K–12: Elon Musk Says Take the Red Pill

By Bruce Deitrick Price

(emphasis added)

Elon Musk is one of the brainiest people on the planet and a fighter. He invented PayPal on his way to launching SpaceX and Tesla. Last week, Musk threatened to sue Alameda County because the pols wanted his employees to stay well distanced on a Tesla production line. Yeah, right, Musk replied — you’ll have to arrest me first.

Musk, once a liberal in good standing, explained his outrage: “Somebody wants to stay in the house, that’s great[.] … But to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their g—— freedom[.] … Everything people have worked for all their lives is being destroyed in real time. I think the people are going to be very angry about this and are very angry.”

Musk exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers: “Take the red pill.”

The New York Times goofily referred to his message as “cryptic.” Most people know that the hero in The Matrix films is offered a choice between a blue pill (comfortable delusions) and a red pill that lets you see reality and truth.

Never mind what the Times suggests; taking the red pill is not a new development. Fox News reported in 2017: “People of all ages and ethnicities are posting YouTube videos describing ‘red pill moments’ — personal awakenings that have caused them to reject leftist narratives imbibed since childhood from friends, teachers, and the news and entertainment media.”

According to Newsweek in 2018, “The pop culture metaphor has become a popular phrase among conservatives. ‘Being red pilled’ widely signifies a free-thinking attitude and having been awakened.”

Piers Morgan, once a CNN host and a typical liberal, found political upheaval in his red pill. “Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable,” Morgan explained in a 2019 interview with Ben Shapiro. “Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it is a massive problem. Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They’re fed up with snowflakery.”

Professor Steve Turley, a conservative commentator, said Morgan’s new attitudes are “easily understandable and indeed justified by the tyrannical nature of PC culture.”

What’s all this got to do with public schools? Everything. They are the perfect embodiment of a tyrannical P.C. culture, which populism and conservatism should oppose.

Go ahead: take the red pill, and grapple with the shocking truths of K–12 malfeasance. The professors and bureaucrats who mismanage our public schools claim they care about education, your kids, and our country. A steady diet of blue pills makes that sound reasonable.

It took years for me to be red-pilled. Finally, I couldn’t escape the conviction that deep down in their Progressive hearts, our professors of education are actively hostile to kids, this country, and education as traditionally defined.

When you take the red pill, you see with clarity that millions of American children don’t learn to read for a horrifyingly specific reason. No, it’s not bad eyesight or a genuine disability. It’s because American public schools insist on using a method known not to work. Whole Word (AKA sight-words) devastates genuine literacy and thus educational progress.

Math is more of the same perverse intent. Your kids may struggle with basic arithmetic and become calculator-dependent at an early age. Why? Because Reform Math and Common Core Math befuddle children and deflate whatever native abilities they have. Take the red pill, and you will likely conclude that such bizarre instruction is not education, but a dirty trick that should be stopped.

Take the red pill, and then you see an impossible truth as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Constructivism? Oh, that’s the hoax that prohibits teachers from teaching. Teachers are ordered to be facilitators, not teachers, so children have to be their own teachers. Now and then, this approach might work. But what typically happens is that children are overwhelmed by their galloping ignorance. They have no joy in learning.

Everyone, please take the red pill. As long as you think the schools are your friends, you won’t take the time to grasp what sneaky tricks go on inside the classrooms. You won’t exert yourself to make the schools better.

All these years, the fraud in the public schools was right there before you. With the red pill, you may say, oh, my God, how could I have been part of this deception? They manipulate little kids and break their spirits.

Education officials have become arrogantly anti-education. They seem to be an alien presence that has foisted itself on us. Progressives appear to carry forward the aggression of Karl Marx, who threatened his fellow socialists, if they dared to disagree: “I will annihilate you!”

Kanye West, unexpected fan of Donald Trump, released a tirade of tweets including a call for people to break “out of our mental prisons.” Many conclude he has been red-pilled. We can hope so.

Kanye can give red pills to the people in Hollywood. Maybe they’ll want to help our schools break out of their mental prisons.

Bruce Deitrick Price’s new book is Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?