JEWISH WORLD

By DENNIS PRAGER I have been telling parents for decades that sending a child to almost any college is playing Russian roulette with his or her val- ues. But it is a different version of Russian roulette. In the traditional version, only one of the gun’s six chambers contains a bullet. In the college version of Russian roulette, 5 of the 6 chambers contain a bullet. If your child attends almost any uni- versity in America (or Canada or anywhere else in the English-speak- ing world), the odds are that your child’s decency, intellectual acuity, faculty of reason, character and moral compass will be damaged, perhaps permanently. The worse news is that sending your child to almost any elementary school or high school — public or private — is fast becoming equally toxic. More and more schools are being taken over by left-wing ide- ologues and by nonideologues who lack the courage to confront the ideologues. Once infected with leftism, these schools teach children to hate rea- son, tradition, America, Christ- ianity, whites, excellence, freedom and masculinity. To cite one exam- ple, thanks to a million-dollar grant from Bill Gates through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Oregon Education Department has announced that teaching there being “one right answer” in math — yes, in math — is an expression of white supremacy. Why, then, would an Oregon parent who cares about his or her child’s mind, send that child to an Oregon school? I n addition to perverting educa- tion, teachers and their unions have exhibited a contempt for chil- dren that has taken even conserva- tives by surprise. Teachers’ unwill- ingness to show up in class for more than a year is as unscientific as it is unprecedented. On Feb. 3, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House news briefing that teachers do not need to get vaccinated against COVID-19 before schools can safely reopen: “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopen- ing does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated. Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools.” Nevertheless, in the country’s major cities, these cowards and hypochondriacs — people who claim to care more than anything else about their students — have refused to return to school (while demanding to be paid). They have refused to teach, despite the facts that child-to-teacher transmission of the COVID-19 virus is extremely rare and a teacher being hospital- ized, let alone dying, as a result of interaction with students is rarer than a teacher dying in a traffic acci- dent on the way to school. Why, then, would you send your child to be “taught” by people for whom you have — or should have — so little respect? Why would you send your young child to a school that sponsors a “Drag Queen Story Hour” or that dwells on “nonbinary” gender iden- tity? Do you think such things do not damage your child’s innocence? Do you want your child to be chal- lenged about his or her sexual iden- tity? Why would you send your child to any school that teaches The New York Times ’ “1619 Project”? This project holds that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619, with the arrival of the first black slaves in North America, and that the Revolutionary War was fought not to gain independence from Britain but to preserve slavery. Virtually every leading historian specializing in American history — most of whom are liberals and Democrats, and some of whom were anti- Trump activists — have labeled “The 1619 Project” a lie. W henever I meet adults who hold traditional American values, I ask them three questions: The first is, “Do you have chil- dren?” If they do, my second question is, “How many of them share your val- ues?” It is not common to meet peo- ple all of whose children share their parents’ traditional values. If they respond that any of their children do not share their values, my third question is, “What hap- pened?” In every instance, these parents 14 JEWISH WORLD • MARCH 19-25, 2021 Dangers Of Education Most American schools are damaging your child continued on page 30 More and more schools are being taken over by the Left and by those who lack the courage to confront it. PERSPECTIVE The dutiful trudge of students filing into a place where individuality will be hammered down into left-wing chatter.