We live in an upside-down age when expressions of ignorance and befuddlement preface claims of wisdom and sophistication. It is very odd.
The phenomenon is not entirely new. I remember a cardinal example from 1982 when I was a cub reporter in the press gallery of the Jersey island legislature on the eastern shore of the Atlantic.
A blowhard businessman who was also a senator rose to his feet to express disapproval that the island’s finances were not more efficient. “I don’t understand,” he declared, “why we fail to operate government as though it were a commercial operation.”
A cleverer legislator was on hand to retort, “We don’t run it as a commercial operation for the simple reason that it isn’t a commercial operation.”
Shrivel up.
Still, disingenuousness and candid incomprehension rarely get put down with such aplomb today. Increasingly, they are tediously deployed to imply that no one with brains and goodwill could disagree with the speaker.
The New York Times’s historical ignoramus, Nikole Hannah-Jones, recently provided a notable example of the genre when
speaking to NBC anchor Chuck Todd
. They were discussing what the proper role of parents should be in a child’s education. Recall that this subject exploded during the Virginia governor’s race when Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe doomed himself by announcing, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
On Meet the Press, Hannah-Jones made the same point, couching it this way: “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught.” One must accept her claim not to understand might be a deliberate falsehood, as her work on the tendentious 1619 Project suggests.
Maybe she genuinely does not know why parents should have decisive input on the content of school curriculums. Perhaps her ignorance is as deep as she professes it to be. After all, her ignorance of American history appears to be as genuine as contrived, though it is her supposed specialty.
So for the benefit of her or anyone else genuinely or falsely ignorant, here is why parents should have the preeminent role in deciding what their children are taught:
Families are the fundamental building block of a healthy civilization of free people, and they should never be sundered. Parents are hard-wired by evolution and have a duty commanded by natural law to raise their children for successful adulthood. Many teachers have only, at best, a passing interest in their pupils and only for ideological indoctrination. Parents who pay taxes to fund public schools do not delegate child-rearing to the state. This is not Sparta. Good schools welcome parents’ input and follow it. Tyrannies pry children away from the influence of parents to propagandize them. That is what is happening in American education now.
Hannah-Jones added that children’s lessons should be left to “professional educators.” In this, you hear the ringing chord of authoritarianism, the Left’s demand that the proper authorities — parents and elected politicians — surrender decision-making to supposed experts.
It’s the arrogant reflex of those who regard ordinary people as incapable of governing themselves, of those who consider their fellow citizens as “deplorables,” in short, of autocrats.
But there will be no surrender. Parents will fight, and parents will be right.
