One Hundred Reasons to Abandon Public Education Now

[_Droopy]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/ ... n_now.html

In a recent article, I noted in passing that "there are a hundred compelling reasons for removing your children and grandchildren from the public schools, regardless of any practical or financial inconveniences this may cause you." My choice of the round figure one hundred was purely a rhetorical flourish -- there are actually far more than a hundred reasons to abolish public education, one child at a time if necessary.

By way of proving this point, I offer the following list for your consideration and dissemination:

(1) John Dewey. "The father of modern education" -- including modern Soviet education. Critic of Western rationalism, socialist, enemy of ethical individualism.

(2) Bill Ayers. Weatherman communist, Deweyite -- and influential voice in early childhood education.

(3) "Benevolent" would-be oligarchs explicitly conceived of modern compulsory schooling as a means of forcibly stunting intellectual growth in order to produce a submissive worker class. (See below)

(4) Standardized curricula and testing. Coerced uniformity of goals and methods -- the "death panel" of education.

(5) Reduces family home to glorified bunkhouse for state-raised children. (See below)

(6) Undermines family's historical role as nature's buffer between individual and state.

(7) Sex education. Mechanistic reduction of sex spells the death of Eros -- life's central mystery -- and hence of sublimated passions, high art, and the pursuit of wisdom.

(8) Psychiatric branding and drugging of non-compliant children.

(9) "Gun-free zones." Public school: "Hundreds of weak, undefended targets here."

(10) Benjamin Franklin. Little formal schooling; a printer's apprentice at twelve.

(11) Jane Austen. Little formal schooling; read books and wrote stories at home.

(12) Alexander Pope. Little formal schooling; major poet and literary critic at twenty-three.

(13) John Keats. Medical apprentice (and orphaned) at fourteen, professional surgeon's assistant at twenty, licensed apothecary at twenty-one, greatest English poet of his era at twenty-three (dead at twenty-five).

(14) Under compulsory schooling, only two entries in Keats' biography (item 13) would have been possible -- "orphaned" and "dead at twenty-five." Think about that.

(15) School environment designed to make life easier for teachers, not better for children.

(16) Public school teacher certification requires "successful" indoctrination in government-approved pedagogy. (See items 1 and 2)

(17) Public school teachers belong to powerful unions with radical leftist leadership and agendas.

(18) Rare talented, earnest teachers are completely hamstrung by government/union social and academic goals.

(19) "Barack Hussein Obama, mm, mm, mm."

(20) Obama Youth singing "Yes We Can."

(21) Bullying. Anti-rational mass children's education fosters coercion, mob intimidation.

(22) Anti-bullying programs. Government creates Lord of the Flies; proposes to correct it by creating Nineteen Eighty-Four.

(23) Government classroom encourages mindless obedience and uniformity ("Because I say so!") -- training children in subservience to irrational, generic authority.

(24) Emphasis on group activities and forced sharing discourages individual initiative and respect for others' property and achievement. "You didn't build that."

(25) Socialization: a progressive catchword which means learning how to mold oneself to the shape of any presiding majority, i.e., conformity.

(26) Fear: the constant emotional undercurrent for "different," "quiet," or "unpopular" children thrust into the midst of hundreds of their "peers" and told to "get along."

(27) Power lust: one of the two common means of reducing the fear of being trapped among an irrational collective. (See items 23-26.)

(28) Bootlicking, currying favor: the other common means of reducing fear.

(29) Homeschooling.

(30) Thomas Jefferson. Studying multiple languages and the natural world at nine years old under a Presbyterian minister.

(31) David Hume. Entered University of Edinburgh at twelve. Completed the most important philosophic treatise of the Scottish Enlightenment at twenty-six.

(32) "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -- Albert Einstein

(33) "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards." -- Mark Twain

(34) "Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." -- Benjamin Disraeli

(35) "Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them." -- Baruch Spinoza

(36) "Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." -- William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889 (See item 3)

(37) "Peer pressure." The moral intimidation of a child whose character is not yet firmly established, by an ever-present group with the power to condemn with ostracism.

(38) 12,000 hours (counting only mandatory class time) of wasted opportunities for family guidance and conversation, practical skills development, remunerative employment, apprenticeships, reading, exploration of nature, and musical training.

(39) Unrelenting boredom. Stifles natural curiosity -- "the devil's playground."

(40) "The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent." -- Dewey

(41) Nationalized standards, e.g. America's new Common Core. Imposing universal, increasingly idiosyncratic standards is intended to render alternative education practically impossible.

(42) History curriculum designed by post-Marxist revisionists.

(43) The entitlement mentality.

(44) Natural attachment to the "provider." Abstract state replaces concrete parents as the object of future obligation and duty.

(45) "Gender role" and "alternative lifestyle" lessons. (See item 7)

(46) Unceasing Marxist critique of Western civilization: sexism, systemic oppression, capitalism is racist, the rich get richer, etc.

(47) Public education requires lowest common denominator approach. Stifles natural intelligence.

(48) Discouraging female modesty.

(49) Discouraging male admiration for female modesty. (See item 7)

(50) Ayn Rand's essay on education, "The Comprachicos." (I first read it while hiding out in my high school library, probably cutting class. It is the one Rand essay I've recalled frequently as an adult.)

(51) The downward ratchet of expectations and achievement. (See item 47) Most teachers are products of the public system at earlier stages. The results:

(52) English teachers who never cared for poetry beyond Bob Dylan.

(53) History teachers who teach Oliver Stone or Howard Zinn, but have never read Tacitus or Gibbon.

(54) Music teachers whose idea of broadening their students' horizons is the "Mission Impossible" theme or "Imagine."

(55) Teachers too ignorant and incompetent to discern or meet the interests or character of their students. My 10th grade English class, which by chance was comprised of only boys, was forced to read the clammy pop-psychological novel Ordinary People. One day, when we were being particularly ornery about it, our teacher finally stormed out on us, after screaming furiously, "This is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century!" Even then, I could only wonder whether she knew any others.

(56) "All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education." -- Sir Walter Scott

(57) Man-made global warming indoctrination. Anyone who works with government-educated children in any developed nation on Earth encounters this intractable faith.

(58) Typical age of entrance at Scottish universities during the 18th century (i.e., the Scottish Enlightenment): fourteen. Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith all attended at fourteen or younger. (Scotland's beloved national poet, Robert Burns, never attended university, and was mostly home-educated.)

(59) The U.S. federal Department of Education's budget for primary and secondary education alone was over $40 billion in 2012 -- more than the entire national budget of Singapore. Results? See the other ninety-nine items on this list. Tax expenditure on education rises continuously; civilization nosedives continuously.

(60) Thomas Edison. Judged addle-minded by his teacher; withdrawn from school and educated by his mother; began a nomadic life of entrepreneurial endeavors and scientific experiments at twelve. Today, he would be on Ritalin at six, urged to make friends by his mother, and likely bored out of his skull and a failing student throughout his teens.

(61) "Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality." -- Beatrix Potter

(62) How can coercion to surrender your child to a state-controlled school regimen until young adulthood be squared with a belief in individual liberty?

(63) "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." -- Vladimir Lenin

(64) John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education.

(65) Imagine twelve years of being forcibly prevented from doing anything of any practical importance.

(65) Artificially prolongs childhood, stunting character development. (See item 3)

(67) Thinking is by definition a private enterprise. Great thinking is often likened to being alone on a mountaintop. Public education seeks to prevent children from ever really being alone, or climbing.

(68) "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands." -- Occasional Letter Number One, General Education Board, 1906. (See item 3)

(69) "From my cold, dead hands." As I have said before, if you stand proudly against state confiscation of your firearms, how can you not feel at least as strongly about state confiscation of your children?

(70) Public schools are deliberately calibrated to limit spiritual achievement, by waiting out (i.e., wasting) the natural period of boundless energy and enthusiasm that drove men to self-development in the pre-public school era.

(71) Feminism.

(72) Political correctness.

(73) "Fairness."

(74) "Diversity."

(75) "Creativity."

(76) "Individuality."

(77) "Truth is relative."

(78) Banning Christmas.

(79) The moral ratchet: Yesterday's vice, today's "experiment," tomorrow's "basic right."

(80) Drugs. America has its first proud drug-user president -- there is no turning back within the public system.

(81) Textbook publishing oligopoly. Crony capitalism makes government curriculum decisions a racket, in addition to being a joke.

(82) "High quality, public education is a human right." -- NEA website. "The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory." -- UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959. (A compulsory "right"?) Doesn't this make private or home schooling a rights violation?

(83) A monopolistic pyramid disperses corruption at the top throughout the affected community. And monopoly breeds corruption.

(84) Parents are now increasingly relegated to the roles of funding machines and support workers for state child-rearing.

(85) The push for public pre-schools. The trajectory: universal, compulsory government raising of children from the beginning of language use to the completion of character formation and thought process habituation.

(86) "The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." -- Karl Marx

(87) Answer to "learning social skills" argument: family, church, neighbors, hobby or study groups.

(88) Answer to "learning about real life" argument: public school is the antithesis of real life.

(89) If "real life" looks increasingly like public school, that's because universal public education has formed a society in its image: infantile, amoral, collectivist, driven by fear, power lust, and pandering.

(90) Education requires a desire for knowledge; desire requires a sense of need; concrete circumstances give rise to need. Compulsory schooling withdraws a child from such concrete circumstances; everything is abstract and impractical. No need; no desire; no education.

(91) "The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." -- H.L. Mencken

(92) Genuine education breeds self-reliance; public school breeds dependency.

(93) "Every educated person is a future enemy." -- Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary

(94) Compulsory government schooling is the exception, historically speaking. It has not always existed. It need not exist.

(95) Public education did not make modern prosperity possible -- exactly the opposite, in fact. As Tocqueville warned, modern prosperity weakened men's resistance to the siren song of "soft despotism."

(96) Private schools, religious and secular, exist.

(97) "I can undo the school's damage at home." If the government mandated that your child be force-fed rotting "state food" for each meal, would you say, "No problem -- I can feed him healthy food on weekends"? Then how do you justify allowing the state to force-feed its spiritual rot to your child's mind?

(98) "I can undo the school's damage at home." All of it? Are you completely certain? Children indoctrinated under totalitarian regimes go home after class, too. Their parents probably tell themselves the same thing -- but they, unlike you, have no choice.

(99) A better car or your child? A bigger home or your child? Early retirement or your child? Freedom to do as you please or the child you freely chose to bring into the world?

(100) Every child who attends a public school will be less than he might have been, and the deficit -- in reasoning, knowledge, character, sensibility, motivation -- can never be fully overcome. (And yes, I include myself among the victims.) This monumental waste of valuable time and invaluable emotional energy is irreversible. Can you live with that?

There is my list. Please add your own ideas. Who knows? Perhaps every hundred reasons will persuade one family to withdraw a child from a government school. One soul rescued from irreparable harm -- that seems worth the effort.

[_ajax18]

Public education is quite possibly a bigger rip off on working people than social security. It's socialism at its very worst for every working person involved. The teachers should have their own business. After working in it I became even more convinced that public education just shouldn't exist.

[_bcspace]

The sheeple aren't going to give up this entitlement so easily. However, I have a transitional solution that may even work as a permanent solution. Privatize the curriculum. Allow parents and students to pick their courses and teachers.

As a permanent solution the problem is that the government still funds it and therefore can change it back at any time. But I think the more choice we have like this the more we can strip away the notion of public schooling. Already we have elective courses in high schools. Essentially, everything becomes elective and the students travel to wherever the course/teacher is. I think it is only from that point can we make the leap to completely private and maybe we wouldn't have to (but probably more will do it).

[_EAllusion]

Here's an argument from David Friedman for eliminating public schools:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertari ... ools1.html

The upshot here is that he makes arguments that are at least worth responding to.

[_krose]

It takes a lot of chutzpah to apply the word "thinker" to a site that produces this type of mindless drivel.

[_Molok]

(78) Banning Christmas.

Uh....

[_Brackite]

(17) Public school teachers belong to powerful unions with radical leftist leadership and agendas.

And Look how Powerful and corrupt the California Teachers Association Union is:

It may seem unorthodox for an unelected citizen to sit with Sacramento's elite as they pick winners and losers in the annual spending sweepstakes. But few major financial decisions in California are made without Nuñez, who represents what is arguably the most potent force in state politics.

The union views itself as "the co-equal fourth branch of government," said Oakland Democrat Don Perata, a former teacher who crossed swords with the group when he was state Senate leader.

Backed by an army of 325,000 teachers and a war chest as sizable as those of the major political parties, CTA can make or break all sorts of deals. It holds sway over Democrats, labor's traditional ally, and Republicans alike.

Jim Brulte, a former leader of the state Senate's GOP caucus, recalled once attending a CTA reception with a Republican colleague who told the union's leaders that he had come to "check with the owners."

CTA is one of the biggest political spenders in California. It outpaced all other special interests, including corporate players such as telecommunications giant AT&T and the Chevron oil company, from 2000 through 2009, according to a state study. In that decade, the labor group shelled out more than $211 million in political contributions and lobbying expenses — roughly twice that of the next largest spender, the Service Employees International Union.

Since then it has spent nearly $40 million more, including $4.7 million to help Brown become governor, according to the union's filings with the secretary of state.

And CTA's influence, unlike that of other interests, is written directly into California's Constitution. More than two decades ago, the group drafted an initiative to guarantee public schools at least 40% of the general fund and waged a successful multimillion-dollar campaign for it. As author and defender of that law, the union established a firm grip on the largest chunk of the budget.

CTA has since used its institutionalized clout, deep pockets and mass membership largely to protect the status quo. The union's positions often align with those of the smaller California Federation of Teachers, but its resources are unmatched. CTA has ferociously guarded a set of hard-won tenure rules and seniority protections, repeatedly beating back attempts by education groups to overturn those measures, increase teacher accountability and introduce private-school vouchers.

Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/18 ... a-20120819

Anyone familiar with California politics knows that the most powerful forces, by far, in the state Capitol are the public-employee unions. Their clout was demonstrated this year when the California Teachers Association, the most powerful of them all, killed Senate Bill 1530, which would have made it easier to fire bad teachers for actions "that involve certain sex offenses, controlled-substance offenses or child abuse offenses."

SB1530 was not concocted by a conservative Republican, but by state Sen. Alex Padilla of Los Angeles, a liberal Democrat. The bill advanced after several cases of teacher abuse against children came to light, especially a disgusting scenario allegedly involving Los Angeles Unified School District teacher Mark Berndt. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the state Senate, 33-4. Then the CTA killed it in the Assembly Education Committee.

The episode illustrates what has happened since California public-employee unions were given collective bargaining rights in the 1970s by Gov. Jerry Brown. This occurred even though such stalwart liberal private-sector union partisans as President Franklin Roosevelt had warned that public-sector unionization would lead to too much union power and the loss of public trust in the government.

Link: http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/union ... -prop.html



The California Teachers Association denoted over a 11 million dollars to Proposition 30, which recently Passed in California. Proposition 30 ended up raising both the Sales tax and the income tax in California to the highest in the Nation.


Where Does California Rank?

[_ajax18]

The sheeple aren't going to give up this entitlement so easily.

If they get their way, being a doctor will be as bad as being a teacher. Keeping the painful memory of being a high school teacher in my mind is what motivated me to do whatever it took to get through optometry school and pass my board exams. With my health issues I didn't think I could do it. But after a year of taking the abuse and disrespect a teacher gets, I made it happen and escaped to a better life.

Most of us can run a mile in under 7 minutes. But can you do it with a broken leg? If not doing it means you'll be a teacher for the rest of your life, you'll do it.

And they wonder why every year, they start the year with substitutes? Maybe you can't insist that people be national board certified teachers when it doesn't pay anything? Maybe putting more money into principals and administration salaries rather than the people who actually have to do the work isn't helping the situation. Public education is a very good example of the problem with socialism. And yet people have a similar attitude about education that they have about medicine. It's a right and the most capable people should just come and do it for free for them.

[_Kevin Graham]

And we only needed one good reason why never to read anything from Americanthinker.com

Thanks for providing that Droopy.

My favorite was Einstein's remark about "formal education," and the idiots at Americanthinker thought this referred strictly to public education.

Ultimately, we should not be surprised that people like Droopy hate education so much.

[_beastie]

If Droopy was educated in public schools, that might constitute a serious argument against public schools.