Kindergarten Crisis: “It’s Not the Pandemic, It’s the Lockdown”

Audio By Carbonatix

Published: March 8, 2022 | Date of Source Audio: March 8, 2022

Transcribed and modified for publication from the original audio program

Dr. Sebastian Gorka talks with Dr. Andrei Illarionov about Putin's true ambitions

Dennis Prager: This is a very distressing time for obvious reasons. The New York Times, which contributed to the – it’s an amazing thing, when The New York Times reports on catastrophes it helped create like, Hey, we're just reporting. We had nothing to do with it.

(Reading from The New York Times article) “It's ‘Alarming,’” is the headline. “Children are severely behind in reading. The fallout from the pandemic is just being felt. ‘We're in new territory,’ educators say.” How about, “we're in new territory because educators put us there”?

And by the way, it's one of the great euphemisms – somehow or other, an appearance of mine on Fox News in the last couple of months, came up on my internet feed and I watched it. And it was a wonderful woman who interviewed me and another guest and said this same thing about the pandemic or COVID causing whatever it was she was talking about. And I politely said, “We can't say that anymore. It's not the pandemic. It's the lockdown.” And to her great credit, she twice said, “That's right. I gotta get that right. That’s exactly right.

It isn't the pandemic that has ruined our kids' education. It's teachers, teachers unions, the left-wing media like The New York Times. It's not the pandemic. It's the lockdown. It's the most scared class of human beings in society: teachers.

(Reading from the article) “The fallout from the pandemic is just being felt. The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year's reading emergency.”

“This was the greatest mistake in international history – the lockdown.”

Just for the record, to remind you – already by the end of March 2020, I was broadcasting and then tweeted that this was the greatest mistake in international history. The lockdown. I’m not a prophet. My agenda is truth. If your agenda is truth, you will dissent from authorities very often. And you will always dissent from the left.

(Reading from the article) “As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.”

They need to change it to “before the lockdown.” I wonder – I'd like to compare those kids to kids who were homeschooled. I would. I don't know what the result would be, but I would like to see a comparison.

(Reading from the article) “In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which researchers described as ‘alarming.’ In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems – twice the number of students as before the pandemic,” AKA, the lockdown. “Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“’We’re in new territory,’ Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic's toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are ‘pretty dramatic,’ she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.”

Thank you, CDC. Thank you, Democratic party. Thank you, teachers. You, not the pandemic, are the cause of all of this, including The New York Times that's reporting this catastrophe.