Bethany Mandel: “Parental Bystanders” and the Failure of American Education

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the last three years, reading scores for 13-year-olds in the United States have fallen fourteen points, while math scores fell nine points. Reading scores are now the lowest they’ve been since 2004, and math scores are back where they were around 1990.But instead of finding ways to address this crisis in American education, public school systems are shifting their focus away from math, science, and reading and are instead adopting curriculum materials and books that are designed to turn children into little social justice activists.Bethany Mandel leads the charge in exposing how schools are failing children. Mandel is a writer and editor whose work you’ll often see in Deseret News and the New York Post. She’s a passionate, homeschooling mom to six kids, and she’s also co-author of Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation with her good friend Karol Markowicz.Stolen Youth describes America’s woke indoctrination within every level of society: education, healthcare, politics, and in the private sector. It’s an easy yet impactful read that outlines what’s happening in American culture today — and honestly, it’s pretty disturbing.We interviewed Mandel and covered it all: Covid and how it negatively affected kids, how school curriculums are incorporating gender ideology at early ages, the dismal national test scores, and how public school board officials ironically send their kids to private schools. According to Mandel and Markowicz, the ideological indoctrination of children now begins as early as toddlerhood. Libraries, bookstores, and daycares now keep books like “ABC Pride” and “The Pronoun Book” on shelves. Schools are also now beginning sex education classes at an earlier age.“The health programs are much more sexually explicit than people realize…,” Mandel says. “They teach second and third graders how to pleasure themselves…this is how the ideology starts.”