Kirk Cameron is trying hard to be relevant again. He’s been making more noise about the wickedness of our secular culture and how the schools are bad.
Cameron takes issue with the perspective that a child’s education should be left solely to the so-called experts, without parents’ input. “And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at. Who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children? Is it the parents or is it the government?”
He went on to strongly criticize “those who are rotting out the minds and souls of America’s children” and said they were “spreading a terminal disease, not education.”
“And you can take your pick. Just go down the list. The things that are destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying love for our great country: critical race theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether they want to be a boy or a girl, The 1619 Project,” he said.
Notice what he left out? The thing he is most famous for, besides making very bad movies? He doesn’t complain about science and evolution. He appeared in that infamous banana video with Ray Comfrot. Cameron is clearly trying to extend his ghastly influence beyond his usual gang of demented evangelicals to demented generic far right loons. There is a lot of overlap in those two categories, but he seems to be aware that getting specific about his crazy beliefs is going to be a deal breaker for some narrow subset of potential followers. Vague discontent is much more marketable.
I want the next person to interview him to ask him about bananas.
Between parents and government there lies community. The government supports the community by ensuring its children get a full education not narrowed by the biases of the child’s parents.
It’s an interesting question. I’d usually trust the state more than individuals with something like education, but even a secular state will only teach kids what it wants them to know. I’ve heard it said that modern education prepares children to become workers, giving them only those skills that the economic machine needs them to have. There’s probably no right answer to the question of what kids ought to learn, which is why I think a lot of people fall back on ‘more’.
I’m sure that Kirk includes science and evolution on that list of secular “evils” that are being foisted upon Jesus’ little children. However, biology-denial isn’t the hot button issue that it was in the 00s. Crypto-racism is the trend in Christian moralizing right now.
And no Kirk, patents don’t know what best. Parents are stupid and abusive-especially the Christian ones. They don’t know what’s best for their filthy crotch-spawn. Let the experts you despise so much raise future generations whilst you go fuck off.
Sorry, that should be “Parents don’t know what’s best.”
I swear this site needs an edit button.
Cameron is dumb.
Who is the government anyway.
We are the government!!!That is that democracy thing.
We elect everyone including the school boards that run the public schools. Our taxes support the government. No tax money = No government.
He is also here, conflating “raising our children” with…”educating our children”. They aren’t the same thing. They aren’t even close. This is nonsense.
Like everywhere, in the USA families still raise children. And the public schools, paid by those families,…educate them.
If you try to make sense of Cameron’s nonsense, you can’t do it.
This is phatic communication, making an emotional appeal to resonate with his target base. He is simply trying to reflect their hate and fear back to them. For money.
Does he have children in public schools? When my child was in school the teachers were constantly seeking parental input, and frustrated when they couldn’t get it. In my child’s case, we had a continuous conversation about how to help him progress (he had difficulties).
I also have a friend who taught 3rd grade for 20+ years who often spoke about the role of parents. It was not always easy as some parents wanted to dictate to the teacher (a la Mr. Cameron perhaps) or weren’t interested and didn’t want to be involved.
In any case, I’m confident he’s not talking about teachers really but the fact that evangelicals and conservatives want to kill public schools and turn education over to religious institutions.
One thing that kooks like Cameron don’t mention is that anyone has the option of sending their kids to private xian schools for brainwashing.
They have their problems though.
I just checked and one of the local fundie xian schools has tuition of around $8,000 a year.
The education you get there probably isn’t terrible but I’m sure it is not better than the local public schools. It may even be worse since they are small and don’t have all the programs a larger school can offer.
Two kids in school at the same time and that is a cool $16,000 a year.
The public schools have a big advantage in that they are free.
They aren’t really free but a huge number of taxpayers such as myself, without kids in school are paying for them.
I don’t mind.
I don’t want to live in a society being staffed and run by illiterates.
Re: robro @ #7…
A big part of the problem of parent involvement for some decades now is that–so far as I can tell from interacting with schools–they have a built-in assumption that a “typical” household has a stay-at-home parent available for the school to communicate with and draw on for “volunteer” labor.
I’m sure those running the schools are fully aware that their own households don’t operate that way, but they all seem to implicitly assume that everyone else’s does. As a result, there is a major disconnect between what the schools think households look like and reality.
Well let’s hope to everyone’s gods that it’s not the priests! Creepy bastards.
whheydt # @9 School board member here. While what you say may be true of many districts, it is not at ours. We’re well aware of what families look like, and the things many of them go through. We appreciate those with the privilege of being able to be involved, but know that most cannot. We are always re-thinking ways of simply getting information to them, understanding that there are loads of other things preying on their attention, to say nothing of that of their kids. After over ten years on the board, one thing I do wish is that more community members (not just those with kids in the schools) would attend our meetings. We do have strong community support, but the overall lack of interaction is disappointing.
One thing we work on is DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), which has been a state requirement for decades, and we take it seriously. But now we have folks coming in and telling us that it is some evil doctrine, ‘CRT lite’, that is being pushed on our kids. Sheesh.
whheydt @ #9 — I honestly never got the impression from my son’s teachers that they assumed there was a stay-at-home parent. There were some, of course, sometimes moms, sometimes dads, sometimes both, but there were a lot of kids like us whose parents were both working. It’s one reason there was always after-school care available. I grew in a family were both parents worked (and had to to make ends meet), as did many families in our working-class world of the 50s/60s. As best I recall, my teachers took that in stride.
Not surprised.
There are trolls everywhere.
What is wrong with “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”???
My local school system on the coast is 40% nonwhite. Which is low for the general area. Nationwide, it is over 50% nonwhite. Most of those nonwhites are Asians and Hispanics.
It’s going to be hard to pretend that those nonwhites don’t exist.
Amusingly enough, we had two right wingnuts on the school board. After they managed to get the district to adopt some policies that quickly became total disasters, they were deposed by the voters in a recall election. It wasn’t even that close.
I’m involved with my local school district whether I like it or not.
I pay a lot in state and property taxes and roughly half of that goes for the public schools. I don’t have a problem with that. It takes educated people to keep an advanced civilization running.
I don’t trust most people with wiping their own asses properly after a shit. Why should I trust the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathers that make up most of the American population with their spawn’s education?
raven @8:
I would go even futrher than “I don’t mind”: I strongly support the idea that education ought to be financed by taxes. It’s a common good that’s properly financed by government. IIRC, Adam Smith had that figured out in The Wealth of Nations, so that’s really old news.
The problem with the way we do it in the US is that education through high school is funded, at least in part, by local taxes; and so less affluent communities that lack a big tax base often have schools that aren’t very good. This typically means that schools with students who are mostly white often provide a much better education than do schools with students who are mostly black.
Conservatives often make noises about “local control” pretending that the outcome isn’t racist. I have no problem with local control, but funding ought to be national.
Akira MacKenzie @14:
Please be kind to those of us who are allergically challenged. 8-)
I’ll never forget the banana video. I at first thought it was satire. Holding a phallus and putting it into his mouth. Yikes!
@ 15
First of all, sorry about the mouth-breather crack. Secondly…
Ah, but now you’re going to have to argue against the toxic individualism and antigovernment paranoia that’s rank throughout the right. “I DIDN’T SIGN NO SOCIAL CONTRACT! SOCIETY DOESN’T EXIST! I AM A SLAVE TO NO ONE! AM I BEING DETAINED! DON’T TAZE ME, BRO!”
Akira MacKenzie @17: no problem about the “mouth-breather”…I was trying to make a joke (although my allergies do make me a mouth-breather at times).
I think you’re right about the Ayn Rand crowd; and many congresscritters will say basically the same thing, although they’ll put it more politely to give the impression that they’re being reasonable.
I was thinking more about what’s ideal rather than what’s possible at present.
Off-topic
Yes, we are making the world soo wicked.
Have you noticed that in the dystopian stories and films made by far right people including evangelicals they always assume the secular government would stop them from leaving the country, a la the communist governments?
I came upon this trope in “Mayflower II” a Christian low-budget SF film where the film makers believe we would try to stop them from emigrating to Mars.
😊 I can imagine lots of people dancing in the streets when Ken Ham et al leave for the Martian Ark Park
(Featured in God Awful Movies, this was a patreon-only episode. Their humor keeps me alive during the troubled times)
It honestly doesnt surprise me that creationist nutters like Cameron have clocked onto the latest manifestation of the never-ending conservative culture war; pretend like you are acting in the interest of non-partisan objectivity as a way to shout down reality based learning so that you can instead slide your personal ideological dogma into the realm of public education. It’s the “working the ref” strategy republicans have employed for years against the news media now applied to schools.
The reality is that we could crowd fund billions of dollars for the fundie xians to leave if they promised to never come back.
That wish list of things we don’t want children to know is a recipe for fascism.
Kirk Cameron lives right down the street from my wife’s best friend in the Buffalo suburbs. I’ve been assured that she farts in his general direction every time she drives past.