Now they’re talking about sending the kids back to school, the Chinese Communist Death Virus scare coming to an end. But there’s a question that ought to be asked.

Should we? Do we really need them all to be in public schools?

Of course not. You’d have to be daft to think so.

I can’t think of anything I ever learned in school that my mother and father couldn’t have taught me at home. My father, with only a 1930s high school education himself, taught me arithmetic where the classroom professionals failed. All right, neither of my parents could have taught me chemistry; but I wasn’t able to learn it in school, either. Besides, back then it was the 1950s, homeschooling was virtually unheard-of, and whereas today we have an abundance of homeschooling resources at popular prices, back then… there was nothing.

At one point during my grade school career, school authorities had begun to think of me as a rather stupid little boy, slow on the uptake. This was because I couldn’t read what was written on the blackboard. I needed glasses! But I was only nine or ten years old and didn’t know I needed glasses. For all I knew, everything was supposed to look blurry.

Glasses acquired, end of problem. Not stupid, after all.

What has America’s education establishment done in the last 50 years, besides teach children to hate their country and disrespect their families? To say nothing of the overall Big Lesson of public schooling that has always been with us: Your age-group peers are the most important people in the world, and you win their approval by conforming to them.

And on top of all that, public school is boring! It is the gold standard for boredom. It is to boredom what Mozart was to music. Mind-numbing, stultifying boredom.

Are you absolutely, positively sure you want to send them back to that?