The National School Walkout Sums Up Our Middle School Politics

The National School Walkout perfectly sums up politics in 2018. It makes total sense to draft school kids as political activists, because all of our politics is already just an inflated version of middle school.

The most striking fact about this walkout is how it became effectively a school sponsored political event in many areas. Actually, that’s only the second most striking fact. The most striking fact is that it was the brainchild of the Women’s March, an organization founded and still run by fangirls of a rabid anti-Semite. So naturally their initiatives are embraced by the nation’s teachers. I’m glad everybody got the memo about not tolerating bigots.

But back to the school sponsorship. Here’s a rundown of how the walkouts are being treated:

“Students at Corvallis High School in Corvallis, Oregon, will stream onto the football field at 10 am, where the scoreboard will count down 17 minutes and the organizers will outline 17 action points. At Audubon Park Elementary in Orlando, Florida, fifth-grade students will observe a moment of silence for the Parkland victims; younger students will participate in age-appropriate observances, and their parents will write letters to Congress and the White House. At Unity Prep Charter in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, middle school students are making posters, which they’ll hand out and display as they march around the block.”

The same report quotes a student walkout organizer: “My principal came up to me; he said, ‘We can’t condone this in any way,’ but he gave me a wink.” Remember that this is a protest with a very specific legislative agenda. Yet one journalist describes getting a notice from school informing students and parents that they can “opt out” of the walkout events.

https://twitter.com/anthonyLfisher/status/973284430147194880

“Opting out” is what you say about a school-sponsored field trip, which is basically what this is. And this was for fifth-graders.

I have a fifth-grader, by the way, and I take great pains to keep him away from politics. My child’s function is not to be a sock-puppet for anybody’s partisan agenda, not even my own. His job at school is to learn the basics of history, science, mathematics, and so on, so that when he becomes an adult he will have the basis for making informed and independent judgments about politics. But at this age, student activists cannot be anything but sock puppets.

That’s what we’ve found out about the Parkland kids, by the way. It turns out the line repeated by the Parkland students — at least, the ones sponsored by Move On and CNN — about how the NRA is totally responsible for gun violence comes directly from one of their teachers, who apparently liked to use his class time to rail against NRA obstructionism. People who agree with them — namely, their interviewers on cable TV shows — have lauded them for being so well-informed, but clearly they aren’t, because they haven’t heard both sides of the argument, just the one that was spoonfed to them.

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