Parents, Teach Your Kids To Be Virtuous. The Schools Can't Do It For You.

A video that went viral Monday shows a black male student in a Chicago high school bullying and berating a black female teacher. Others in the class sit by and laugh as the student throws objects at his instructor, screams that he's going to smack her, overturns furniture, and picks up a desk and threatens to hit her with it. The footage is from a while ago, and the Chicago Public School system says it instituted "restorative justice and social and emotional learning resources" in response to incidents like this, so everything's OK now.

[mattwalsh-social-instory]

Another video shows a black male high school student body slamming his white 62-year-old teacher in order to get his cell phone back.

Another video captures an older white principle being thrown to the ground by a black male student.

Another video shows a mob of high school kids swarming around a female police officer as another student viciously beats her while she lies on the pavement.

Another video reveals a black high school student throwing a school security guard to the ground. (He spent a few weeks in jail for the assault, then got out and assaulted his girlfriend, then went to jail again, and is now playing college football).

Another video catches a black male high school student wrestling a school security guard to the floor while other students stand around and cheer.

Another video shows a black female high school student punching a white female teacher in the face.

Another video documents a black male high school student brutally attacking his elderly white female teacher because she took away his cell phone.

I could go on. With almost a quarter of a million teachers being assaulted every year, there is no shortage of examples. Traditionally, teachers have been a favored group among liberals, but these incidents are not covered in the mainstream media, and they are generally ignored by the Social Justice Warrior crowd because, as we've seen, often the assailants are black teens.

I haven't stacked the deck here. I looked up videos of students assaulting teachers in school, and all that I found, maybe except for one, involved black students. I don't believe that to be a coincidence. Black Americans are, after all, responsible for 50 percent of the murders in this country, and almost 40 percent of our rapes, robberies, and assaults, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. The black teens brutalizing white teachers especially shouldn't be a surprise, because blacks commit about eight times more crimes against whites than the reverse.

These are all facts. Relevant facts. Staggering, terrible, nightmarish facts. But inconvenient facts. Politically incorrect facts. And that means they must be ignored, and so must the victims, even if the victims are -- in the case of public school teachers -- usually quite popular and beloved by liberals. In liberalism, there is a hierarchy of Approved Victim Groups. Blacks are above teachers and women, but below gays and transgenders. Naturally, white men, white conservative women, and Christians are all at the bottom of the pyramid.

Liberals don't mind bullying and victimization so long as the hierarchy is respected. In other words, bullying must always be directed downwards, from the superior victim group to the inferior. That means a homosexual cross dressing fetishist who calls himself "transgender" may sexually harass underage girls by walking into their bathroom or locker room, and liberals will applaud. But if a straight man so much as looks at a woman sideways, or compliments her in a matter that makes her feel uncomfortable, liberals will say she's been raped. Do you see how this works? Victimization must be ordered properly according to the liberal Victim Hierarchy. The highest victims can be victimized by no one, the lowest by everyone, and the ones in between only by those above them. It's a very confusing system that requires years of study and many lost brain cells to understand.

[sharequote align="center"]Victimization must be ordered properly according to the liberal Victim Hierarchy. [/sharequote]

This explains why Republicans will be accused of waging a war against teachers if they criticize the unions or try to cut funding to the Department of Education, yet black teens can punch old ladies and tackle the principal and the incidents will always be glossed over or entirely ignored. In fact, in light of the faux-racial controversy contrived by race hustlers after a white school resource officer removed an unruly black student from the classroom last week, liberals have called for a reduction in the number of police officers stationed in public schools. They're not only ignoring the chaos in our schools, but actively attempting to facilitate it.

Opportunistic, dishonest, and irresponsible adults have already started to take advantage of the completely backwards "black students are being targeted" narrative (really, it's black students who are doing most of the targeting). A woman went to the media just yesterday complaining that her sophomore niece -- a "child," she says -- was abused by a white security officer when he tried to break up a fight between her and another student. She says her eyes welled up with tears when she saw the video of the brawl, not because her niece was rolling around on the floor during school hours trying to pull another girl's hair out, but because she was handled a little roughly by the poor sap tasked with stopping the melee. The fight happened two weeks ago, but I guess after seeing all the publicity the Spring Valley High incident garnered, the doting aunt suddenly and coincidentally decided that her violent, out-of-control niece was actually a victim.

It's clear to me, and to any rational adult, that our schools need more security, not less. These incidents are not isolated. They are not aberrations. They are not exceptions to the rule. Increasingly, they have become the rule. And the reason is really very simple: There has, in many cases, been a total abdication of parental duties. Many parents have retreated from their roles and asked the government to step in. Our schools are not schools anymore, but foster homes.

The behavior you see in the videos above, or in hundreds of classrooms across the country, especially in city schools, is not mere teenage rebellion or youthful hijinks; it's barbarism. We've come to expect this sort of thing of teenagers -- the violence, the total lack of discipline or respect, the pathological immaturity, the sadistic bullying, etc. -- but that's because we have so profoundly failed as parents, and as a culture.

There is nothing ingrained in a young person that makes her incapable of behaving like a decent, civilized human being. There is certainly nothing that prevents her from understanding that she ought to listen to her teachers and respect authority. These are concepts we expect 6-year-olds to grasp. My two and a half year old son would shake his head in disbelief if he saw what goes on in high schools around the nation. I bet I could train my pet hamster to follow the rules more reliably than some of these kids. I don't really have a pet hamster, but you get my point.

Parents get upset when schools resort to bringing in police officers to help control the anarchy, but if parents would actually do their jobs in the first place, perhaps the police wouldn't have to do it for them. If parents would do their jobs, schools could be schools again, not part time prisons and day care centers.

(Photo credit: Shutterstock)

And what is their job?

I said last week that parents need to teach their children to respect authority, and that's certainly part of it. But the collective parental breakdown goes far beyond that. There's a more general and basic thing kids need to be taught: It's called goodness. Virtue. Morality. What we're seeing in schools -- elementary, middle school, high school, college -- are young people with absolutely no moral formation. They are brutal, selfish, abusive, and vicious because that's a natural default setting for human beings who've never been taught and shown how to be righteous and upright.

Teaching a child how to be good, decent, moral, and virtuous should be the primary function of every parent, but it seems many parents have never even said the word "virtue" to their kids, much less attempted to teach and demonstrate the substance of the concept. Goodness is a truth that must be explained and skill that must be developed. This takes total dedication and sacrifice on the part of the parents. Some are, shamefully, too self-interested, lazy, and distracted to even try.

Tragically, if parents will not be moral teachers, there really cannot be any substitute. If parents will not thoroughly and painfully devote themselves to spiritually forming their children, nobody else will be able to do it. Government schools are set up, perhaps necessarily, as industrial education factories. Kids are put on the conveyor belt and sent down the line as bits of state-approved information and indoctrination are systematically installed into their heads. Whether the information sticks or not, they must continue along until they're dumped out on the other side, where, in most cases, the process will pick up again in the university system.

[sharequote align="center"]Teaching a child to be good, decent, moral, and virtuous should be primary function of every parent.[/sharequote]

There is no mechanism -- nor can there ever be, nor should the state really even try -- to teach these kids how to be moral and decent. A very, very, very gifted teacher might be able to make some kind of spiritual impact on a child, but that impact will be temporary and limited to a few minutes a week, after lunch and in between 4th and 6th period. It's not nearly enough to take the raw material of youth and forge it into something honorable and principled.

So, lacking the ability or resources or mandate to make kids good, schools must simply find ways to cope with and control the kids who are not. Many parents have hoisted their confused, recalcitrant progeny onto the school system and said, "here, you deal with him." And then these same people are upset if "dealing with him" means dragging his insubordinate butt out of a classroom in cuffs. They want the schools to stop everything, grind education to halt, just to teach the child how to be a decent human being, yet they -- the actual parents -- can't be bothered to do it themselves. It's ridiculous and impossible and unfair to everyone involved.

Of course, this isn't only a problem with black kids. White, black, and brown alike are often plagued by parents who probably don't even know what the phrase "moral formation" means. But it's especially a problem in the black community because over 70 percent of these kids are born out of wedlock, and over half will grow up in a single parents home, deprived of any sort of full time father figure.

If even a simple majority of black parents would get married and stick together in the same house, many of the problems in the black community would disappear. If, let's say, a good 70 or 80 percent of black fathers would actually be fathers to their children, rather than glorified sperm donors, we wouldn't constantly hear about supposed "police brutality," because their kids wouldn't be throwing furniture at their teachers, or hanging on the street corner looking for every opportunity to start trouble.

The absolute number one problem in the black community is the failure of black parents to teach their children how to be moral and decent. This is also the number one problem in the white community and in every community, but it happens to be more widespread and more pronounced among black Americans. That's not a "racist" observation, it's just an observation.

I also recognize, and have said many times, that not all bad kids are products of bad parents. Young people are people just like the rest of us, which means they have brains and free will and the ability to make their own choices. I'm sure there are even serial killers out there who had very involved parents. There's no strategy a parent can employ to make their child immune from bad choices and evil. All a parent can do is equip him with the spiritual tools to ward off temptation and behave with dignity and integrity, but this is not a foolproof plan.

Making matters worse, our culture works persistently against parents who wish to instill the right values in their offspring. And kids who are sent to public schools -- even those with good parents -- will still be spending most of their day marinating in an environment where morality is unwelcome, virtue is scoffed at, and faith is attacked.

A child who has been given proper moral formation and offered the best spiritual guidance will still be venturing out into a world that punishes truth and celebrates sin. This will be the case no matter if he's home schooled or public schooled, but in public school the negative pressure will be particularly concentrated, intense, and prolonged. Many children will succumb to these forces and reject the lessons of their parents, which is a heartbreaking reality for the mothers and fathers who tried so desperately to prevent this from happening.

But it's like this in large part because so many other parents have neglected their fundamental responsibilities. If most of the kids in a school left every day and went to a home with a good and noble mother and a dutiful and manly father, the environment in school wouldn't be one of utter hostility to virtue. It still wouldn't be perfect, but it wouldn't be a war zone, either.

When it comes down to it, many parents are failing their kids. It's just that simple.

In the end, white or black or brown, parents need to stop complaining about how the schools or the police handle the obstinate, wayward bullies they raised, and start looking in the mirror. As Proverbs says, we must train up our children in the way they should go, so that even when they are old they will not depart from it. That's our God-given duty. If we reject it, we can only blame ourselves for whatever happens next.

Feature Image: Shutterstock

–

TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views. The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author.