About 2,500 years ago, Plato, arguably the world’s first socialist, proposed that parents should give over their children at an early age to be raised by the state. Since then, this harebrained idea has surfaced over and over again, as it satisfies the ambitions of control freaks who want power over all of humanity while promoting their ideologies.
Moving up to the 20th century, after the Russian Revolution, Lenin tried to promote the same concept of abolishing marriage and the nuclear family in favor of children belonging collectively to society, but had to back down in the face of massive public resistance. And after the revival of the state of Israel, leftist kibbutzniks tried it again, having children brought into children’s houses at a tender age and raised collectively. The experiment foundered, however, because mothers wanted their own children with them. And now this failed idea is making a comeback, beginning on the Left Coast, with a process referred to by noted historian Victor Davis Hanson as “the Californication of America.”
As I have previously noted, the Left has declared war on children on numerous fronts – from shutting down in-class instruction for two years during the Covid pandemic and forcing even infants to receive risky, insufficiently tested mRNA vaccines, to the downplaying of teaching basic academic skills in favor of indoctrination in wokeism, DEI, intersectionality, reverse racism (all whites are oppressors, all non-whites are victims), premature sexualization, and gender fluidity, with a strong dose of antisemitism thrown in for good measure. In this column, we look at the other side of the equation, so to speak – namely, the effect of this war on parents.
Before enumerating examples of these derelictions of duty and their effect on parents and families, it is instructive to note that a common thread runs through them. Just like sexual predators and pedophiles, the highly ideological teachers, administrators, and even school boards, as well as unscrupulous psychiatrists and psychologists and avaricious surgeons, all follow the practice of “Don’t tell Mommy or Daddy.”
Now a bit of history. The present exploitation of children took hold beginning in the 1990s when hardcore leftists first infiltrated schools of education and then commandeered the entire American educational system from kindergarten through graduate school. They introduced a teaching method called critical pedagogy based on the ideas of the Brazilian Marxist educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, whose philosophy, as expressed in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was “education for liberation.” His concept was that teaching is a political activity, and any academic subject could be used as a springboard for interactive class discussion about “social justice,” with the teacher serving as facilitator rather than all-knowing lecturer. Students were directed, through questioning, to examine critically the social and political structures of their society. The process was called “conscientization,” meant to describe developing socialist consciousness.
Although critical pedagogy took root in the 1990s, it really took off after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. The legacy media helped along with implementing critical pedagogy, most notably when the New York Times published the 1619 Project, which won a Pulitzer Prize (they’re politicized too) in 2020 for principal author Nikole Hannah-Jones – even though it was criticized across the interpolitical spectrum for creating a distorted version of 400 years of American history in which racism was the driving force behind our entire society. To this day, the Times continues to push for its adoption as the American history text for school districts across the nation, with considerable success. And anyone who objected could be easily neutralized through Herbert Marcuse’s system of “repressive tolerance” – that is, only left-wing views are tolerated while right-wing views are suppressed. James Lindsay calls this “pre-censorship,” in which ideas never even see the light of day before they are censored. The effort was facilitated by Internet platforms in concert with the federal government, so that objectors could be deplatformed, demonetized, debanked, even sued.
An inflection point in this process was reached during the Covid school lockdowns of 2020-22, when many parents were shocked, even outraged, to discover what their children were being taught. One enterprising Tennessee school district actually insisted that parents sign a waiver agreeing not to monitor their children’s lessons online. New organizations such as Moms for Liberty sprang up to fight the new anti-American, anti-religious, even anti-decency curricula introduced by the Left, and began appearing in large numbers at school board meetings to demand answers.
It didn’t take long for the empire to strike back. Acting on a letter from the National School Board Association, the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, depicted parents attending school board meetings as domestic terrorists and initiated surveillance by law enforcement.
In addition to the racism and antisemitism promoted by teachers and administrators, such as teachers ordering Jewish students to line up on one side of the classroom or delivering harangues in support of Hamas, there was a groundswell of opposition to schools promoting gender identity confusion and transgendering. As family physician and psychologist Dr. Leonard Saks observed in a conversation with Marissa Streit on Prager U’s “Real Talk,” before 2015 there was a very low incidence, perhaps 0.01%, of children exhibiting gender dysphoria (the belief that one’s gender identity was opposite to their biological sex, male or female), which was rightly characterized as a psychiatric disorder.
In came the radical teachers, backed by radical psychologists, insisting that it was possible for a person to be born into the wrong body. Within a decade, 3% of all children were claiming to be transgender, according to Dr. Saks. (On a parallel track, other professionals proclaimed that there are more than two genders.) School districts that weren’t allowed to give a child an aspirin without parental consent became dispensaries for puberty blockers, and from there all that was necessary for referral to a surgeon for bodily mutilation was a perfunctory session with a psychologist. And if parents did find out, they were given the stark (and thoroughly dishonest) choice of “Would you like a live son/daughter or a dead son/daughter?” whereas studies show no link between denied “gender transition” and suicidal ideation.
Spearheaded by California under the leadership of Governor Gavin Newsom – the same Newsom who ordered churches and synagogues closed during Covid while allowing bars and Walmarts to remain open, and practically sequestered the public in their homes while gallivanting with friends for a pricey birthday party dinner at Napa’s posh French Laundry restaurant – blue states upped the ante by passing legislation to bar schools from notifying parents even of a child’s social transitioning (adopting a name and identity of the opposite sex in class).
As I see it, the education-industrial complex had at least two motivations: first, the traditional Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist drive to tear down the old established society, especially the nuclear family, with its confining norms, in order to build a new socialist Utopia (in actuality a dystopia); and second, as a generally irreversible means to reduce the birth rate, originally proposed in 1969 by economist Frederick Jaffe, then the vice-president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
From there, as frequently happens with government programs, “gender-affirming care” expanded its scope to giving puberty blockers and making referrals for “gender-conforming” (i.e., body-altering) surgery, all without parental notification or consent. California declared itself a sanctuary state for children from other states whose parents objected to them transitioning, and passed laws to take away custody from California parents who refuse to let their children do so. Other blue states are doing likewise.
Accompanying the above-referenced developments, school districts opened up participation in women’s sports to transgendered males, whose greater physical strength and stamina allow even mediocre male athletes to win championships that should have gone to women. Concurrently, these districts opened girls’ locker rooms and restrooms to transgendered boys, with predictable results. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, a boy wearing a skirt entered the girls’ restroom and raped a young girl. The school’s response, as reported by Post Millennial on August 16, 2024: “The rape was covered up, and when the father complained about it, he was arrested. This led directly to the Biden-Harris administration’s prosecution of parents who complained at school board meetings.” Meanwhile, in neighboring Fairfax County, another D.C. suburb, an investigation is underway concerning allegations that school officials at Centreville High School in Union Hill allegedly arranged and bankrolled abortions for girls in 2021 –including one who was 17 years old – without notifying parents, as reported by Fox News and reprinted in the New York Post.
The one ray of hope is that on June 27, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mahmoud v. Taylor that when parents assert the right to guide their children’s religious education, their wishes must be respected, thereby nullifying the Montgomery County, Maryland school board’s taking away “parental notice and opt-outs for storybooks that celebrate gender transitioning, pride parades, and pronoun preferences with kids as young as three and four.”
As if these stories weren’t disturbing enough, two more recent items should strike fear in the heart of any parents thinking of placing children in public school. First, the California State Assembly has passed and sent to the Senate AB495, the Family Preparedness Act of 2025, which purports to protect immigrant families from ICE raids by creating temporary guardianships, but according to opponents, including the Christian organization Alliance Defending Freedom, it applies to all children and allows anyone with a familial or mentoring relationship with a child to file a caregiver’s authorization affidavit conferring authority over the child’s schooling and medical care without a court appearance, notarization, or parent’s signature; in fact, the “caregiver” need not even be known to the parents. “This is actually a dream come true for kidnappers, traffickers, and pedophiles,” Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills told Fox News.
Second, Illinois has become the first state in the Union to mandate annual school-administered mental health screenings for children in grades 3-12, including healthy children with no behavioral problems. Parents can opt out but have to do so annually. As psychiatrist Dr. Matthew Sacks writes, “The new law does not specify how children will be screened, what questionnaires will be used, or what procedures will be followed when a child’s answers are seen as troubling.” Once again, this is an unwarranted state intrusion into the lives of families.
To conclude, we’re living in an increasingly sick secular society, quite possibly the end of times. As I’ve previously written, I believe we should stop funding universities and other antisemitic institutions that undermine our values, and concentrate instead on providing the resources for as many Jewish children as possible to attend day school. As the Mishna tells us, in the name of Rabbi Tarfon, “The day is short, the task is abundant, the laborers are lazy, the wage is great, and the Master of the House is insistent” (Pirkei Avos 2:21).
