During a recent visit to Australia, a friend told me that he is going into debt to pay for private schooling for his children - mainly to keep them away from the counter cultural brainwashing that goes on in the public schools there. Of course, the same things go on in the public schools here. Recently a lawsuit was filed by parents against the Bedford Central School District in New York State, charging them with numerous examples of brainwashing, including some that have been emotionally damaging to the children.

Unlike plaintiffs in many other lawsuits these days, these parents do not ask for money but only for an injunction against such practices.

According to the official complaint filed in the U.S. District Court, fourth-graders on an overnight school outing were taken to a children’s cemetery at night and told to lie down on the graves to see if they fit, as well as other cemetery activities. If this seems far out to you, it does not to me, for my daughter was supposed to visit Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles as part of school exercises in "death education" - a nationwide movement with its own zealots, who typically do these things behind the backs of the parents.

The lawsuit in New York charges that there were assignments to write poems on the theme "How God Messed Up" and a whole curriculum on New Age occultism, as well as many other antireligious, anti-patriotic, and other counter cultural assignments. Then there were the inevitable writing assignments in which the student is supposed to "reveal intimate details about himself and his family."

Again, this may seem strange to most people, who have no idea how widespread such things have been for years in the United States and before that in programs under the communists in China, where, brainwashing" originated.

The legal question is whether the school district overstepped the bounds. If so, the time is long overdue to go beyond wrist slap penalties like injunctions and impose some multimillion-dollar punitive damages to get the attention of the authorities who treat children as guinea pigs for psychological experiments or permit counterculture zealots in the schools to do so. My research, my own personal experience, and letters from parents across the country all say the same thing: There is no talking to these people. Fad ridden apostles of the latest trendy notions, secure in their job tenure and with their pay raises automatically coming with time served, do not have to listen to anybody - unless there is going to be a real price to pay Only after I hired a lawyer, who phoned the principal, did the school begin to lighten up on my daughter.

The larger social question is how we are going to get our schools to drop brainwashing from the curriculum and get back to teaching academic subjects. Dealing with these things case-by case is like running a lawn-mower over crab grass, it gives only the most temporary relief.

Some landmark court decisions, with hefty punitive damages, can let the education establishment know that the party is over But that is only one way, and by no means a reliable one, given how many judges there are with a soft spot in their hearts for the counterculture.

some parents are making financial sacrifices to protect their children from the psychological child molesters in the public schools by sending them to private schools, though even these must be investigated first to make sure that they are not allowing the classroom propaganda ministers on their staff to run amok.

Other parents are making the even more heroic sacrifice of schooling their children at home, which can mean giving up one parent’s income. Fortunately there are now home-schooling educational materials and organizations that help with both the educational problems and the legal problems growing out of the public schools ‘harassment of parents who are taking away children who represent hard cash from the government, as well as a captive audience to brainwash.

It is outrageous that millions of children and their parents must carry such burdens. The people who should be paying a price are those who are creating this problem. But that will not happen so long as teachers ‘unions, tenure and a public school monopoly continue to exist.

The whole burden should not be left on individual parents to fight an entrenched education establishment All of us should support school choice programs, including vouchers, and realize that tenure is one of the tragic mistakes of American education.

Thomas Sowell, an economist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a nationally syndicated columnist.