The dangerous lessons of blind compliance in public education

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Concerned parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, have brought their desire to protect their young children from instruction in LGBTQ ideology all the way to the Supreme Court. The school argues that parents have severely limited rights, that exposing young eyes to sexually explicit garbage is education, and that opting out would be too cumbersome to manage.

The question is not whether it is feasible to remove the child. The question is why the parents wish their children would continue learning in an environment that considers it appropriate to expose them to the pornographic children’s books in question. This obvious sex grooming should be the reddest of flags, and the parents, instead of fighting to opt out, should be fighting to fire all the teachers and administrators at the school.

I’m reminded of when, years ago, a concerned grandmother wrote to ask what she could do for her 10-year-old granddaughter, who was asked to dress up as Adolf Hitler for a school project. She needed both to be validated in her reaction and permission to react appropriately.

When I shared this with my teenage sons, aged seventeen and nineteen, they were shocked for different reasons. Homeschooling them inevitably trained them to recognize how wrong that situation was and how troubling it was that the grandmother (aged over fifty-five?) did not know to simply protect and remove the granddaughter from the damaging situation.

Discernment is a lost art, replaced by obedience and complacency in our factory schools.

The assignments above are more than bad classroom decisions—they are symptoms of a deeper, more concerning issue in public schools: a culture of compliance over critical thinking. For decades now, our schools have prioritized conformity over courage and mindless submission over understanding, implementing a system of discouraging inquiry and encouraging rote memorization, whether it be factual or opinion. “Trust the expert.”

In the infamous 1963 Milgram Experiment, participants were instructed by an authority figure in a white lab coat to administer what they understood were increasingly painful electric shocks to another (unseen) person. Most complied—even when they believed they were causing serious harm. Why? Trained obedience. One subject even believed he was killing his victim at the behest of his supervisor, and was tearful to learn it was for show.

Milgram concluded that people will easily abandon their personal responsibility if someone else appears to be in charge. The willingness to obey, without question, was “the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Really? Well, this behavior is trained for all of K through twelve, thirteen years, 16,000 hours, in our nation’s schools.

Government schooling generally discourages risk-taking, independent thought, and moral reasoning. The most common question students ask isn’t about ideas or understanding. It is, “Will this be on the test?” In that culture, even when something clearly feels wrong, many students are too conditioned to challenge it.

When dressing up as Hitler becomes a school requirement, we must all stop and question the system. When the teacher wants a seven-year-old to know about lubrication, parents must stand between the groomer and the child.

Sex trafficking is not a valid pedagogy. Unfortunately, neither is much of what passes for schooling today.

This is about the slow erosion of independent judgment, both in students and in the adults raising them. Despite their own schooling/indoctrination to believe the opposite, parents do have power and they must use it, before it’s too late and we are all paralyzed by our inculcated compliant passivity.

Many parents defer to schools because they are conditioned to believe educators always know best. We defer to doctors under similar assumptions. We defer to legislators and other “experts” for the same reasons. But the more we defer, the more we outsource our thinking, forfeit our rights, and sacrifice our individual sovereignty.

The grandmother who wrote to me should absolutely remove her from this abusive teacher. Cross-dressing as a homicidal racist is not a valid pedagogy. If nothing else, the child should learn that her family loves her enough to protect her when it matters. The parents with their case at the SCOTUS should indisputably reject the “professionals” attempting to groom their children and insist on replacing both faculty and administrators. SCOTUS is only a battlefield; the real war is for the minds (and bodies) of their children.

The responsibility to raise thoughtful, morally grounded young adults lies primarily with families, not institutions – especially if those institutions embrace morals that are contrary to our culture. Unfortunately, we’re now seeing generations of adults, some even in high-paying executive roles, who are unsure how to make decisions without guidance. This is also why many businesses are hiring right out of high school, instead of waiting for the compliance virus to fully infect the minds of college graduates. And it is why our best (at least, formerly) universities are actively recruiting homeschooled youth, who have learned to think outside the box, instead of blindly following the crowd.

If we want our children to grow into independent, ethical, compassionate members of society, we must teach them by example. That starts by refusing to participate in systems that value obedience over truth, basic decency, and individuality.

Children are too precious—and too vulnerable—for us to remain passive.

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