Opposing Public Education.

Vic Biorseth, Friday, March 20, 2009
http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

When “we the people” ordained and established the Constitution for the United States of America, we specifically defined and delimited the organization, operation, authority, responsibility and scope or our own government, as well as our own citizen rights. The first of those citizen rights, secured to ourselves and to our posterity, is the blessings of Liberty, spelled out right there in the Preamble of our Constitution. Our government is established to serve us, not the other way round, and our government has never been authorized to suddenly, incrementally or gradually increase limitations on our liberty or on the liberty of our posterity. Liberty means freedom, not subservience.

Citizen freedom means, in the most realistic and practical sense, freedom of the family. Citizen freedom is granted to “responsible units” of the society, meaning competent adults. Competent adults who enjoy the blessings of liberty assume first responsibility for less competent members of the family, meaning children and less competent adults. First responsibility necessarily means first and primary authority, not secondary, whether to the government, the “village” or to any other entity. No one is authorized by us to interfere with parental rights to first authority and responsibility over their own children and less competent members of their own families.

Liberty in America requires two major elements that government, at any level, should not obstruct, hinder or interfere with.

First, the proper functioning of our free country as Constituted requires a predominantly moral population of citizens. America since her birth has been a Christian nation, founded by Christians and overwhelmingly populated by Christians, who guide their lives by the enduring Judao-Christian Ethos of Western Civilization. That Ethos is the historical basis for Western Civilization Common Law, and it forms the very foundation upon which our own American Civil Law stands.

The written words of our own founding fathers confirm that the proper functioning of the American Republic requires a highly moral people. Those who say that we cannot Legislate Morality are wrong; morality is precisely what has historically been legislated, and what needs to be legislated. The sole alternative to legislating morality is legislating immorality.

Second, the proper functioning of our free country as Constituted relies primarily on the free and voluntary exchange among free individuals and free non-government entities or organizations for all economic activity. This means a free and open free market exchange economy. The only role of government in this free market exchange is to preserve the fair competition by enforcing the rules of the game. Meaning, government needs to enforce valid contracts, prevent coercion and otherwise keep markets free. Government intervention is otherwise only valid when correcting market factors that restrict free competition, such as monopoly, or any other such free market hindrance that renders free and voluntary exchange to be restricted, unfair or impossible.

I submit that the term “Public Education” is grossly misleading, because what it refers to is in fact “Government Education.” All levels of government, including the Federal government, are deeply involved in tightly and completely controlling and running so-called “public” education. The school buildings and facilities are government owned. The land the schools stand on is government property. Every person who works on the property or in the buildings or facilities is a government employee. All public school teachers and administrative staff are government employees.

In direct violation of the Rule of Subsidiarity, higher levels of government direct and control specifically what is to be taught to children by lower and more local levels of government. This is dictatorial government from above; parents and families, and even teachers are remote from the process and are unable to face the dictators in the open public square. The rules are given by faceless and nameless regulators and bureaucrats who have assumed authority over, but are not subject to, the jurisdiction in which their dictatorial rules are daily applied.

When the federal government distributes money from its tax revenues to the various states, and when state government distributes money from the federal disbursements and/or form its own tax revenues to local school districts, that money comes, as it always does, with strings attached. These funds often become addictive, in that the local school district could never raise that kind of money by taxing the local voters whom they have to face in the town hall. When the lower level government gets big money it tends to spend it, not save it. This spending is habit forming. Local government educational bureaucracy grows fat, dependent and lazy, since it does not have to compete or even show excellence in performance to keep getting the seemingly guaranteed money.

Government school teachers display gross incompetence in their product, which is supposed to be educated children. Teachers have not only morphed into typical petty bureaucrats with pointless (but important!) positions, but they are all – as in, every single one of them – Unionized petty bureaucrats. The National Education Association (NEA) teacher’s union is a thoroughly Marxist organization that exists for the purpose of staying in existence, increasing pay and benefits and doing less. Which sort of describes what all unions do. It also very successfully makes it nearly impossible for any member to be fired or even reprimanded for incompetence or even not showing up for work, or for anything at all, including even complete illiteracy.

(Believe it or not, there actually has been a case of a long time teacher admitting the inability to read, and who’s teaching job was successfully protected by the NEA.)

Our government, at any level, but most particularly at the federal level, has no business whatsoever trying to educate children. That’s not what we instituted our government to do; formal education is far beyond the proper scope of our government. American citizens were better educated before government invaded the private sector and largely took over formative education. Note well that Lincoln was a lawyer, that he never went to law school, that he was largely self-educated, and that that was a fairly typical situation in that era.

Examination, over time, of letters home from soldiers in the field, including those written by soldiers from backwoods, farm and small town backgrounds, show a quite stunning decline in penmanship, vocabulary, command of language and the simple ability to fully communicate a thought. The same may be said for meticulously maintained hand-written store ledgers and counter clerk’s records. Comparing such records between, say, the Revolutionary War and World War II Makes the World War II era look to be populated largely by semi-literate dunces. No offense intended to the World War II generation; today’s generation is far worse educated than they were. It clearly gets worse over time. We are being systematically dumbed-down.

The need for the government to indoctrinate the masses – note that American Leftists (meaning Marxists) no longer use the word indoctrinate but replace it with the word educate – did not originate with our founders and may not be found in any founding documents. It originated in Marx and Engle’s Communist Manifesto. Again, see the Marxism page for more details.

Over time, American public school students are taught what to think, rather than how to think. The quasi-religion of Darwinist Evolutionary Theory is a perfect example subject. With no empirical evidence whatsoever to support it, it is taught as dogma, and students are very nearly prohibited from thinking about it.

It is in the government schools and the government schools alone that the religion of the majority of the population is banned and restricted from any exercise or even expression of itself. The government school system seeks to accomplish the secularization, i.e., religious cleansing of America’s school children, acting against the will (and the liberty) of the vast majority of American parents and families.

It is in the government schools and the government schools alone that the ever increasingly disgusting subject of sex education is force-fed to children from grades K to 12. This “education” amounts to how-to classes on the mechanics of safe fornication, protected sodomy, responsible promiscuity and discreet adultery. It includes inculcating in young minds the normalization and “mainstreaming” of homosexuality. This, too, acts against the will (and the liberty) of the vast majority of American parents and families.

Compared to home-schooled children, and compared to private-schooled and parochial-schooled children, the so-called “public”-schooled children are shown to be so poorly educated as to rank their education as abysmal. Compared to other nations, including third-world nations, they come out horribly behind. More tax money is spent on them per child than in any other nation, and, I would bet, than in private schools. They still come out something like 28th among nations. Twenty seven other countries educate their children better than does the American government school system, which consumes more wealth on education than probably any ten of them combined.

What our government schools are cranking out, for the most part, is irreligious, immoral little semi-literates, reading four or five or even more grades lower than the one they are in or graduated from, unable to formulate a coherent and grammatically correct English sentence, unable to work simple long divisions, ignorant in geography and history, and so forth.

Privatize ‘em! Or shut ‘em down. The U.S. Department of Education has no valid reason to exist. Probably few State departments of education need to be anywhere near as large as they are, if indeed they need to continue to exist at all. These “education” tax supported governmental behemoths are classic examples of the illegitimate, corrupt and corrupting Legislative Earmarks that fill the giant Political Pork Barrel, round which gather the politicos, lobbyists, skimmers and other more sinister characters, like the true Marxists.

How to do it?

First, pass the Fair Tax. Doing this one thing would eliminate at least the educational portion of the currently existing pork barrel, and remove the political club that higher levels of government currently hold over the lower levels.

Second, adopt a Voucher system in which vouchers, or coupons redeemable by educators or educating institutions in cash, to parents of school-aged children, one voucher per child, sufficient to pay for one month’s education tuition, a flat fee to be determined. If tuition at the school of choice costs more, the parents would be required to make up the difference. The parents who receive vouchers would be identified by the same government filing used to get the Fair Tax Pre-bate. Under Fair Tax, people annually file for their monthly Pre-bate government check, with information regarding families and household make-up.

Government vouchers go to parents, parents give them to the educator or educational institution of their choice, be it a private school, a parochial school, the successful home-school-er across the street, or a formerly government, and now really Public school. The educator goes to the government and exchanges the voucher for cash. People who home-school their children would be able to cash their own school vouchers in, just as if they were a school.

Formerly government but now public schools would open for business the next day, same as always. All the NEA teachers would show up for work, ready to teach, or occupy space, or take a bad-hair day, or whatever else their union allows them to do. If any parents show up with vouchers, they stay in business, so long as parents keep showing up monthly with vouchers. Parents are free to take their monthly vouchers to any other educational facility at any time. This means that the public schools would either find a way to get competitive or go out of business, just like every other potential voucher recipient.

Parents would be driving the bus. Teachers would be working for parents, not the government.

The whole process would be simplified, which is something that should absolutely exacerbate the resulting frothy, foaming flummox of the Marxists. (I mean Democrats.)

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