“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man” is a saying attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola. “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted” is credited to Vladimir Lenin.
Despite their radically opposed worldviews, both the Jesuit and the Marxist recognized the importance of education and the impressionability of young minds. As Jane Austen might have put it, this “is a truth universally acknowledged.”
For many years, a debate has raged over indoctrination in our schools, centered on the teaching of socialist principles, and more recently on race and gender critical theory. Our universities are ground zero for these culture wars. In the past few years, these same battles have erupted in our elementary and secondary schools. Millions of parents became aware of these ideologies when the pandemic and distance learning gave them a front row seat in their children’s classrooms. Some responded by withdrawing their children from public schools and enrolling them elsewhere, some are fighting back, and some have either ignored the situation or put out the white flag….