Holistic Pediatrician: Today’s Public Education Impairs Kids’ Critical Thinking Skills

Today’s educational system completely ignores everything we know about child development and brain development, and by not allowing proper brain development to occur, the school system impairs children’s ability to think critically, according to Dr. Lawrence Palevsky.

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

Story at a glance:

• As people have become aware of the dangers of the COVID-19 shots, they’ve also started questioning conventional vaccines, and many parents who didn’t get their children vaccinated during the pandemic are not taking them in to catch up on their routine shots now.
• Vaccinations aren’t the only thing forced upon our children that is doing them more harm than good. The public education system also poses a massive threat to our children, as the indoctrination and brainwashing span from kindergarten to high school and beyond.
• The current educational system completely ignores everything we know about child development and brain development, and by not allowing proper brain development to occur, the school system impairs children’s ability to think critically.
• Using medication to bring fever down often does more harm than good. A fever is your body’s way of killing off invading pathogens and clearing out inflammatory toxins, so by lowering your fever, you’re prolonging the problem.
• Avoid acetaminophen when sick. Acetaminophen depletes your body of glutathione, which you need for speedy healing.

In the interview below, Dr. Lawrence (Larry) Palevsky, a practicing pediatrician, discusses the impact that mainstream propaganda narratives have on our children, and why it’s so important to get your children out of the public education system.

He also reviews some of the foundational strategies for staying healthy, and how to treat those dreaded childhood fevers.

Palevsky has been one of the medical experts speaking out against the COVID-19 shots, but he was a pro-choice, vaccine safety advocate long before COVID-19.

Clearly, the COVID-19 jab is the most dangerous “vaccine” in history, but all vaccines are fundamentally flawed and come with risks.

Palevsky, who graduated from the New York University School of Medicine in 1987, initially became concerned about vaccines in 1991, when the New York State Department of Health started to mandate hepatitis B vaccine for all infants.

“I had no comments about vaccines per se at that time,” he says, “but it just raised the red flag to me. Why are we giving a vaccine to a population that has never suffered from hepatitis B infections and where we can give the mother a hepatitis B vaccine, or give the kid a hepatitis B vaccine if the mother was surface antigen positive?”

Palevsky continues:

“So, this raised an alarm for me … We had never had a vaccine for an illness that didn’t affect the population we were injecting … [Then], in 1998, in the outpatient department of the hospital, a mother came to me and said, ‘Dr. Larry, did you know that there’s mercury in vaccines?’

“I heard that information and I said, ‘Alright, what else [don’t I know]? And the ‘what else’ created the last 25 years of finding information that I would never have been taught in medical school or residency that directly opposed the narrative.

“It didn’t oppose the science, it just opposed the narrative. And what I realized was, I was finding science while I was being opposed by consensus, and consensus is not science. And so, by 1998 to 2000, I found that the risks far outweighed the benefits and, by 2002, I decided that I would never offer vaccines again in my practice …

“I could not in good conscience offer [patients] something that I had no knowledge about scientifically, and a lot of concern about scientifically, because there was no safety about it. There were no real studies done. The ingredients were unknown and filthy at best. And there were no good studies to demonstrate safety or effectiveness.”

The COVID shot debacle

While many doctors have lost their medical licenses for refusing to give vaccines, especially in the COVID-19 era, Palevsky’s livelihood was never threatened in that way, probably because he doesn’t have hospital privileges, doesn’t use electronic medical records, doesn’t sell vaccines and rarely writes prescriptions.

So, there’s little in terms of track record of what he’s doing clinically, other than what his patients might have to say. He’s also not selling any kind of alternative to vaccination.

And, since he hadn’t offered childhood vaccinations for two decades, nothing changed when the COVID-19 jab came out.

“There were pediatricians around the country who called me out,” Palevsky says, “who are now probably eating crow because the evidence back then, when they called me out, was obvious, and the evidence now is even more obvious that this is a bioweapon, a murder weapon and not a shot that’s meant for health.”

Obviously, I couldn’t agree more. It’s a bioweapon, and it seems to be particularly pernicious to the young who have no clinical need for it. Children’s risk of dying from COVID-19 is negligible, and that was clear from the start.

The primary reason for jabbing children was to protect the elderly, which is completely unethical. Hence, children can only receive harm from the jab, and we’re seeing that in spades.

Palevsky comments:

“I think the most heinous thing is that … the whole system has been gaslighting the obvious observations and experiences of most of the physicians and parents in the world who have woken up.

“The first things we started to see were menstrual cycle changes, especially in women who had stopped menstruating. The most horrible thing we started to see was infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages. And then we started to see babies born with birth defects, babies born with strokes, with blood clots, with developmental delays.

“We saw young kids with myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, pericarditis, inflammation around the heart. You saw kids who were dropping dead. You saw kids who were having neurological problems in addition to stroke.

“You saw seizures. You’re even seeing Parkinsonian-type symptoms in young adults. And again, the sudden death was amazing.

“Heart attacks. And what’s most amazing is that the medical profession in advance started to prepare the public for heart attacks and strokes in kids. They started to approve medications ahead of time so that people were prepared to know that pharmaceutical medicine was available should your child have a heart attack.

“So these things were normalized into the pediatric population and pediatricians were just accepting that neonatal ICUs [intensive care units] could have stroke victims all the time.

“The other interesting thing was that in OB [obstetrics] suites, we’re starting to see fewer and fewer kids being born, which was another sign of infertility. Nonetheless, all of it is being accepted as normal.”

COVID jabs opened Pandora’s box

According to experts, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) appears to be primarily related to immunizations. After the release of the COVID-19 jabs, we suddenly started seeing adults dropping dead for no apparent reason, a phenomenon dubbed sudden adult death syndrome (SADS).

Still, even though most of the SADS cases are happening among those who got the COVID-19 jab, it hasn’t been causally linked.

Curiously, between 2020 and 2023, SIDS rates actually dropped from historical norms, and Palevsky believes this is because many parents weren’t taking their children in for their routine primary care visits due to lockdowns and fear of going out in general.

One silver lining of all this is that as people have become aware of the radical dangers of the COVID-19 shots, they’ve also started questioning conventional vaccines, and many parents who didn’t get their children vaccinated during the pandemic are not taking them in to catch up on their routine shots now.

As noted by Palevsky:

“Once people who were never concerned about childhood immunizations started to realize that there was a concern about the COVID jab, it opened up a Pandora’s box. They not only started questioning the COVID jab, they started questioning all jabs.

“And so, this COVID scenario has actually backfired for the American Academy of Pediatrics and standard Western medical care, because parents are more concerned [about vaccines] than ever.

“And I have seen an uptick in the number of patients who never questioned vaccines coming into my office because the COVID jab became a concern.”

The public school system is destroying our children

Vaccinations aren’t the only thing forced upon our children that is doing them more harm than good. The public education system also poses a massive threat to our kids.

The obvious conclusion for anyone who has investigated these issues is that you cannot put your children into the public school system because the indoctrination and brainwashing are so pervasive, and span from kindergarten to high school and beyond.

They’re quite literally destroying the brains of our children.

Palevsky comments:

“The current educational system completely ignores everything we know about child development and brain development. Completely ignores it.

“We know that the most distinguishing thing about humans compared to other mammals is the function of our frontal brain, our frontal cortex and prefrontal cortex, which allow us to think and reason, analyze, understand, focus, pay attention, be aware, have consciousness.

“When babies are born, that part of the brain is not developed. It’s dormant. The question then becomes, how does that front of the brain develop? If you look at true child development, you see that development of the forebrain develops from the back of the brain forward.

“So, you initiate a voluntary movement, you have an experience, you do it over and over and over again. Through those experiences you come to an understanding. You come to reason, you come to think, and then you have ownership of your knowledge.

“So, the hindbrain does an action. The midbrain has an experience, over and over and over again. And the forebrain comes to what I call a forebrain conclusion, and then you have knowledge.

“The entire educational system, the media, medical school, residency, everything that we see in today’s world that delivers information says, no, the brain develops from the outside in. We’re going to teach you, we’re going to tell you, we’re going to give to you, and you’re going to now know. And unfortunately, that has become the norm.

“So, what you see is all these self-appointed experts who have all of this great knowledge but have no ownership of it because it’s not theirs. They never researched it. They never studied it. They never experienced it.

“They never thought it through. They never critically evaluated it. They never did trial and error. They just said, ‘If you said it … it’s true.’

“And so, in our schools — and that includes law schools and medical schools and graduate schools, social work school, psychology school — you don’t have to think. They just download it into your forebrain and cut off the rest of your brain’s function.”

Public education was always about control

Children are also taught NOT to question. That’s the quickest way to get into trouble. So, they basically cannot afford to think differently than what they’re told.

By not allowing proper brain development to occur, the school system has created, and continues to create, figurative automatons, human robots, whose ability to think critically has been severely impaired.

The government and media are further exacerbating the situation with fear propaganda. As just one example, many children, teens and even young adults nowadays believe that life on Earth will cease to exist within their lifetime — and that it’s their fault simply for living!

They believe we must eliminate efficient energy production, farming and food production and mechanically suck carbon out of the air in order to survive when the complete opposite is true.

All those things will kill huge swaths of humanity and lower our standard of living to pre-industrial times. We’re talking about living conditions that few modern-era people would survive due to sheer lack of know-how.

“We’ve actually watched the front brain deteriorate in function, and that’s partly due to creating fear, which cuts off the blood flow to the front brain,” Palevsky says.

He continues:

“Addiction also cuts off the blood flow to the front brain. Video game addiction cuts off blood flow to the front of the brain. Devices, all these apps, all the social media cuts off blood flow to the front of the brain and creates ongoing primitive brain function. So, we have designed a society that doesn’t allow for education. …

“I’m afraid for the next generation and the next generation after that, because they have no skills anymore to really work through a problem, to figure it out because they’ve been kept from having life experiences.

“The challenge that I don’t think the American public is aware of is, if we go back into the history of public education, we will see that the purpose of public education, at its darkest roots, is to make people sheep, to keep them from critical thinking, to keep them in mass-thinking and to control the population.

“That’s a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow, but all you have to do is go into the research of public education and you’ll see that was always the design.”

How to combat the programming

So, how can you counter all this brainwashing? Here are Palevsky’s suggestions:

1. Turn off your TV and radically limit the amount of time you allow your children to watch TV. Also, be selective in what you allow them to watch.

2. Stop reading mainstream news and look for reliable alternative sources that aren’t regurgitating the official narrative.

3. If you do keep your children in the public or private school system, have conversations with your children at home.

Ask them, “What’d you learn today? What do you think about what you learned today? How did it make you feel? Did you have an opposing view? Were you able to express an opposing view? What happened if you did? Did the teacher allow it or did the teacher not allow it?”

Cultivate an opportunity at home for your child to go through a process of critical thinking.

4. Consider homeschooling. There are many options available for parents these days, including co-op classes, online curriculums, nature schools and more.

“If you are really disgusted with the public school or private school education, then you are in good hands because the number of parents who are homeschooling their children in this country has exponentially gone up,” Palevsky says.

He continues:

“Not only do kids do better when they’re homeschooled, but their attention spans are better. It also frees the child up to be creative, to have imagination, to learn through doing, to learn through life experience, to learn how to do things that the schools are not teaching you anymore.

“These kids do function better, and they do have better grades and they do have good social skills. They’re just not being bombarded with a propaganda machine.”

Live in sync with nature to avoid seasonal colds and flus

Getting back to vaccinations, this fall they started pushing not only the seasonal influenza vaccine and an updated COVID-19 shot but also a brand-new RSV vaccine.

Do you really need any of these? Palevsky believes there are far better ways to stay healthy during the winter season.

“Most people are not aware that the flu is not caused by a viral illness,” he says. “I’m not saying there are no viruses. What I’m saying is that we’re looking at the wrong cause for the illness. The virus isn’t the cause of the illness. The virus is a bystander.”

Palevsky continues:

“The reason you get sick in the fall, winter, and early spring is because we live out of season. We live out of schedule of the season. We eat improperly out of season. We don’t sleep enough, we don’t rest enough, we don’t eat the warm foods; instead we’re eating cold foods and summer foods.

“We don’t take our vitamin D and K2, we don’t eat soups and our broths, we don’t slow down. Anytime we live out of sync of nature, we are causing stress to our body.

“Farmers used to go to bed at sunset and wake up at sunrise. But when the day gets darker earlier, and we’re up six, eight hours past when the sun goes down — that’s stress.

“And one thing that the body has to do because it can’t keep stress, is to get rid of it. If you accumulate enough of it, you’re going to get sick. We think the reason we get sick is because there’s some magical virus going around. Well, that’s not true.

“The reason you get sick is because you’re stressed, you’re living out of [sync with] nature, you’re not eating right, you’re not sleeping right, you’re not resting right, you’re not dressing right, you’re overdoing it when your body should be quieter and you’re creating too much stress.

“We’re eating lots of refined sugar, seed oils, hydrogenated oils — these are toxins and are all stressors. And so we have to get sick because the body is made to heal. Too much stress, it’s got to come out. And that’s what an illness is.

“So in conclusion, it makes no sense to get these shots because the illness is not caused by a microorganism. It’s caused by out of sync with nature, out of sync with food.”

The benefits of fever

Colds and flus typically generate a fever, but fever can also develop in the absence of a viral or bacterial infection, and using medication to bring the fever down often does more harm than good.

A fever is your body’s way of killing off invading pathogens and clearing out inflammatory toxins, so by lowering your fever, you’re prolonging the problem.

Palevsky explains:

“The very chemicals that cause a fever are the same chemicals that are present all the time to maintain our body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. So, to think that at 98.6 F. we don’t have those chemicals is incorrect. The same chemicals that give us 98.6 give us 102.

“But at 102, they’re working in larger numbers to burn out and get rid of the waste. The fallacy is that if you have fever, you must have an infection, and that’s incorrect.

“There are three reasons to have fever. One, infection. Two, inflammation, which is probably the major reason to develop fever, and three, neoplasm or malignancy.

“When a child has [a fever of] 103 or 104, it’s actually a good thing because it slows the body down. It stops you from putting more stress into the body.

“My mentors back in the 1980s, who’d been practicing in New York since the 1940s, would say that after their children resolved their fever illnesses, they would almost always have a developmental growth spurt.

“Because the purpose of the fever — which is almost always inflammation and not necessarily infection — is to clean out the body, to prune the body, to cleanse the body … giving over-the-counter medicines for fever, giving the antibiotics for something that’s not an infection, and giving the shots actually creates much bigger illnesses in your kids.

“I don’t recommend aspirin in my practice. I also don’t recommend acetaminophen in my practice.

“To me, acetaminophen is probably close to, if not the largest poison you can put in your body because it depletes your body of the very chemical that you need in the moment when you’re sick, and that’s glutathione. You need that glutathione if you’re sick. So giving acetaminophen … lowers your ability to stay well.”

Treating fever from a clinical perspective

So, in conclusion, most fevers do not need to be treated or brought down. The warning signs you want to look out for, regardless of the exact temperature of the fever, is their general demeanor.

Palevsky explains:

“In 1993, when I was thinking about leaving the ER and going into private practice, I said to a colleague of mine, whose practice I was looking at, ‘What do you do for all these kids who are 3 months to 3 years, who have a fever and no source for the fever?

“‘Do you do blood work and urine?’ He said, ‘Larry if I did blood work and urine in every one of those kids, I’d lose patients in my practice … Think about it. If you have a kid who’s got a fever of 104 and is sitting up and looking at you and is able to converse, keep the head up, hydrate, and a kid who has a fever of 100.4, who can’t lift their head up, who’s lethargic and isn’t speaking, which kid would you worry about?’

“That was a great teaching for me because it reminded me of clinical practice. Clinical practice says, evaluate the child for being alert, awake, arousable, interactive, able to walk, talk, drink, pee, poop. What’s the skin color? What’s the respiratory rate?

“And so I don’t worry about the number as much as I want to see what the kid looks like.”

That said, if your child is younger than 3 months old, contact your pediatrician if he or she develops a fever.

If a child between the ages of 3 months to 2 years has a fever above 102.5 F. and there’s no obvious source, a common concern is bacteremia (bacterial infection), which can be diagnosed with a blood or urine test.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

Dr. Joseph Mercola

Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder of Mercola.com.