Marita Vargas
Don't be fooled, leave your school
By Marita Vargas
If Americans are bent on retaining their freedoms they will need to keep their children home from public school next year. And though the decision to do so is not a light one, it is an urgent one, the urgency of which is better determined by the parties involved — as most things are. To help people assess the validity of the assertion above, let us consider why Big Education may be incompatible with individual freedom.
Universal Compulsory Education is a contradiction in terms: Those who designed our public schools were not interested in liberty and choice, as those who maintain them are not. That is why the education establishment fights every effort by mere mortals to escape the compulsory nature of its experiment. The establishment is interested in producing a product using your children as the raw material.
When the education planners began their exercise in social engineering, they claimed that schools would be the great equalizer. That is a dangerous notion. When the educationists talk about equalizing, they are talking about equalizing outcomes for everybody. They are not talking about equalizing opportunities.
Equalizing opportunities requires that the planners get out of the way, as You and I, equally driven to act in accord with our hearts, minds, and strengths, work to maximize the use and effectiveness of our gifts. The difference boils down to human persons who believe that are created by the master potter, and human persons (social planners) who believe that common humanity (You and I) should be putty in their masterful hands.
The equalizing mission of the schools has nothing to do with education: If you think that the schools are about teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, and government to make free citizens of all of their students, think again. That would be an equalizing mission, in deed. However, the "equalizing" mission of the schools is to dispense condoms, refer girls for secret abortions, normalize gay marriage, and enshrine variations on neo-pagan environmentalism as the new civic religion.
If you are waiting for the ACLU to take on this last point as a separation of church and state issue, you are waiting in vain. The ACLU and the schools know that the Judeo-Christian ethic is not friendly to group-think, and group-think is necessary for the secular paradise they seek to build. Meanwhile, who is teaching grammar?[1]
The equalizing mission has everything to do with social control: Parents concerned about the difficulty of getting satisfaction from their local schools on a variety of issues, should consider what things will be like when national standards are in place and the good old USA has signed on to international agreements such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Are you upset about that sex education program that no one told you about? Are you angry about the fact that your twelve year old is not considered college material and will have no chance to attend college? Forget about all resistance. You just haven't caught on yet that individual rights are trumped by the common good as defined by the last of the self-righteous-breast-beaters, the social planners. Thank goodness your child belongs to the state, he won't make that mistake in the utopian future. If this sounds incredible to you, you had better look up how England interprets the provisions of UNCRC as it pertains to its own homeschoolers. The initial report by Graham Badman on elective home education in Britain advised the creation of a vast bureaucracy to control home schooling families. Britain needs another bureaucracy like BP needs another oil spill. Under this interpretation, the people lose twice: They lose their civil rights and they lose their national sovereignty. Oh, and they lose their children. Of course, the global-centralized planner types are pleased. Supra-state solutions are their bailiwick. Meaning, that such solutions will soon be coming to a country near you.
A gargantuan bureaucratic jungle surrounds your child: The sheer enormity of the bureaucratic jungle that surrounds the young should set off alarm bells in every parent who draws breath. When the federal Department of Education, every state house in the land, state offices of public instruction, county offices of education, and "local" school districts can't get it right why do we accept their pronouncements and march to their orders? Bigger is not better.
But liberals, ever restless in their attempts to achieve social nirvana, and afflicted with a control mania that makes Nurse Ratched seem like Miss Mary Ann from Romper Room, are busy working overtime to use the schools to create a centralized economy that will participate internationally with states that have also undergone such a transformation.
The subjects not taught in school are the most valuable bulwarks against tyranny: Ancient History comes to mind as a valuable subject for the citizens of a democracy to know. Is it on the roster of required classes at your local high school, or does the school list a course using a textbook on world civilizations that puts the students to sleep? Without knowledge of Ancient History we are at risk of failing to identify the rise of tyranny in our own day. A citizenry steeped in history, is much harder to manipulate — as is a citizenry in command of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. If you add the Bible and the classics, you would have a curriculum for the perpetuation of freedom. The only thing such a curriculum will not produce is an opening for the educational reformers to take over — hence, its absence in the education of every man.
If you only know what the government wants you to know you are in trouble. Hillaire Belloc pointed out ages ago, that a modern state that demanded to take on the care and education of the young was already well advanced on the road to tyranny. We in America have forgotten that the government can overstep, that in acting outside of its rightful sphere of influence, it can do damage to liberty. Allowed unchecked power, it will engorge itself, subsuming the role of the family and of the church. Such bloated governments always end by requiring blood before their stranglehold on life and liberty can be broken. How big is our behemoth of a state right now?
Our government thinks nothing of acting in contradiction to the express will of the people. It fears nothing. Even now, it is acting to contravene rights, limit liberties, and ruin our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Perhaps, there is still time to employ the last three in preserving our rights, but not if millions of Americans do not wake up to the dangers presented by our system of education.
NOTES:
© Marita Vargas
July 5, 2010
If Americans are bent on retaining their freedoms they will need to keep their children home from public school next year. And though the decision to do so is not a light one, it is an urgent one, the urgency of which is better determined by the parties involved — as most things are. To help people assess the validity of the assertion above, let us consider why Big Education may be incompatible with individual freedom.
Universal Compulsory Education is a contradiction in terms: Those who designed our public schools were not interested in liberty and choice, as those who maintain them are not. That is why the education establishment fights every effort by mere mortals to escape the compulsory nature of its experiment. The establishment is interested in producing a product using your children as the raw material.
When the education planners began their exercise in social engineering, they claimed that schools would be the great equalizer. That is a dangerous notion. When the educationists talk about equalizing, they are talking about equalizing outcomes for everybody. They are not talking about equalizing opportunities.
Equalizing opportunities requires that the planners get out of the way, as You and I, equally driven to act in accord with our hearts, minds, and strengths, work to maximize the use and effectiveness of our gifts. The difference boils down to human persons who believe that are created by the master potter, and human persons (social planners) who believe that common humanity (You and I) should be putty in their masterful hands.
The equalizing mission of the schools has nothing to do with education: If you think that the schools are about teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, and government to make free citizens of all of their students, think again. That would be an equalizing mission, in deed. However, the "equalizing" mission of the schools is to dispense condoms, refer girls for secret abortions, normalize gay marriage, and enshrine variations on neo-pagan environmentalism as the new civic religion.
If you are waiting for the ACLU to take on this last point as a separation of church and state issue, you are waiting in vain. The ACLU and the schools know that the Judeo-Christian ethic is not friendly to group-think, and group-think is necessary for the secular paradise they seek to build. Meanwhile, who is teaching grammar?[1]
The equalizing mission has everything to do with social control: Parents concerned about the difficulty of getting satisfaction from their local schools on a variety of issues, should consider what things will be like when national standards are in place and the good old USA has signed on to international agreements such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Are you upset about that sex education program that no one told you about? Are you angry about the fact that your twelve year old is not considered college material and will have no chance to attend college? Forget about all resistance. You just haven't caught on yet that individual rights are trumped by the common good as defined by the last of the self-righteous-breast-beaters, the social planners. Thank goodness your child belongs to the state, he won't make that mistake in the utopian future. If this sounds incredible to you, you had better look up how England interprets the provisions of UNCRC as it pertains to its own homeschoolers. The initial report by Graham Badman on elective home education in Britain advised the creation of a vast bureaucracy to control home schooling families. Britain needs another bureaucracy like BP needs another oil spill. Under this interpretation, the people lose twice: They lose their civil rights and they lose their national sovereignty. Oh, and they lose their children. Of course, the global-centralized planner types are pleased. Supra-state solutions are their bailiwick. Meaning, that such solutions will soon be coming to a country near you.
A gargantuan bureaucratic jungle surrounds your child: The sheer enormity of the bureaucratic jungle that surrounds the young should set off alarm bells in every parent who draws breath. When the federal Department of Education, every state house in the land, state offices of public instruction, county offices of education, and "local" school districts can't get it right why do we accept their pronouncements and march to their orders? Bigger is not better.
But liberals, ever restless in their attempts to achieve social nirvana, and afflicted with a control mania that makes Nurse Ratched seem like Miss Mary Ann from Romper Room, are busy working overtime to use the schools to create a centralized economy that will participate internationally with states that have also undergone such a transformation.
The subjects not taught in school are the most valuable bulwarks against tyranny: Ancient History comes to mind as a valuable subject for the citizens of a democracy to know. Is it on the roster of required classes at your local high school, or does the school list a course using a textbook on world civilizations that puts the students to sleep? Without knowledge of Ancient History we are at risk of failing to identify the rise of tyranny in our own day. A citizenry steeped in history, is much harder to manipulate — as is a citizenry in command of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. If you add the Bible and the classics, you would have a curriculum for the perpetuation of freedom. The only thing such a curriculum will not produce is an opening for the educational reformers to take over — hence, its absence in the education of every man.
If you only know what the government wants you to know you are in trouble. Hillaire Belloc pointed out ages ago, that a modern state that demanded to take on the care and education of the young was already well advanced on the road to tyranny. We in America have forgotten that the government can overstep, that in acting outside of its rightful sphere of influence, it can do damage to liberty. Allowed unchecked power, it will engorge itself, subsuming the role of the family and of the church. Such bloated governments always end by requiring blood before their stranglehold on life and liberty can be broken. How big is our behemoth of a state right now?
Our government thinks nothing of acting in contradiction to the express will of the people. It fears nothing. Even now, it is acting to contravene rights, limit liberties, and ruin our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Perhaps, there is still time to employ the last three in preserving our rights, but not if millions of Americans do not wake up to the dangers presented by our system of education.
NOTES:
[1] For more on the subject of centralized planning in schools and national norms see www.Edwatch.org.
© Marita Vargas
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