Add to this mix all the feminist sex positivity of OF creators and teachers who initiate sex with students, and you may understand the actions of the Cornell 7 also as a result of the toxic climate at our public schools.
We need to fundamentally rethink as a society on how to educate our children about sexuality, relationships, identity; a quaint principle at the NTP is wholly insufficient to deal with this. The NTP is a relic from the sixties when Playboy Magazine was able to create moral panics.
I do not see any hope for the public school system in the USA. It is unfixable due to the grasp of teacher unions and progressive interests. It needs to be nuked out of orbit. Sending your children to a public school is a form of child abuse.
When thinking about education at other than public schools, we need to consider the following things:
- It is preferable that parents are in charge or have a sufficient say in how the school is run.
- Sexual education needs to start at an appropriate age, e.g. at the start of puberty or at age 12.
- Students need to be told about the facts of life as part of a biology curriculum, as reproduction is one of the aspects that define what life is (other aspects are metabolism and growth).
- Regarding ethics, students need to be taught how to properly relate to each other, with an emphasis on things like respect, and not using each other as a means for gratification. This should also include tolerance for those who are oriented differently.
- Teenagers need wise counseling on self image, relationships, health, and other issues; this counseling should reflect the values of the average parent body. It is not the task of schools to be activist and reform society.
- Schools need to be transparent about their values. Activist teachers that violate these values, or teach contrary to those values, need to be fired.
- Teachers are role models; the conduct of teachers in their private lives should reflect the moral values of the local community that comprises the parents.
This is a start, other commenters may take it from here….
Cees,
I agree totally. The lack of morals and propagation of values inimical to my children’s overall well being is one of my top three reasons for homeschooling, with a local rate of 25% of graduates found functionally illiterate, and approximately 20-25% of local graduates registering as proficient in reading and math being the other two. Reason number four is that my town celebrates these numbers because they place us in the top half of our state and our state is in the top half of the US. I have not prioritized those first three reasons because they are all very damning of the system. I cannot state how much I agree with your “nuke them from orbit” stance.
“with a local rate of 25% of graduates found functionally illiterate“
How many incoming college freshmen NEED to remedial education?
““In 100 Years We Have Gone From Teaching Latin And Greek In High School To Teaching Remedial English In College.” – Joseph Sobran.
There are identifiable/quantifiable Root Causes (“36.7% of Madison [WI] Metropolitan School District [MMSD] students are chronically absent (compared to 22.7% statewide). WORSE FOR BLACK CHILDREN, 6 OF EVERY 10 ARE AWOL” [bolds/caps/italics added]), but they’re the root causes which are the kind that Lefty treats like a Third Rail made from Gold Kryptonite
Remove Milwaukee and Madison student absenteeism from the statewide totals, and what would become of that 22.7%? Refining it demographically would make it exponentially more damning.
“approximately 20-25% of local graduates registering as proficient in reading and math“
That could be worse, am I right? Matter-a-fact it is…in Milwaukee:
Fewer Than 15% Of MPS 4th- and 8th-Grade Students Were Proficient In Reading And Math In 2022
Then, factor in how much that embarrassingly paltry figure has been massaged, quantifiably “eased,” fudged, manipulated, altered…cooked…to get it UP to 15%.
PWS
Boys learn how to treat girls by seeing how their father treats their mother and their sisters and their boys’ aunts and girl cousins, and how their uncles do the same. All of which requires strong and competent women in the family. What goes on at school is just noise. But, if there’s no family, trouble awaits.
We know that is not actually true. The indoctrination tells the students that the loving, dedicated relationship they see in their parents is a result of patriarchal brainwashing. They are taught that their parents are evil, racist, sexist, homophobic, tranphobic, abelist, etc. This become really important in college, when the parents are no longer present.
All through public school, I was taught that the world was racist, that abortion was reasonable and just, and that affirmative action was good and needed. I mostly believed it until I went to college and saw it all in practice. I saw the evils of affirmative action, I saw that many professors were just pretending to be knowledgeable, that socialism was a disaster, I realized how horrific abortion was, I realized how racism was just a grift, and I saw homosexuality in a much more unfavorable light.
Now, this was the opposite of what the school and college was actually teaching. I just was good at observation. At orientation, the university spokesman proudly said that they would not award any scholarship they administered to a white male. In biology class, development of a mammalian fetus was discussed, but human fetus’ were treated as ‘special’ and not consistent with any other mammal to justify abortion. My French study partner was a first generation college student from Chicago, admitted under affirmative action. She had a 24 ACT score and was given an ‘academic’ scholarship. The mean ACT score at the school was 30 and all the classes were graded on a Gaussian curve. She was facing nearly impossible odds. After 2 semesters, they took away her scholarship despite a 3.0 GPA (which impressed me) and she had to leave the university. I realized that the ‘affirmative action’ was just to bring in bodies for statistics. The government only collected racial numbers on freshmen, so they kicked her out when they no longer needed her to give her scholarship to another freshman the next year. Two students were caught discussing affirmative action in a negative way in their dorm room with the door closed (the RA testified that she held a glass to the door to listen in on them) and were thrown out of the on campus housing immediately (no refund) and faced other punishment. When Hillel made a plywood school bus to publicize the killing of Israeli schoolchildren on a school bus, our PLO student affiliate firebombed it and the university justified the firebombing as ‘free expression’. The university paid for the gay student group to have their own exclusive bathhouse complete with a large hot tub during the AIDS crisis, but anyone who said this was irresponsible was labelled as ‘homophobic’. When the university was asked why Spring Break wasn’t close to Easter, the president responded that the university didn’t want anyone to think that Christianity was a valid religion. When I applied for (taxpayer funded) summer research, I found that I wasn’t eligible for about 1/2 of them because I was a white male. During Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebrations, white students were told not to attend any of the events except the one specifically for them out of ‘sensitivity’. It just goes on and on…
Most students gave in to the programming during college. It was just reinforcing what they had been taught in public school. I rejected the programming because my parent’s example was no longer there and I was able to see the true nature of the society they were pushing. I was MORE susceptible to the programming when I lived in a stable, loving household.
In today’s public school, the indoctrination is so much worse than it was then. It was there, but it was maybe 10% of the content. Today, it is over 50%. The students don’t learn to read, write, do math, or learn science. They are just indoctrinated. They weren’t discussing gay sex in elementary school then like they are today. They didn’t have drag queen story hour for small children. There weren’t books telling you that you are defective if you are white straight and Christian. The teachers weren’t dragging you off to engage in a left-wing (only) political protest. If you were a boy, they didn’t label you as defective and drug you to keep you from fidgeting while the teacher discussed her lesbian marriage. The messaging is off the charts.
Don’t tell me that advertising doesn’t work. About $1.5 trillion is spent on ads and marketing in the US each year. If it didn’t work, they would find a better use for the money.
Tour de Force, MR; if you’ll forgive me, textbook INDOCTRICATION!
PWS
Cees,
Excellent observations. I think, though, that this is not simply a public school issue. Private schools suffer from the same problems.
jvb
Our son attended private schools from Pre-K4 through 12th grade. In his first year, he had a teacher he absolutely adored – in fact, she was adored by all of the students and the parents alike. Then, one day we parents received an ominous email about the teacher having to leave for unspecified health reasons.
The parents, as idiot parents do, decided to make a scrapbook journal for the teacher with “get well” wishes to her. Well, it turned out that her health issue was a limited time health issue and usually resolve in about 9 months, which is not normally a reason for leaving the school but it was her . . . erm . . . marital status (or lack thereof) that was cause for concern. When we asked our son about the situation, he said, “Oh, c’mon. She’s gonna have a baby.” Oh, the parents said.
The school’s position was based on the potential harm the scandal could have caused within the grade, though 3 and 4 year olds are most likely oblivious to the issue. I am not sure if there is a corollary rule the “Naked Teacher Principle” that would apply – would that be the “Unmarried Prego Private School Teacher” rule? Perhaps in parochial schools as that would/could bring scandal to the religious affiliation of the school.
jvb
Parochial schools, and schools founded on an explicit religious bases may expect their teachers to be a Christian role model, including private sexual behavior. Being pregnant without being married, or being openly gay, are firing offenses at those schools. Schools may even require that parents sign faith statements, or are aligned with a church. If parents disagree with this, they should not send their children to those schools. If parents exercise school choice it is up to them to make the right choice.
I don’t disagree with your points. I was showing an example of a parochial school actually enforcing its standards.
jvb
Openly gay, as in tell tale speech and body language, not an issue. I think an unmarried teacher being pregnant should not be permitted to teach in that condition. No child should be given the message–daily— that it’s Ok to have kids outside of marriage.
Sure, but the issue is not whether a person is gay or not; the issue involves that person’s behavior in relation to the faith’s tenets that prohibit engaging in that behavior. It would be very much like living together and not being married, something the Catholic Church prohibits. Additionally, the Catholic Church’s position is very clear on openly practicing homosexuality, which should not surprise anyone. A gay teacher married to another gay person would be directly opposed to the Church’s teachings.
jvb
But nothing an openly gay or seemingly gay person does in a classroom promotes or celebrates gay sex or same sex marriages. The conduct of a gay teacher in a classroom should be, indeed must be, the same as any teacher.
I will use this thread to make a plug for a very good article by Jonathan Turley about the education cartel in K-12 educations, with the teacher unions giving enormous campaign contributions to the Democrat party, who in blue states just give the teacher unions what they want.
The economic effect is similar to monopolies and cartels, whereby prices are jacked up, the interests of the the customers (parents and customers) are neglected, innovation stalls, and the quality of the products and services suffers. The effect is even worse in case of legal monopolies, where the law is used against any possible competition (charter schools, private schools, home schooling). Cartels and monopolies are arrogant, and resistant to improvement.
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/10/06/the-education-cartel-and-the-blue-state-school-scam/
There is not going to be a fundamental solution except if we allow for school vouchers, tax credits, and school choice as is done in some states in some states in the Deep South, with remarkable results.
As I am predisposed in favor of free market solution I tend to be very critical about the need for government provided solutions. We do not need government run grocery stores (despite what a socialist as Mamdani thinks) so why do we need government run schools?
I read the Teachers’ Union’s screed from the other day, along with the essay written by Nikole Hannah-Jones. To me, this is not about funding. You cannot fix a broken hose by throwing more money at the hose – you have to plug or fix the hole causing the problem or, if you can’t fix it, scrap the one you have and start over with a new one.
jvb
It seems to me that one of the biggest problems in education is the school boards and who is elected to them. A lot of the boards members who are voted for by the general public in America seem to have no interest in the proper education of the children, rather they have their own political views that they want to push.
Here in New Zealand each school has its own board of trustees who are voted onto the board by the parents. With the parents being more concerned with the education of their children than pushing way out political views, this should, in theory at least, lead to a higher quality board.
How much power the board has compared to the Department of Education I do not know, but one thing I have heard a lot is that the quality of the school principal is the biggest factor in the quality of the children’s education and it is the school board that interviews the applicants and chooses the principal.
If you don’t know that the educational system is downstream of culture, you need to go spend some time in a public school.
While much of what you state is correct, you’re missing a huge factor in why. Today’s kids are products of the households in which they are raised. I’m not defending the acts of some (many) educators, especially when it comes to inappropriate behaviors and acts, but parents (or the lack of parenting) are more to blame.
The behaviors many students exhibit come from their primary role models at home, and as they say, “apples don’t fall from orange trees.” We face students everyday that range from completely uncaring about education (lazy, apathetic, unmotivated, etc.) to openly hostile and nearly feral. For the most part, these problems didn’t come from the school system, they come from home as we see when a parent comes in yelling and defending their kid’s behavior, ranging from cheating on coursework to assault. Too many parents have offloaded their duty (positive roll model) onto the schools and society. If you think a teacher can do everything that a parent should do in 45 minutes a day to 150 kids, you are sadly mistaken. 50 years ago, when the expectation at home was for your kids to be polite, respectful, attentive, and responsible, those attributes were modeled at school and reinforced. Growing up, I knew if I got in trouble at school, it was going to be worse at home. It is a very small minority that instills those qualities into their kids in today’s world and expecting schools to be able to stem the tide is wishful thinking.
The district I work in does well in our state report cards and has far fewer problems regarding attendance and discipline compared to the big city district we boarder. Though we share some areas that are in the big city, overall our demographic is suburban, more educated, and more involved. The other district, in a very blue city, has one of the worst report cards in the state, largely due to student absenteeism. We all have to meet the same state standards for attendance and graduation, yet not one of the big city districts in Ohio comes close to the performance of suburban districts. Many of the very rural districts have similar problems.
Why? It’s not just money. Per student spending if often much higher in urban areas with worse results. Again, parents and the home the kid comes from has a far larger impact on performance but politicians can’t win elections calling out parents for not raising their kids to be good citizens.
Again, not defending the reason for Jack’s post, calling out and punishing bad behavior used to be standard societal practice but not now. Too often now, as we see from the top levels of government on down, bad behavior is excused, covered up, justified, defended, and sometimes rewarded (looking at you GoFundMe), so yeah, why not try to work the system, what’s the worst that can happen?