Vladimir Lenin allegedly said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted."  America's leftists have taken those words to heart and, since the 1930s, have assiduously winnowed their way into America's education system.  The COVID lockdown, for all its destruction, may have ended up performing a huge service by exposing to parents just how bad the leftist toxin has grown in the last ten to fifteen years.  The sea change in parental attitudes toward education is shown in the fact that, across America, public school enrollment is collapsing.

In the years after WWII, leftists began to infiltrate the American education system.  They started with the colleges, but, for decades now, as generations of college graduates become teachers themselves, and write the textbooks, their ideas have been drifting steadily down to the lower grades.  We've gone from a public school system intended to create useful, patriotic American citizens to a public school system intended to create Democrat party die-hards who hate America, embrace Critical Race Theory, despise free speech, dream of overthrowing the Constitution, demand unlimited abortion, and believe that biological sex is an artificial construct.

As late as 2018, most suburban parents thought well of their kids' schools, praising supporting teachers who really seemed to care about the kids.  All that changed with the lockdowns, which the Democrats desperately wanted as a vehicle to destroy Donald Trump.

Suddenly, parents saw what was really going on in their children's classrooms: the divisive Critical Race Theory; the hostility to the Bill of Rights, especially free speech; and most disturbing of all, the endless indoctrination into transgender ideology, all of it premised on that "gender unicorn."  (Remember: that unicorn is a "tell."  It's the nudge-nudge, wink-wink revealing that the people forcing these notions on children know that transgenderism is just as imaginary as that unicorn.)

Parents also learned that the teachers' unions, which always insisted they existed for the children's good, cared nothing about children.  No matter the evidence that children are minimally vulnerable to COVID and are not vectors, or the evidence showing that being deprived of classroom education and socialization was devastating America's children, teachers' unions across America were adamant: teachers were not going back to school — so parents had even more opportunities to see how awful many of those teachers are.

Image: Abandoned classroom by zeitfaenger.at.  CC BY 2.0.

Now the inevitable is happening: even with the lockdowns over, parents are pulling their children out of public schools in record numbers, something we can only hope leads to the collapse of the whole rotten edifice.  The New York Times describes the fallout:

In New York City, the nation's largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula.

In the suburbs of Orange County, Calif., where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California's rolls since 2019.

And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland — are now considering combining classrooms, laying off teachers, or shutting down entire schools.

All together, America's public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey. State enrollment figures show no sign of a rebound to the previous national levels any time soon.

The cause isn't declining birth rates, although that hasn't helped.  Instead, "the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not be easily reversed."

Of course, the N.Y. Times, being the Times, cannot acknowledge that parents were horrified by what they saw. Instead, the article identifies two causes: (1) families thrown into turmoil because of economic disaster, homelessness, and school closures, so their kids just left the system and (2) "parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools," which, because they weren't unionized (something the Times doesn't mention), stayed open.

Well, that second reason is one way of saying that parents also realized that Lenin's dream was coming true: their children weren't being educated; they were being indoctrinated.

Moreover, despite the article's focus on California, which is Ground Zero for students leaving the system, the article is silent about three significant California initiatives driving families from the schools: forced COVID vaccinations; the radically left, antisemitic, and mandatory "ethnic studies" curriculum; and the continual dumbing down of California's new K–12 math curriculum in order to serve "social justice" metrics.

All in all, if there's a silver lining to the cloud of COVID lockdowns, it's the possible end of a public school system that has long been inefficient, ineffective, and morally and ideologically corrupt.