Politicizing school children …

I read about plans to have a nationwide walkout by school children to protest guns.

One preteen was quoted as saying they wanted people to show more kindness to each other and there should be no more guns so “people don’t suffer.”

Then a reported million kids walked out of school – along with thousands of their teachers – to attend rallies against guns.  In some cases, public schools provided buses to bring their students and teachers to these rallies.

The media predictably gushed over all this: here were students as young as first grade marching in unison to mark their opposition to the NRA, lax gun control, and guns in general. Some kids chanted “hey, hey NRA, how many kids did you slay today?” They held signs demanding that Congress ban assault weapons, legislate universal background checks, and more.

The media, liberals, and anti-gun groups were thrilled.  They described it as a “grassroots” movement by children for sensible action on guns. 

In some ways it was more of an Astroturf movement. Behind the scenes all this was organized in part by MoveOn.org, The Women’s March, a Bloomberg-funded group, Planned Parenthood, and of course sympathetic teachers and school administrators.

I don’t have anything against organized protests. I was part of some when I was in college.  However, it was usually against something very specific, with a very specific goal.  I don’t think that was the case with the recent student walk out. 

I seriously doubt many of the young participants knew much beyond what they’d been told in school or on social media. I suspect they didn’t know much about the 2^nd Amendment, our current gun laws, or that previous bans on assault weapons accomplished nothing. Or that the NRA has been in the forefront of promoting background check legislation for years.

Or that the 17 deaths at Parkland were more the result of a systemic failure by school administrators, local mental health and child services professionals, the FBI, and local law enforcement to do their jobs and get a clearly disturbed teen off the streets and into treatment.  There were ample warnings and evidence this nutjob was going to try to kill a lot of people long before he did. But for whatever reason, perhaps fear of getting involved, all those entities fell down on the job.    

That’s a lot tougher to grasp than political talking points to promote an agenda. Ignoring, or hiding, those realities behind bumper-sticker slogans is disingenuous. 

And using children as puppets to advance political goals of adults is a disgrace.  Spare me the crap about how great it is for children to be politically active. If school children started an anti-abortion protest, or marched against illegal immigration, or in opposition to assault weapons bans, the same forces now cheering on political activism by school children would be appalled.  

The children would be dismissed as uninformed and misguided, too young to know any better. Any adult who urging them on would be called a monster.

We all know this.  And all of which would also be true.

Promoting political activism by young school children – whatever the cause – in simply wrong, especially when it’s guided by adult authority figures. School children don’t always have the ability to see when they are being manipulated and used for someone else’s agenda.     

More to the point, whoever in our public schools is teaching young children to become politically active ought to be fired. Kids should be learning English, Math, Science, History, and yes, Civics – that long-abandoned subject that informed kids about the Constitution, how our representative form of government works, and their responsibilities as citizens when they became adults.  

It should not be the role of teachers to propagandize their political beliefs on school children. That should never, ever, be tolerated. 

Yet that’s what’s happening every day. 

Whether it’s teaching that climate change is exclusively man-made is proven science, that gender is a matter of choice not biology, that self-esteem is more important than learning to read and do math, how the traditional concept of a nuclear family and its social benefits is fundamentally bigoted, or how awful we are as a nation compared to others, that’s what’s being taught.

Opinions – which all those are – should never be taught as facts.        

We’re talking about school kids, after all. They may not be able to see the difference. 

The critical reasoning skills of today’s children aren’t that refined. Kids aren’t always aware when they’re being fed propaganda and opinions and not absolute facts. It’s bad enough many rely on misinformation and half-truths on social media.  Yet they also tend to accept whatever teachers tell them without question, and that’s not always the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Or that there are often multiple sides to a story.  On climate change. On the flexibility of gender.  On the value of self-esteem over everything else.  On the relative merits of the traditional nuclear family.  And how we as a nation compare to others.     

I would never accept teaching Creationism and Divine Intervention as the one and only way to explain the various species on the planet. Or that there are only four elements – Earth, Wind, Fire and Water – in place of Science. 

At the same time, it’s equally wrong to teach children to blindly believe a political and environmental agenda that appears to be intentionally one-sided.

Somewhere along the line teachers and school administrators became the high priests of what school children should believe and how they should act.  Perhaps this was because so many parents abrogated their own responsibility to shape the beliefs of their children.  So it was left to teachers and school administrators to fill the void. 

This has been a terrible mistake.  It’s allowed some in our public-school system – not all of course – to seize the opportunity to promote their own agenda and create a new generation of like-minded students to think and believe as they do. 

That’s the unstated, albeit real, goal of many of those pushing school children to become politically active; however, only to support causes they want them to support. They do this by presenting only one political perspective. One set of “facts.” And then their pupils are encouraged to reject anything that conflicts with their teacher’s worldview, which is mostly a progressive liberal perspective. 

So when you see young children holding signs opposing deportation of illegal immigrants, in favor of the rights of transgendered people to use the bathrooms of their choice, or, in this case opposing guns, look carefully beyond their earnest faces and apparent enthusiasm.   

Behind every one is typically someone using them to advance their own agenda.

Usually a teacher.  Or an organized special interest group. 

To them school children are photogenic pawns.  Bait for the media. 

It’s wrong to use children this way.