In recent years, satire and parody from comedy sites like The Onion and The Babylon Bee have proven to be prophetic, as many “jokes” later became true. Parody, satire, and old-fashioned comedy are now dangerous for many reasons. First, they may get you cancelled, and secondly, your silly joke may become reality.
I used to joke that politicians’ worn-out battle cry “for the kids” had been used to promote everything imaginable. Under that slogan, Oklahoma has championed issues like liquor by the drink, horse racing, the lottery, and medical marijuana. The only thing left, I foolishly surmised, was legalized drugs and prostitution, “For The Kids!” Our proposed state question for recreational weed lists education as its first beneficiary. So far, I was only half prophetic.
The surreal is now real, not unlike professional wrestling, which is why I call this new reality the “educational smackdown”. It’s all theatrics, and level-headed parents and educators are forced to choose between two elitist mindsets: Pollyanna Public Schools (PPS) and Evil Public Schools (EPS). Meanwhile, neither side accepts any responsibility for their antics, leaving us with very stark choices in the upcoming elections. Now that primaries are over, I wonder if either side will pivot to reflect the beliefs of common-sense parents and educators.
To capture the hearts and minds of sensible parents and educators, the PPS crowd must admit that radical agendas have been pushed into schools for decades. Age-inappropriate issues, hostility towards people of faith, and out-of-touch national unions have alienated many from public schools. We need to own that as educators. To win back rational parents and educators, the PPS crowd needs to get real. We have usurped the parent-educator partnership in favor of faraway activist agendas.
Likewise, the EPS crowd cannot continue to pretend that everything in public schools is deplorable. Local schools accomplish miracles every day, and local communities know it. Clearly, the new strategy of replacing one form of indoctrination with another doesn’t work; neither does focusing on isolated examples of bad behavior while ignoring their own complicity in crippling public schools. We can do better than taxpayer funded barbeque grills or vague teaching laws that proponents cannot even follow in their own classrooms. We trust the doctor-patient relationship; let’s trust the parent-educator partnership, too.
Case in point: as data emerges from the pandemic, both sides are outraged, but neither side will admit their part in the dumpster fire. Sensible parents and educators struggled to survive it while flaming pennies (the radical one-percenters on both sides) set their schools ablaze. One side openly advocated to close schools while the other side created knee-jerk rules that forced schools to close. In retrospect, both sides needed closed schools for their own contradicting political purposes, and the proof is now in the pudding. As a superintendent during all this, I navigated both sides to keep my schools open, but in the end, no one won.
We now need leaders with the courage to represent everyday parents and common-sense educators, but so far, we are only faced with extreme choices offered with faux outrage, bluster, and backroom deals of elitists in a pretend educational smackdown. We need a leader willing to betray their own orthodoxies to serve sensible, everyday, common-sense parents and educators – leaders willing to honestly resist the extremes of their respective political cults. Eighty percent of parents and eighty percent of educators agree on eighty percent of kid-level issues, and this 80/80/80 rule works every day in your neighborhood schools. May the forgotten and ignored majority of parents and educators rise.
Most importantly, however, we must stop all jokes, parodies, and satire. Let’s call on the government and big tech to immediately shut down, de-platform, and block sites like The Onion and Babylon Bee, because we can no longer discern pretend from reality. Besides, God only knows what will happen next . . . for the kids!
Tom Deighan is a public educator and author of Shared Ideals in Public Schools. You may email him at deighantom@gmail.com.
