What you have been hearing about lately is a precise description of everywhere Hillary Clinton has eaten, what she ate, and who she met (or refused to meet). What you might not have heard about is one of the most important issues candidates will have to address coming into 2016: education. Specifically, Hillary Clinton asked (emphasis mine) “How did we end up at a point where we are so negative about the most important non-family enterprise in the raising of the next generation which is how our kids are educated?”

Have you ever taken a moment to think about the social organizations we move through in our life? The first one we go through is the family, the very basic structure of society. The second and third (often interchangable, as different families go about them in different ways) are school and church. From there, it expands to the community, work, media, and government. However, that first one, the family, plays an incredibly vital role throughout a person’s transition into the others.

This is no less true for education than it is for church or the community. The role of family goes well beyond just delivering the child to school, though liberals like to tell us just how our children belong to the whole community. The role of family is to be involved and stay involved with what their children are doing, how they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. As a teacher, it is easy for me to see the differences in behavior between students whose parents are involved, care, and (very importantly) are easily accessible and the students whose parents aren’t around or don’t care.

Parents who send their children to school and expecting the school to “fix” them are the ones who do the most harm to their children and the education system in general. Why are we so negative about education, Mrs. Clinton? Because we see the results of where education has brought us since the movement began to make them do everything in place of parents. Schools feed children, teach children, and strictly control what they learn and how they learn it. Without parental involvement to keep this in check, to keep students and their teachers in check, children are lost to a system that seeks to raise your child for you.

The system needs fixing, sure. But that has to start at home. Education simply cannot be a “non-family” anything. If it is truly “non-family,” then therein lies the problem.