I’ve always been perturbed by the choice of August as the month where our children return to school. My own experience, whether in grade school, high school, college or seminary, whether in England, France or Switzerland, was that Back-To-School was synonymous with the first week of September. But here, for some bizarre reason concocted in the higher echelons of Ohioan academia (should such a place exist), children are forced to abandon the beaches, the parks, and the playgrounds at the height of summer, to be wrapped up in a new wardrobe of “sensible” school clothing and sent packing off in their overheated school buses to sit in a dull and uncomfortable classroom and learn the latest fads of the woke elite. Education and Entertainment are now interwoven in a highly organized agenda of wokeness where the only books they are encouraged to read are peppered with discussions about gender identity, the acceptance of same-sex marriages and the promotion of all things sinful and unnatural, all reinforced by the obligatory visitations from drag queens and other perverse creatures. What our children fail to absorb from all this indoctrination will no doubt be supplied exponentially by the afterschool Satan clubs.
If my gloomy description of life at school fails to fit in with the happy memories of your own childhood, let’s just remember that times have changed, and perhaps more than we care to imagine. We have fond but delusional thoughts of packing our little ones off to school and placing them in the care of loving, God-fearing teachers who are doing their best to take the place of the parents in raising children to be fit members of society. Let’s face it, do we not feel just a little relieved that after these long summer days, we’re finally going to be relieved for a while of the burden of our charming little children running around creating havoc? Being able to pass them off to someone else for a few hours a day must surely be an improvement? Think again! Our duties as parents do not end with the arrival of the yellow school bus. On the contrary, the responsibility of making sure our children receive a sound Catholic education is one of the gravest of all our duties. We cannot and must not turn a blind eye to whatever is going on in our local school district. Parents nationwide are finally wising up to the fact that the education system has been corrupted by a handful of leftwing freaks who have an entirely different idea of what they want your children to be.
In the past, we usually had the option of placing our children in Catholic schools. Today, we might still find that a better alternative than public school. Even non-Catholic Christian schools will probably do a better job of raising your children than the local school district. From my limited experience of the education received in the local, rural Ohio schools, they aren’t as bad as other places. But they’re getting worse. Just a few miles south, the town of Lebanon has one of those afterschool Satan clubs already. And from what I’m hearing from some of the children who attend the local public schools southwest Ohio, there is an increasing culture of sin prevalent even in grade school. Think “furries.” Even relatively normal first and second graders now curse and swear like seasoned sailors, and know all the facts of life. It’s not the children’s fault. Parents must refocus on their primary duty to protect them from the filth with which the Biden-Harris Department of Education is dirtying their innocent little minds. The Church today should be helping parents do precisely that. Unfortunately, we can expect no assistance from that quarter. Our best bet would seem to be home schooling, where parents are in full control of what their little ones see and hear and learn. At all costs, teach your children from the earliest age the truths of the faith, and instill in them the moral compass to navigate this world of sin when they find themselves surrounded by those who would destroy them.