Virginia school issues anti-gun writing assignment

Image by jjpacres from Openverse

Virginia has gone back and forth on the gun issue. From repealing a lot of its gun control laws to reinstating them a few years later, it’s not difficult to imagine folks there getting a bit of whiplash.

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But when it comes to education, the state has really been something of a hotbed. Just google Loudon County Schools for more on that.

Yet such problems don’t just reside in just one school district in Virginia, apparently. Not when teachers elsewhere are willing to assign anti-Second Amendment nonsense for a writing assignment.

A Fairfax County, Virginia mother raised concerns about an assignment that prompted students to analyze an anti-Secondment Amendment persuasive essay sample.

The concerned parent, Darcey Geissler, sent Fox News Digital the essay that made a case for gun control. Responding to the principal’s email about her concern over the assignment, Geissler called the assignment “a poorly written, factually and legally inaccurate ‘essay,’ written by an adult parading as a child, being used to once again advance a political agenda.”

Geissler told the principal directly in an email, “When I was in law school, our first assignment on persuasive writing – a skill necessary to be a lawyer – was on whether or not a misspelling in a deed was sufficient to pass title. Not exactly a sexy or emotional issue. We were not handed Roe v. Wade, the 2nd Amendment, or climate change, even though we were law students with significant education and life experience.”

“The reason we were not given hot-button issues when first learning to write was because in order to learn persuasive writing, it is imperative that the skill not be clouded by the issue before the skill is learned,” she continued in the email.

A spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools told Fox News Digital that the assignment “was given to students as part of a persuasive writing fifth-grade unit.

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Except, as Geissler noted, this is a political issue that can cloud perspectives.

And to be perfectly fair, the piece in question is less an attempt at persuasive writing and more an example of bad writing.

I get that it’s meant to mimic what a student might write, but holy crap, if that’s the example they’re going to give, no wonder writing is a skill so few kids today actually possess. You can read it at the link above, and I invite you to do so.

Geissler argues that this isn’t a persuasive writing assignment, but indoctrination, and she’s not wrong.

Kids, be they in Virginia or literally anywhere else, will accept what they’re fed in school without question. They’re told they are there to learn, so they accept the information given as factual. That includes pieces like this. The bogus information contained in it will be regurgitated for years by some of these kids.

Look, I get that it’s important to teach persuasive writing. In this day and age, that’s almost a life skill. However, persuasive writing probably shouldn’t start off with such a hot-button issue. There are a ton of other ways to teach it, such as using subjective ideas like why X music is the best musical genre. Sure, there will be people who disagree, but that disagreement isn’t quite the same thing as talking about politics in class.

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The schools say they’ve addressed Geissler’s concerns, but I won’t count on it. They may well be paying lip service to those concerns in hopes that they won’t hear from her again.

Schools need to stay out of politics. It’s not their place to indoctrinate our children into being good little anti-gun drones and I’m glad Geissler spoke up about it.

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