Opinion
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February 12, 2019 (Family Research Council) — Recent decades have seen “Mommy Wars” about daycare and breastfeeding. Are we on the cusp of a new fight over whether to send your kids to public school?

If so, I say bring it on. It's long overdue.

Should we pull our kids out of public school? Millions of parents with children in public schools can't believe they're asking this question. But they are.

Family Research Council hosted an expert panel on this question last week. Grab a cup of coffee and an hour and watch it here.

The panel features Mary Hasson, a lawyer and writer with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discussing her new book, Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It's Too Late.

The first consideration for people of faith is, well, faith. Does attending government schools impact a child's faith as an adult? Hasson cited bracing research that suggests it does. In one study on Catholic children, only 5 percent continued to practice their faith as adults after going through public school as kids, compared to 40 percent who kept their faith after attending Catholic schools. Evangelical children experience a similar loss of their Christian faith.

Not only are American public schools hostile to religious faith; they are hostile to America. Hasson discussed how there is much less history taught today — less civics, but more activism. Capitalism is degraded, socialism is promoted — with your tax dollars.

But the game-changer, said Hasson, is the “fractured concept” of the human person that public schools now teach. Sex confusion and transsexualism are dogma. And this anti-science propaganda is producing disturbing results: some schools see up to 20 percent of their students identifying as LGBTQ, said Hasson.

Even when schools allow parents to excuse their children from classes about their changeable genders, “you can't opt a child out of the school culture.” Schools have embraced the idea that, since any child can be “trans,” every child must be treated as potentially “trans.” This approach is “baked into the culture” of government schools today.

Activist and public school parent Meg Kilgannon provided another perspective on the question. There's too much public money on the table to just leave it to liberals to use as they wish to ruin our nation's children. While conservatives bicker endlessly about charter schools vs. vouchers, Leftists are happily spending our tax money molding the nation's young minds in their image.

Kilgannon knows the fight in Fairfax County fight well. She is a parent activist par excellence who has stayed in the system but fought to protect her kids every step of the way.

If conservative and Christian families leave, what about the children left behind? These children, said Kilgannon, will be our nation's future teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, presidents, etc. The future of our nation is inextricably tied to the state of our public schools today.

Both panelists agreed that there are good and faithful teachers and administrators who are faithful to their calling to educate and not indoctrinate. But they find themselves in a tenuous position if they question the radical sex ed or identity politics that their professional associations peddle.

Both agreed, too, that parents' first duty is to their children.

Hasson's final point has stayed with me more than any other. Every education choice bears a cost, she said. The cost of private schools can be a mountain of tuition dollars; the cost of homeschooling includes time and lost income. But the cost of public schools just might be your children's souls.

Published with permission from the Family Research Council.