdays around the expectations of her three children’s math, English, and science teachers, surrendering her work station to their Zoom meetings.

Now, the music teacher was proposing a “fun activity” and Mawn’s thoughts immediately turned to the recorder — the piercing woodwind instrument that her twin 10-year-old boys are learning to play this year.

"I mean, we’re stuck here in the house, and I cannot have recorder class for an hour,” said Mawn, who is working full time from the Wilmington home she shares with her three children, her husband, and her in-laws.

“We have to live here and, like, not kill each other,” said Mawn, “and the recorder is definitely going to knock one of us over the edge.”

Mark the fourth week of school closures as the moment when parents began to crack. The state’s experiment in home schooling may have been interesting for a week or two, but as social media rants reveal, many parents are now fed up. Managing their children and their anxieties amid a global pandemic, and working from home if they still have jobs, some parents have begun resisting the deluge of demands coming from their children’s teachers.

Max Mawn sat with his mother Melissa outside their home in Wilmington. For Melissa, the demands of her three kids' teachers have gotten to be too much.CRAIG F. WALKER/GLOBE STAFF
“It’s just overwhelming. Everybody’s overwhelmed,” said Mawn, who aired her frustrations last week on a Facebook page for Wilmington residents.

“I understand a love for the arts but in a state of emergency, I can’t teach music and gym," she wrote. “My children can play outside, in their own backyard or ride their own bikes in our driveway. That will have to count for gym.”

Around the same time, Sarah Parcak, a renowned archeologist from Maine, was drafting a lengthy, expletive-filled Twitter thread reiterating what she’d already told her son’s teacher: First grade was officially over for the year.

“We cannot cope with this insanity,” Parcak wrote. "Survival and protecting his well being come first.”

The parent rebellion is not at all fun for teachers, who have found themselves in a no-win situation since schools were closed in mid-March. First, they were hounded by some hard-charging parents who expected more daily structure and an immediate and effortless switch to online instruction. Teachers had to quickly develop new coursework and ways of presenting it, and jet into families’ living rooms via video conferencing, where their every move would be scrutinized.

Now, with teachers more regularly holding classes online, parents are pushing back, saying the expectations are unmanageable — particularly for younger children who can’t handle the technology on their own and need a parent by their side.

One mother reported that her Dorchester nursery school is offering twice-a-day Zoom meetings for her toddler and preschooler — a gesture that she appreciates but that she considers more trouble than it’s worth.

The first time they participated, she said, “it was like a nightmare.” The 4-year-old did not understand: “Why can’t they hear me? Why can’t I talk?” she said. When the girl did get time to speak, she grew shy and clammed up.

“And five minutes later she wants to do it and the Zoom call is over and then she’s hysterical," the woman said.

One irony is that many parents have been schooled to limit young children’s screen times; now they’re being steered to it by preschool teachers.

It feels like some weird science fiction story, said the Dorchester mother.

“It’s like we’re trying to re-create the illusion of school and being together but it’s not working," she said, “and there’s an essential component missing and we would be better off accepting that this is life now and trying to do something else.”

Another irony is that working parents like her are paying dearly to participate in their children’s “circle time."

“I’m not paying $2,600 a month for you to do a video chat with my kids twice a day,” she said. “I’m paying for you to watch them and provide high-quality education so I can work.”

Keri Rodrigues, a Somerville mother who heads the National Parents Union, an education advocacy group, said many parents are in survival mode, having suddenly lost their income or begun working at home to maintain it, and they shouldn’t feel pressured about academics at the moment.

“Do not destroy the fabric of your family because you’re trying to please a school district,” Rodrigues advised. “We are living through a generational unprecedented crisis. Get your family through it without hating each other.”

Like Mawn, Rodrigues has three children and is fielding an onslaught of e-mails from each of their teachers in each of their subjects. Some point the students to assignments on Google Classroom. Others direct them to activities on private educational websites that require additional sign-ups and the management of yet more passwords.

“My kids are in first and second grade. They’re barely tying their shoes, let alone remembering all of these different passcodes for all of these different websites,” Rodrigues said.

Meanwhile, some of her boys’ teachers had never used Zoom before and their Google Classroom pages weren’t working, requiring intervention from the schools’ information technology professionals.

“By the time the district IT director is involved,” Rodrigues said, “I’m out.”

She recommends that parents do only what works for their children and feel empowered to make the decisions. As far as she’s concerned, she’s the superintendent now, Rodrigues wrote in CommonWealth last week.

“School is not open. You do not have control over my house,” said Rodrigues, who is also the founder of Massachusetts Parents United. “I appreciate your resources. I think they’re great. But if you stress me out, I’m not reading your e-mail.”

Mawn is picking and choosing her academic battles now, even — oops — missing the memo that one of her son’s Zoom classes was moved to a different day this week.

“The e-mails are killing us,” Mawn said. "I think it would have been easier if, every Monday, we got a letter saying . . . ‘We want to do those 10 things this week.’ Just one e-mail, please.”

She understands that the teachers have never handled a pandemic before. But could they not streamline the assignments?

“If I wanted to teach," Mawn added, “I would be a teacher."

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