In all my viewing of the Feenstra family’s adventures in their new Russian home over the past year — and admittedly I haven’t watched every single episode — I have been unable to discern whether the children are being home-schooled, attending local schools, or both. I have seen them studying Russian online and doing what appears to be other homework, but the source of the lessons was not clear.

For that matter, I don’t know what their education consisted of in Canada, either.

However, as I wrote an entirely different piece yesterday, “It Starts In the Schools,” I realized that that story — based on a report of Russia’s new school curriculum being heavily weighted toward Soviet-style patriotic and militaristic indoctrination — would, if not now, eventually have an impact on the Feenstra family. Because I cannot imagine that the younger children will be able to escape attending regular school classes forever.

And what then? They have been sheltered throughout their lives from what their parents perceive as the evils of wokeness and LGBTQ influences. And in Russia — where they fled to escape the liberalism of Canadian life — they seem to associate primarily, if not exclusively, with other families of similar ultra-conservative beliefs.

What the parents fail to realize is that, in Canada, they were free to make those choices for their family. In Russia, if they are told the children must attend school, there will be no options.

And without question, the Russian schools would come as something of a shock to these innocent children . . . not only the revisionist history the teachers are now being forced to teach, or the periodic visits to the classrooms from the government propagandists; but also the variety of students with whom they will be associating on a daily basis.

Because not all Russian children — as is true of children everywhere — are from conservative, clean-living, God-fearing families. And many of them have been raised by parents with very different political, social and moral attitudes. Are the Feenstra kids going to be prepared to deal with all of that?

I seriously doubt that Arend and Anneesa Feenster are even aware of the current changes taking place throughout Russia’s school systems, whereby an entire generation of children is being force-fed lessons and lectures in ultranationalism and xenophobia reminiscent of the Soviet era. And at this point, if they were told, would they even believe it?

And that is why I worry about those kids . . . that, and the fact that, once they become full-fledged citizens, the boys will likely be required to serve in the military.

Which is a whole other horror story.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
2/11/25