The San Diego Unified School District has been radicalized. In recent months, the district has announced mandatory diversity training for teachers, added a new “ethnic studies” curriculum focused on racial grievance, and even abolished the requirement to turn in homework on time—all in the name of becoming “an anti-racist school district.”

Chesterton was a friend of George Bernard Shaw but also an ideological opponent, who often debated with him on public stages, defending with uncommon eloquence a traditional “mere-Christian,” natural-law view of the human person and human history, as opposed to Shaw’s aggressive, multifaceted modernism, his feminism, Nietzscheanism, socialism, vegetarianism, “creative evolutionism,” and eugenics.

There was a stark difference between public and private schools in how they handled the launch of the school year in mid-August to early September in response to COVID-19. The situation is no different as 2020 comes to a close. Half of all U.S. public schools are closed either entirely or partially, as opposed to private schools who scrambled last summer to open on time and have remained in full operation since.

A new resolution from the World Medical Association wants governments to come down like a hammer on industries that emit greenhouse gases. It goes all in to support the usual climate-change policies, such as eliminating industrial-meat-producing and fishing practices, wealth redistribution, and the pipe dream of making it all up by creating “green jobs.”

Our traditions are a gift. They are a technology that were bequeathed to us, and hard-won over many generations. There are certainly traditions that need to be revised or removed. However, until we take the time to explore what those traditions are doing for us, or supposed to do for us, we should not be quick to remove them.