Who is really teaching our children?

As we round off the first half of the scholastic year, many in North Carolina are preparing for the holiday season, when their homes will be bustling with children and extended family members. During this hectic time of the year, how many parents will actually stop to ask themselves this very important question: who is really teaching my children? We have our own family traditions and values we are trying to pass down, but are the lessons being taught in the long periods between holidays helping or harming these efforts?

During the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020, parents experienced an opportunity — often for the first time — to peek behind the curtains of our public education system. Shocked, dismayed, and even angered, many parents decided to act and demand a seat at the table of their children’s education. Due to this, we saw an increase in parents, justifiably, demanding their right to be more involved in their child’s public school.

Others, frustrated with the archaic nature of our public education system, decided to opt out in favor of other education models that fit their family needs. North Carolina parents have much to be grateful for this holiday season for having state legislators who made the Tar Heel state only one of nine states empowering them to choose where and how to spend their taxpayer dollars towards the education of their children.  

The lessons learned from parental deep dives are undeniable. School union leaders have been controlling and running the operations of our once great public school system for decades. They have ceased pursuing the teaching of basic life skills and critical thinking. Rather, they ventured into doing the federal government’s bidding and producing children who are incapable of thinking for themselves.   

These are not exaggerations.  

One should consider why Biden rewarded the former president of the nation’s second largest teachers union board — Randi Weingarten — with an advisory position within his administration at the Department of Homeland Security. This, after she clearly advocated for schools to remain locked down during the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

He was simply rewarding her for a job well done in ensuring our public education system continues to fail our children. Case in point: take a look at last year’s Nation’s Report Card, and you will be shocked to learn that our children are lagging behind, with notable declines in reading and math among 4^th and 8^th graders.  

This phenomenon is not recent. Indeed, it has been going on for decades, but they, of course, blame this “crisis” on the pandemic.  

We all know who the culprit is for this decline. This is the same pattern we have seen over the years. The federal government manufactures a crisis; it calls for policymakers to take urgent action to solve this crisis; those policymakers then throw more hard-earned taxpayer dollars to overcome the crisis they devised. Such is the government merry-go-round.

To add insult to injury, we now come to learn China — not satisfied with commandeering the ranks of ivy league schools — has also infiltrated our K-12 programs. According to a recent report by Parents Defending Education, China has reached into 143 school districts in 34 states and the District of Columbia through its Confucius Classrooms program, giving schools nearly $18 million since 2009. Of those schools, the report said, the “CCP has had ties to school districts near 20 U.S. military bases.” 

Alarmingly, North Carolina — home to the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps, the United States Army Special Operations Command, as well as the US Army Forces Command — was also targeted. Indeed, in addition to key prominent schools within Wake County Public Schools and Winston-Salem Forsyth County School District, school districts close to Fort Liberty — namely Cumberland County — received funding, ranging from $10,000 to $45,000, to open Confucius Classrooms. 

It is blatantly clear. The current administration and the left-wing elite are all too happy to create a cookie-cutter generation of young Americans who are illiterate of our proud history, unaware of all the selfless warriors who have shed their blood to preserve our freedom, unschooled in the basics of life skills needed to succeed, and all too willing to toe the line rather than critically think for themselves.  

Our children are under attack by those who seek to mold their minds. The left-wing elite — who run our public schools — are more concerned with ensuring boys have the right to share bathrooms with our daughters. They are more concerned with reading inappropriate books to toddlers than teaching them about our Founding Fathers. 

The left-wing elite has a fundamental belief that parents have no right telling schools what they should teach, nothing could be further from the truth. We, as a nation, have a long-standing custom that parents retain the right to direct the upbringing and education of our children — a result of the culmination of the Supreme Court’s rulings on parental rights. Furthermore, the enumeration of powers within the Constitution does not grant the federal government the right to be involved in the rearing of our children. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” 

We need to come to terms with the fact the federal government is not in the business of educating our children. It is in the business of either indoctrinating young impressionable minds or allowing someone else — be it the school unions or China — to do its bidding.  

All parents must understand; if we are not directly involved in teaching our children, someone else will be. After all it is our right and duty to protect our children from those who seek to poison and control their minds.