Oh Nothing, Just Kirk Cameron Paraphrasing Hitler In Push For Wholesome Christian Homeschooling
That tracks.
During the pandemic, conservatives screamed and hollered that they needed their kids to go back to school because they weren't learning to function socially. Then when schools came back, they screamed and hollered that schools were teaching their kids how to function socially in today's society, both by making them aware of the existence of LGBTQ+ people and racism, and by employing Social Emotional Learning to teach them empathy and communication skills.
And now, a grizzled Kirk Cameron is announcing that public schools are "Public Enemy #1" and encouraging parents to homeschool their kids instead, in order to protect them from the scary, all too sexy liberal agenda of "people exist and you should not be shitty to them."
Transcript:
Since the pandemic we’ve been made grossly aware of the inaccurate and the immoral things things that the public school system has been teaching our children and our grandchildren, and it’s up to us as parents to cultivate the hearts and minds and souls of our children. Toward what is good toward what is right, beautiful and true. And the public school system unfortunately has not been working with us but actively working against us. In my opinion, the public school system has become public enemy number one.
I think you need to see the movie because you may be wondering “What can I do about it? How can I be part of the solution? “The Homeschool Awakening” will give you answers. And I think America needs a film like this, right now. We need to take back the education of our children becausewhoever controls the textbooks controls the future.Whoever’s shaping the hearts and minds and souls of our children will determine whether or not we live in a free country and we have freedom of speech.
Golly, does that last part ever sound familiar. In fact, it sounds a whole lot like a favorite saying of a certain Führer ... "He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future." Not to mention, a little like "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," the official slogan of the bad guys in 1984 .
As weird as it sounds, and as deeply harmful as Christian homeschooling is for children, and as deeply harmful as casually quoting Hitler is for everybody, I'm going to argue that this is kind of a good thing. The Right has three main tacks when it comes to going after their long-time nemesis, the public school system.
You've got the hardcore capitalists who think it's bad to have a system that people aren't profiting off of and want to push for charter schools and vouchers and all that, you've got the culture war Right that wants to be able to take over the schools and use them to push their own propaganda, and you've got the Christian Right, which veers between trying to force prayer, bigotry and a 6,000 year old earth in public schools and, upon not getting their way, go full Gothard and start pushing for homeschooling. Out of these options, frankly, our best bet is that they all go with homeschooling. That way they're not excessively draining school funds to the point where public schools can barely survive or trying to convince our children that Adam and Eve hung out with dinosaurs in biology class.
I don't know if conservatives have noticed this yet, but despite their centuries of effort, social progress keeps happening whether they like it or not. I can only think of one instance in human history where a nation actually went fully backwards in terms of social progress, and that involved the damn Taliban. They're not going to make trans people go away, they're not going to make gay people go away, they're not going to get women, outside of wacky Instagram "tradwives," to go back to the kitchen, they're not going to be able to get back to some pre-social media world where White people never had to find out that racism did not go unnoticed by those experiencing it. It's not happening. They can do things legislatively and in the courts to make things miserable for people, but outside of establishing a theocratic dictatorship, they have no chance of "controlling the future" in the way they so desperately want.
Which is good news for the rest of us.
Stephen and I will be back here for a "live" chat at 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern — good news for that one person who once said we should have a whole musical theater discussion because we have thoughts about the Funny Girl revival.
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