Who should be in charge of raising and teaching children? Parents, or the government?

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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Brittany: Hey, Connor.

Connor: Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: So, I wanna ask you a question to start off this episode, and that is, who is in charge of raising your kids? Connor?

Connor: Oh. Who is in charge? That’s hilarious. You asked this Brittany. I’m wearing a T-shirt right now. I kid you not. It has an outline of the United States of America. So the whole country and a little outline. And then inside of the United States of America has some words that say, I will not co-parent with the government.

Brittany: And Connor did not know about this episode yet. Yeah. So that’s funny.

Connor: No idea. That was very fortuitous. Yes. So who’s in charge? I am in charge. I am the parent, my wife of course, and I together. And I don’t want to co-parent with the government. I don’t recognize their authority over my children. I don’t think, others have the right to decide, what my children should do or think or, anything like that. I think parents have a very, I think even God-given, responsibility and authority and, yeah, that’s how I would answer that question.

Brittany: I think you’ll probably agree with this then. So it’s not the job of the government. It’s not the job of the nosy neighbor, you know, who might hate homeschooling. Cuz I’ve encountered that before. I know I had a friend who during an election season in Utah, her kids were helping like knock doors and giving out information and, you know, passing out things. And it was during school hours and someone called the police because they were like, your kids should be in school. And then when she was like in homeschooled, it still became like, well, your kids should be in school. Yeah. So, you know, and it’s definitely not the loud, opinionated person on Twitter. You know, I, I don’t have kids. I agree with you. Yeah, there’s a lot of them though. but parents and family, I would even say some family, but that’s up to you, right? Because there are a lot of even cultures where, you know, kids are raised by not raised, but you know, it’s like aunts and uncles and grandpas and grandpas. But that’s family. So I think that’s definitely different than government, but that’s not what a lot of people seem to think these days. And people seem to have a lot of opinions on how you should raise your kids. And what’s funny about that is that some of them don’t even have kids. So that’s, always makes me laugh. So why do we think this is, you know, is it because they think parents need help with, you know, childcare or, you know, cooking meals or having more time in the day? Or like, I think is it because they wanna shape the kind of people, you know, our children are gonna become and what they think? And this all kind of starts with education, and you and I have talked about propaganda a lot and how scary that is. And I mean, school is kind of the greatest propaganda machine ever. And I do think parents are starting to get a little bit angry about this because there’s been a lot of push with what critical race theory, which we’ve talked about a lot, which is kind of teaching kids this, this woke culture idea. And we’ve talked about that a lot too. You know, that you can only believe in certain social issues. Like you can only have one opinion on certain social issues. And if you don’t think that way, then you’re a racist or you’re a bad person, or you know, you’re evil. Even if, I think it was in Utah, Connor, a teacher was fired because she got, somebody filmed it and she got, she was like a science teacher too, or like a math teacher. It had nothing to do with anything and told the students that their parents weren’t right that she needs that they needed to like listen to her on social issues and imagine if that hadn’t been recorded. These are what teachers are doing. And a lot of times, and this has become a big issue, is they don’t tell parents. And if parents ask and they say, can I know what’s being taught in my schools? A lot of times you have parents and even like politicians saying, oh, it’s not your job to know what we teach your kids. Like, that’s our job. We are in control of your kids when they’re with us for eight hours a day, which is probably another problem, then the kids are off for eight hours a day. But that they’re, you know, when they’re with the teachers, we are in control of everything they do. And you don’t need to know anything in some states, I don’t know if Florida did that with their new bill, but I know West Virginia did you have to now publish on like a website or publicly what the curriculum is, meaning what you’re, the kids are being taught in school. Because I think, and I think you probably agree with this, parents have a right to know what is being, you know, taught when, when they’re not around. But a lot of this is because like I said earlier, they want to control they meaning in government and teachers or the government, let’s be honest, they want to control the virtues, like the things, the morality code that you live by because they want your kids or you guys to grow up and be like little, we call ’em carbon copies, like little copies of them that you can continue their own activism, which is creepy if you think about it. And a lot of kids or schools, like I said, are are trying to hide this because they don’t think parents are qualified because they have that little piece of paper that says, I’m allowed to be, you know, a teacher. So that’s, I think that’s really scary.

Connor: You were a teacher, you were, and I know you weren’t in public school, you were in a private school.

Brittany: Not public school.

Connor: But did you kinda see from any peer teachers or others that kind of tendency to maybe look down on parents or think that the, you know, they, the teacher was more qualified and you know, did you see any of that yourself?

Brittany: Not, I was very lucky not at the school I taught at now. I did have teachers disagree with maybe my personal views. And I will say the school did have underlying views with what my views were. But because the school was so based on the Socratic method where you teach through questioning, there wasn’t really time to say, this is what I believe. Like, it just almost didn’t make sense with the way we taught, which I think was really, it was kind of like a, a security mechanism, right? It made sure that you couldn’t really do that. So I think I was lucky.

Connor: I remember last year when parents started speaking out at school boards because they were so concerned about a lot of these things that you’ve mentioned Brit. And so they, you know, parents are sitting there thinking, okay, well my teacher’s not listening, the principal didn’t listen to me, so what now? So they say, okay, well the school board, right, that’s like the kind of governing body that oversees the government schools in that area. So parents start going to school board meetings and they’re reading from books that their kids are having to read in class with all this like vulgar, crazy stuff in. They’re talking about how like all these woke weird teachers or what they’re saying and doing these different activities of white guilt, right? And white privilege and all these things. And so parents are out there kind of speaking out the school board meetings and what happens the United States Department of Justice, the Attorney General for the whole United States, his office, they come out with this memo saying that these parents are like domestic terrorists, right? Because they’re speaking out because they’re yelling at school board members. It’s like, gimme a break. Like where, you know when Black Lives Matter was like riding in the street and burning buildings down and cars and running over people and all these things, like those aren’t domestic terrorists, but caring parents who worry about, you know, government propaganda for their kids and they’re upset of what’s happening. That’s a domestic terrorist. Seems totally backward to me. But it shows the priority of the government and I think especially the parents listening, right? We have to really keep this in mind that I don’t think, like if we’re co-parenting with the government, by having the government help us educate our children, right? We’re not on an equal playing field. They don’t respect the views of parents. You’re kind of an obstacle, right? It’s the priority of the school, the school board, and the teachers, they get their way. You’re just a speed bump. and while they may give overtures to parents, in other words, they may just tell parents, oh yeah, we value your input and oh, we wanna hear from you. At the end of the day, that’s just really not true because so many of the people in government schools and the school boards in the United States Department of Education and all the government bureaucracy that oversees these schools, they have this mentality, that it takes a village to raise a child and that they are the village and that you the parent, right? Need them. So for the kids listening out there, the question is, right, are we, to be raised by our parents or are you to be raised by this bunch of strangers who maybe don’t have the same values as you or the same goals as you, and do they really care about you or do they actually more care about themselves? Brittany, you may remember a few years ago, there was a commercial that came out on MSNBC and it featured a, one of their kind of commentators or talking heads, these people who just spout their opinion for a living. her name is, Melissa Harris-Perry, and she’s a professor of political science. And so she recorded this 32nd, advertisement for MSNBC, and she was talking about, public education funding. So MSNBC, for whatever reason, was creating its own commercials to say, you know, taxpayers need to, we need to take more money from taxpayers and spend it on public schools. Even if, even though when you look at the government schools where they the most are spent, I think like Washington DC is at or near the top of the list. You don’t see better performance for the students just because the government spends way more money on educating kids, that doesn’t translate into improvement, right? And so this idea that we need to invest more in education like that doesn’t really, that may be nice for the teachers who get paid more or all the contractors and the companies who are able to extract a lot of profit out of this system, but it doesn’t, like if it is this system are government schools for the kids or is it for all these other like beneficiaries, all these other people who make money along the way. So anyway, she’s recording this, this commercial, and, so I’m gonna read a transcript of what she said. It’s not long, obviously, this is a 32nd, commercial. She said we’ve never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had a private notion of children that your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had of the very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is she continues. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. And then she concludes once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the families, we start making better investments.

Brittany: That’s scary.

Connor: It’s scary, right? Because all throughout history we have examples of collectivism. Let me share, another example. In economics, there’s a term called the tragedy of the commons. And here’s a silly example. If my dog poops on my front lawn, I’m gonna clean it up because I don’t want dog poop on my front lawn. But then imagine that I’m out walking my dogs in the neighborhood park, the public park belongs to everyone, right? And then, you know, I let my dog off leash to go chase a ball, throw a ball, whatever, and then he poops over there. I’m gonna have this little thought that comes in my mind that says, eh, I’m not gonna bother. I feel really comfortable sitting right here. I don’t have the same incentive to take care of the park because it’s not my park. And and this is something we see across the world with, with even endangered animals, right? When it’s no one’s problem or when it’s everyone’s problem in the community, no one really does anything about it at enough to save these animals. But when you have like this private, animal reserve and they have their own privately owned animals, these endangered animals, they take care of them and they breed them and they make sure their population is growing and everything. They have an incentive to do it because it’s theirs. And so I have an incentive to raise my children and to make sure they are well cared for and learning the right things and becoming well-rounded. But if all of a sudden we have this kind of community obligation, right? It’s our children, our community, I think we get the tragedy of the commons. In other words, I think a lot of students, a lot of kids fall behind because no one’s watching out for them. If.