Dr. Ben Carson is one of the most distinguished surgeons in American history. He’s also a man raised in a single-parent home where his mother required him to write two book reports every week. Carson went on to earn his medical degree and become our country’s leading pediatric neurosurgeon. He understands that with God’s help, initiative and education can enable almost anyone to thrive. As he said on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “I always say it really doesn’t matter where a person comes from. A lot of it has to do with the way that they are educated.”

Incredibly, much of our public education system is now more concerned with propaganda, not quality teaching. Many leaders in public schools across the country want to indoctrinate our children not only with anti-American views but a debased understanding of human sexuality.

For example, Loudoun County, Virginia used to be a quiet oasis of neighborhoods, family farms, and historic sites a few miles outside of Washington, D.C. No longer. It has become the focus of national attention as the radical left has tried to transform Loudoun’s public schools into a playground for its extreme agenda. And for the past several months, parents have fought back.

As well they should: why would any mom or dad want their children exposed to “sexually explicit and profane books in school classrooms and libraries” or “critical race theory” that distorts history and creates racial division? Or “transgender policies” that “require teachers to use a child’s ‘chosen pronouns’ and that allow students to access opposite sex restrooms, showers and changing facilities?”

It’s this last policy that has now created a whole new level of outrage. A boy who identifies as “gender fluid” assaulted a female student in a girl’s restroom. Thankfully, the young man — who is reported to have been wearing a skirt when he attacked the girl — has been convicted in court.

And now, it’s not only the parents who are protesting: Loudoun County students today held a “walkout in protest over the recent sexual assault cases at the public school system and to show solidarity with victims of such abuses.”

Is this the “phony, trumped-up culture war” that Barack Obama derisively dismissed a few days ago in a speech urging Virginians to elect Terry McAuliffe as governor?

In the Trump administration, Carson was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, where he saw firsthand the failures of many inner-city public schools. That’s one of the reasons he’s so impassioned about improving our education system. As he explained, “We want to combat” the efforts of the left to “indoctrinate our kids” and, instead, “help children know that this is a good place that we live in, not a bad place, with a wonderful history, and that if we work together, we can accomplish great things.”

Carson went on to say that there is no value in “telling one group of people that they are oppressors and another group of people that they are oppressed? How is that supposed to help?” He also noted that the left’s attempts to bend the minds of our youth goes beyond the classroom. He asked, how allowing a boy “who all of a sudden feels like a girl playing girl sports” is “fair in any way?”

But the doctor is not discouraged. Parents standing up “is one of the most wonderful things that’s happening right now,” he said. The founders of the United States “spent so much time formulating our Constitution … to give the people, we the people, the tools that they needed in order to maintain their freedom.”

It’s for all these reasons that Ben Carson has launched the American Cornerstone Institute, whose “Little Patriots” program is designed to familiarize children with the good things in our country’s heritage. It’s also why he has written, with his coauthor Valerie Pfundstein, “Why America Matters.” It teaches young ones about “the Judeo-Christian values of America and its founding.” Your children and grandchildren will love it.

In 1791, Founding Father James Wilson wrote, “It is the duty of parents” to “educate them … for their usefulness, their respectability and (their) happiness.” “The duty of parents” — not a demanding, we-know-best, liberal educational elite. True at our nation’s founding. True today.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.