The Problem With Closing Schools

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The problem with a lot of this was we're pleading ignorance for the past. We had no way of knowing that the school closures were bad. If you look at the sort of test scores out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when they only closed schools for two months, they were catastrophically bad. And so what would have been a healthier thing to do is to in that moment say, this is an emergency measure that we are taking that will have detrimental consequences and we have to do this in a very careful way.

According to conservative commentator Bethany Mandel, “the Left is waging an all-out battle on the American family, particularly the youngest members. If they can make our children miserable, lead them to question every building block of society, and rebuild their entire concept of reality, then the Left and their woke indoctrinators will consider that a victory.” She firmly believes “Our children’s lives and the survival of our families are at stake.”

In this honest conversation, Dr. Shermer disagrees with some of Mandel's conclusions, agrees with others, and pushes back against certain aspects of her worldview.

Shermer and Mandel discuss: • anecdotes vs. data about children and politics • What is a woman? What is a man? • sex and gender • woke medicine • transgender affirming care • libraries and publishers of children’s books • abortion: pro-Choice or pro-Life? • support for children: government or private?

Bethany Mandel is a columnist for Fox News and a homeschooling mother of six. She has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Spectator, and more. Her new book is Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.