Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, co-authors of The Communist Manifesto, derided what they called the “bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child.”

Soviet revolutionary and Marxist theoretician Alexandra Kollontai, who served as the People’s Commissar for Welfare in Vladimir Lenin’s regime, claimed that parents were “not capable of educating the ‘new person.’” Only qualified educators, she added, will provide the right environment for the child to “grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.”

Leftists today have embraced this Communist anti-nuclear family ideology. They believe that it takes the “collective” to raise a child. For example, Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor affiliated with the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Wake Forest University and former host for MSNBC, declared in a commercial she recorded for the network that “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Leftwing school administrators and teachers have infiltrated public school systems across the country, allowing them the opportunity to indoctrinate their captive student audiences with poisonous propaganda.

Thus, it is no surprise that these leftwing ideologues are pressuring public schools in many states to step in the shoes of parents and take over deciding what is in the children’s best interests. Public schools are enabling impressionable students as young as eleven to deal with their underlining mental and social problems by expressing a gender identity other than their biological sex. Administrators and teachers play mind games with their students by calling them by their preferred names and pronouns and allowing them to select the bathrooms they wish to use, while hiding all this from the students’ parents. That is child abuse.

Instead of relying on parents to know what is best for their own children in performing their traditional role of protecting their children, leftwing educators, who may be transgenders themselves, insist on arrogating that role to themselves.

For example, a lawsuit filed by an association known as Parents Protecting Our Children against a school district in Wisconsin referenced a teacher’s flyer posted at school that stated: “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.”

The same article included an outrageous quote by a California history teacher whom the New York Times described as a “nonbinary, who has helped students socially transition at school without their parents’ knowledge.”

The nonbinary history teacher declared, “My job, which is a public service, is to protect kids. Sometimes, they need protection from their own parents.”

What the kids really need is protection from egotistical teachers like this nonbinary educator who are trying to project their own gender identity syndromes onto their students.

Parents, not woke school administrators and teachers, have the constitutional right and primary responsibility to direct the education and upbringing of their children.

“The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations,” the Supreme Court declared in one of its earliest opinions on the subject.

In a case decided in 2000, the Supreme Court majority reaffirmed that “the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children…is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”

Too many public school systems today are fast becoming the instruments of leftwing indoctrination. They are deliberately freezing out the parents from being informed, much less having the decisive voice, regarding what their children are being taught about such sensitive subjects as gender identity.

Last year, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education law against a background of rising attempts by leftist activists to pressure Florida’s school administrators and educators to introduce sexual orientation and gender identity indoctrination into their classrooms. True to form, the Left was apoplectic with rage and launched a disinformation campaign against the law. Governor DeSantis is firm in holding the line against these attacks. But he and other similarly minded governors are up against a public school monopoly dominated by the ideologically driven teachers’ unions.

It is time to break this monopoly. A few states are showing the way with school choice legislation, which would allow students’ parents to decide how to best use public money for their children’s elementary and high school educational needs. As Republican Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said about the school choice bill, called the Students First Act, that she signed on January 24th, “For the first time, we will fund students not systems!”

Saving school children from the Left’s brainwashing in class requires no less.