Documentary
2022 / 69 minutes
Rating: 7/10

“[Education] is the battle that is going to affect all the other battles. We’re all involved in different things: protecting gun rights, lower taxes, saving babies from abortion, all these things, and they’re all very worthy battles, they need to be fought. But the thread that runs through them all is education, because if we lose on the education front, we’re going to lose on every front.”
– Alex Newman, author of Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children

Truth & Lies tackles how bad it is getting in America’s public schooling system, and what we as parents can do about it. To begin it lays out an eye-opening collection of complaints, each interviewee offering up a different critique of what’s going wrong:

• The teaching of Critical Race Theory
• Socialist indoctrination
• Pornographic sex-ed, introduced as young as kindergarten
• Hijacked curriculum (Common Core, comprehensive sexuality education, school-to-work)
• Teachers doing what they will, no matter the curriculum, and behind parents’ backs
• A lowering of standards and expectations for students
• A loss of any Judeo-Christian underpinnings

So what, then, is the solution? The film offers a couple of answers.

Take over the public schools?

Early on we see parents protesting to their local school boards about the objectionable content being fed to their kids in class. One of the experts consulted, a Dr. Duke Pesta, suggests that “if those same moms who are so eloquently lecturing the school board were the school board, things would change pretty quick.”

Indeed, we learn that in one community in Texas a small group of parents did manage to take over their local public school board. But how effective could such a takeover be? As this same Dr. Pesta explains later on, it isn’t as simple as getting the right curriculum in place. Pesta noted, you could eliminate the whole of the curriculum leaving only the Bible and the constitution, and progressive teachers could still use those two texts to move their agenda forward. He offered up this mock lesson:

“What does it suggest to you that Jesus had 12 male apostles? Let’s do a queer theory reading of the Gospel of John. Jesus associated almost primarily with men, they were his inner circles, so it stands to reason, right, that Jesus was not heteronormative…”

So is taking over the local school board akin to trying to bail out a sinking Titanic? Sure, if you have enough involvement, parents might be able to slow the descent but can they reverse course? Government will still be doing what it has no business doing, taking over the educational role God gives to parents. The problem remains that public schools are governmental, not parental schools.

Getting out of public schools

The other answer the documentary offers is to get our children out of the system and either start educating them ourselves or get them into a good private school (as not all are). That’s going to come with expenses, in time and money, but, as interviewee after interviewee assures us, it isn’t as hard as we might imagine. Parents have been teaching their children since the day they were born; we are, after all, their very first English teachers, giving them one lesson after another in how to talk!

Conclusion

So who should watch this film? The target audience is parents with children in the public system, trying to shock them into reconsidering, and encourage them about the homeschooling possibilities that exist. It’ll also be a good reminder to parents who are homeschooling or sending their kids to a private Christian school, about why they are doing so. While this is an American film, Canadians will also benefit – the particulars might differ from one country the other, but the same educational philosophies are at play on both sides of the border. There is some PG material here, particularly when they talk about sex-ed curriculum, but older home-school or privately schooled teens might be a good audience too, as it’ll show them the value of the gift their parents are giving them.

Find out how to buy or rent Truth & Lies at Truthandliesfilm.us. To get a feel for what you’ll learn, you can watch this 4-minute clip below (like the film itself, this clip discusses material that is not appropriate for children).