Why conservatives won’t simply outbreed the Left

By Hannah Lape, Op-ed contributor Saturday, November 07, 2026

Occasionally, a fellow conservative remarks that, in due time, the Right will outbreed the Left as liberals go “extinct” for a myriad of reasons: abortion, transgenderism, and same-sex marriage among them. Conservatives will carry on getting married and having children; the Left in general will not, and we will “win,” so they say. But it is not that simple. 

As long as conservatives keep sending their kids to public schools, and as long as public schools stay the way they are, the Left will make its own descendants out of the Right’s children. 

The problem of public-school teachers pushing radical Leftist ideology in K-12 classrooms is well documented. In Deerfield, Illinois, I testified at a school board meeting after a teenage girl was forced to change in a locker room with a trans-identifying male. At similar meetings, parents read excerpts from sexually explicit books available in public school libraries. Teachers, on the other hand, take to social media to pride themselves on displaying smorgasbords of gay “pride” flags in their classrooms. 

The problem is bigger than ideological indoctrination; it is physical, too. School-Based Health Clinics (SBHCs) across the country facilitate secret social and hormonal “gender transitions,” abortion referrals, and contraception prescriptions on school grounds without parental consent or notification — SBHCs in California boast “confidential and free” chest binders, cross-sex hormones, medical transition services, and name/pronoun change services in schools, a Seattle SBHC offers students a “Community Health Locker” with tucking tape, tucking underwear, nipple guards, and chest binders, and in Illinois, SBHC nurses help students bypass parental consent laws to get abortions.

The scale of the Left’s ideological conquest in public schools is alarming. But before I propose solutions, we must ask: What is education, and how did the Left subvert it? 

Plato and Aristotle agreed that education’s objective is to instill truth, form persons, and cultivate virtue. For Plato, the metric of education’s success is that a child: 

“Would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-natured works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest year and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hand in welcome and recognize the affinity he bears to her.”

Aristotle followed: “One must be brought up in a certain way straight from childhood, as Plato asserts, so as to enjoy as well as to be pained by what one ought, for this is correct education.” Master and student agree that education must inculcate love of truth and hatred of untruth in a child. Virtue comes before marketplace productivity; truth is reason’s foundation, and a person’s creativity must be tethered to core principles. 

Education, by nature, exists to instill values — as G.K. Chesterton notes, “Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.” In other words, education is never worldview neutral. 

As such, in a first step to subversion, the Left demanded that truth and religion retreat from public schools in favor of secularism and “college and career readiness.” Then came the Scopes Monkey Trial (a 1920s legal battle against Tennessee’s ban on teaching the theory of Evolution in public schools) and Engel v. Vitale (a 1962 SCOTUS ruling deciding that official school prayers are unconstitutional), and the Left forced God out of public-school homerooms and science classes. They did not force schools to trade dogma for neutrality; they subverted true dogma in favor of false dogma.  

Leftist educators understand that their worldview, albeit a lie, is best propagated if instilled in the youth — taking Plato and Aristotle’s advice and turning it upside down. Through the “neutral” guise of “college and career readiness” the Left has manufactured, the next generation is ripe for the taking. Why not administer cross-sex hormones on school property? Why not embrace “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and revisionist history? Why not teach the class that marriage is nothing in particular and that men can become women and women men? So out with the Ten Commandments in classrooms. They were replaced by pride flags. It was never about neutrality. 

Other sages of the 20th century saw the subversion of education tumbling downhill. C.S. Lewis wrote about it in The Abolition of Man, beginning with an affirmation of the ancients:

“The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.” But when we abandon that, “famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.” The Left takes this advice seriously. They are inculcating false sentiments into soft heads and teaching students what to love and what to hate. 

This model is not soul-healthy for children. A thriving child “recognizes the affinity he bears” to reason because he was gifted truth. Teaching a child to love lies is a recipe for failure, and confused children now struggle with their bodies, minds, and identities. 

Naturally, Christian parents interested in the old style of truthful dogma are a threat to today’s liberal dogmatists. Wendell Berry observed that “parents with children in school are likely to find themselves immediately separated from their children, and made useless to them ... it is no wonder that, under these circumstances, ‘educators’ tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence and wish to take the children away from home as soon as possible.”

To end on a note of encouragement, I ask Christian parents to continue being that threat. Opt for a classical, home, or private education whose teachers demonstrate a commitment to truth, virtue, and character; if that is not possible, be vigorously involved in your child’s public schooling. Prioritize personal formation over future achievement and offer your children the blessing of loving what is right and hating what is wrong.

If enough parents do it, maybe we can take education back from the Left. But until then, we should stop allowing liberals to make posterity out of our children.