One year ago, noting the increase in homeschooled children as a result of schools shutting down over the ChiCom Virus pandemic, it was impossible to predict just how drastic that shift would end up being.

Initially, the shift was a matter of necessity. As entire school systems remained closed for in-person learning, and virtual learning was shown to be largely ineffective, parents looked for ways to make sure their children didn’t fall behind. Unable to afford private schooling, many parents turned to homeschooling.

Other parents, whose children were doing school virtually, got to see firsthand their children being indoctrinated by the destructive Critical Race Theory and its call for “social justice,” which taught children to hate their country and anyone who is white. They were also immersed in “gender theory,” which teaches the lie that sex/gender is a social construct rather than a biological reality.

This is on top of the inherent and embedded flaws in America’s public school system, an anachronistic throwback to the dawn of the Industrial Age, when industrial barons sought to give rural men, women, and children just enough education to mold them into compliant workers.

As Frederick T. Gates, chairman of the General Education Board (founded and funded by industrialist John D. Rockefeller to push for mandatory schooling), declared, “In our dream … the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters.”

The results have been disastrous over time. In 2019, nearly 70% of America’s schoolchildren did not meet reading proficiency standards set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and that was a decline from the previous year.

As poor as the state of education in America has become in recent decades, the quality plummeted even more over the last year as the number of hours students spent learning declined precipitously.

It’s hard to know which situation is worse — millions of children going to school to be poorly educated, or not going to school at all.

Teachers unions have fought tooth and nail to prevent schools from reopening, even as they demand higher pay, more resources, and fewer hours worked. In Chicago, teachers were told not to reveal they had been vaccinated because it would undermine the union’s efforts to keep teachers working from home. As of last month, less than half of America’s elementary schools were open for full-time classroom instruction, doing irreparable damage to the children’s long-term learning and lifetime earnings prospects.

And that’s not even factoring in the incredible emotional damage being done to children who have been kept in a constant state of fear and isolated from their friends and peer groups. Rates of depression and suicide among children and teens have jumped as government-enforced lockdowns dragged on.

If one thing has become abundantly clear, it’s that with Democrat politicians and teachers unions, the welfare of America’s children is the absolute last thing on their mind.

But as these politicians and unions abdicate their duty to America’s children, parents are finally waking up and taking responsibility for their children’s education.

According to a recent report by the Census Bureau, there has been an explosion in the number of parents opting to homeschool their children. It should be noted that the enrollment question was written in such a way as to verify true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school.

Between 1999 and 2012, homeschooling rates roughly doubled, and since then held steady at about 3.3% of all American schoolchildren. By April 2020, that had increased to 5.4%, only to see an even bigger jump by the first week of October to 11.1%.

Maybe the most striking thing about the surge in homeschooling is where it is occurring. By far the largest jump in homeschooling has come in black households, where rates jumped from 3.3% before the pandemic to 16.1% by the fall, a nearly five-fold increase. The rate for Hispanic households nearly doubled, from 6.2% to 12.1%, with a jump from 4.9% to 8.8% in Asian households. White households nearly doubled as well, from 5.7% to 9.7%.

When the pandemic is finally in the rearview, we will be hard-pressed to find anything positive about the period dominated by government lockdowns, mask mandates, widespread fear, millions of jobs lost, and freedoms infringed upon or stripped away under the guise of combating the virus.

Yet one bright silver lining may just be that we reached a critical mass of parents who finally realized not only how inadequate was the “education” delivered by our national public school system but how much anti-religious, anti-science indoctrination had been occurring.

We may find that we now have millions more children educated by the parents who love them and are deeply invested in their success. Parents who taught their children not only reading, writing, and arithmetic but taught them to love God, love their country, love themselves, and love their fellow man.