I think it is becoming abundantly clear that the government indoctrination camps we call the public schools no longer have the best interest of the students at heart.
Maybe. I am beginning to wonder what it would take to wake people up.
Perhaps the following article will help.
Today, Dr. Gary North published the following article on his site, Specific Answers.
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There are 13 assumptions that pave the road of good educational intentions. Most Christian parents who send their children to college have adopted eleven of the 13.
The first one is this: “The state has both the authority and the moral obligation to fund education.” Then come the other 12.
2. “Our local public schools are not like all the others. I will enroll my child in kindergarten.”3. “The teachers there are conservative.”
4. “I have joined the PTA. My opinions are being heard.”
5. “The teachers have the sexual revolution under control in our middle school.”
6. “The high school’s textbooks are conservative.”
7. “Our high school’s teachers are conservatives.”
8. “The curriculum in our high school is religiously neutral.”
9. “My children will resist temptation.”
10. “I want my children to be missionaries on campus.”
11. “I am sending my kids to a Christian college. They will be safe.”
12. “The college is accredited. They will get a good education.”
13. “My kids will have high-paying jobs after they graduate in the humanities.”
Here are what assumptions the parents make when they make these implicit confessions of faith.
2. “Our local public schools are not like all the others. I will enroll my child in kindergarten.”
This is what I call Lake Wobegon statistics. The parent assumes that his local school is above average. But all of the nation’s parents assume this, at least those outside the ghettos. Otherwise, half of the parents would be self-consciously deciding to send their children into substandard schools. None of them would admit that they are doing this voluntarily. So, the parent sends the child off to kindergarten, which is the first step in a 13-year or 14-year process. It begins with this assumption: the parent can legitimately transfer the authority over his child’s education to the state. It also begins with this assumption: there will be no negative consequences for this decision.
3. “The teachers there are conservative.”
The parent has no idea what the political or religious views of the teachers’ are. He knows nothing about the teachers’ background. This much is clear, however: the teachers were all certified as accredited teachers, and the accrediting associations are all licensed by the government. They are all creations of the state.
4. “I have joined the PTA. My opinions are being heard.”
The Parent-Teachers Association was the creation of tax-funded educators. It was created for a specific reason: to make certain that the educators could head off criticism of their programs by offering parents the illusion that the parents have anything valid to say about the content or the process of education. The educators were committed to this principle: the will of the parents must be undermined throughout the entire educational process. In short, they assume that the only people with the qualifications necessary for educating the child are the educational elite, which enforces its views on the students in the state licensed colleges and universities that produce the teachers. From day one, they fully understood that parents would lose interest in the local PTA as soon as their children were out of that school, so that there would be no sustained opposition to the constantly evolving theories of the educational elite.
5. “The teachers have the sexual revolution under control in our middle school.”
Millions of students today become sexually active in middle school, meaning before the ninth grade. This is why the schools are attempting to hand out prophylactics to students without first notifying their parents. This information is available on the Web.
Parents do not really care. They go along to get along. They adopted Lake Wobegon statistics six years earlier.
6. “The high school’s textbooks are conservative.”
Parents do not read the textbooks that are assigned to their children. They do not read reviews of these textbooks. There are not many reviews. The textbooks have been published by major publishing houses that are all run by graduates of the state’s education system. These textbooks are written in order to satisfy the requirements of committees of state-certified educators. The textbooks are written to pass on to students the ideological outlook of the teacher-training institutions. These institutions in turn reflect the ideology of the education departments of the most prestigious universities. These universities have been at war with parental views since about 1800.
7. “Our high school’s teachers are conservatives.”
The teachers have all been certified by institutions of higher learning that are committed to the worldview that promotes state-controlled education. This means that they are committed to the idea that the state, not parents, should have final authority over the content of education, as well as the methods of education. The parent’s only functions are to serve on the PTA and to vote yes on school bond issues. Voters are expected to fork over the money, but the money is then controlled 100% by the educational bureaucracy. The courts enforce this. Once a parent enrolls his child in a state-funded school, he legally loses all control over the content and structure of the educational program. Any parent who does not understand this from the day the first child goes into kindergarten is terminally naïve. This is a widespread condition, because the parent is the product of the tax funded educational system. The system has done its work well. It will do the work well on their children, too.
8. “The curriculum in our high school is religiously neutral.”
This is the greatest myth of all: the myth of neutrality. It is the religious presupposition on which all of the tax-funded schools are legally constructed. It is a lie from start to finish. Anyone who doubts this should read the book, published 50 years ago, by R. J. Rushdoony: The Messianic Character of American Education. Here, educator by educator, you can read what these educators said about their right to control the content of education in order to shape the thinking and therefore the lives of the students. Follow the footnotes.
9. “My children will resist temptation.”
Again, this is Lake Wobegon statistics. This is the equivalent of sending your children into what you know is a moral cesspool, and then expecting that your children will climb out of that cesspool smelling like roses. It assumes that peer pressure does not exist for students. It assumes that this excuse will never occurred to the students: “Everybody is doing it.” Everybody isn’t doing it, but a large enough percentage of the most popular kids is doing it to influence the others to do it, if they get the opportunity. Parents of good-looking children are using Lake Wobegon statistics.
10. “I want my children to be missionaries on campus.”
Let me put it another way: “I want my children to be missionaries in a whorehouse.” I realize that this is an exaggeration. Whorehouses charge money to customers. Tax-funded schools are mandatory, and the bills are passed on to the taxpayers. Any parent who does not send his child into a tax-funded school may be visited by truant officer, and the parent will have to prove that he is providing an equal education to his children. The parent is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Yet even people arrested in a whorehouse, except in Louisiana, are presumed innocent until proven guilty. (In Louisiana, Napoleonic law reigns: guilty until proven innocent. But in Louisiana, hardly anybody ever gets arrested for being in a whorehouse. The state’s motto is “Let the good times roll.”)
11. “I am sending my kids to a Christian college. They will be safe.”
Where did the teachers get their certification? Mostly in tax-funded universities, and always at accredited universities, which means state-accredited universities. The universities are part of a cartel. So, the teachers have been screened through the Ph.D. in terms of the presuppositions of the tax-funded, humanist school system. They assign textbooks that are written for committees of tenured college professors, who have committed their entire lives to preaching the worldview that is consistent with tax-funded education. The parent does not go to the college’s bookstore to look at the content of the textbooks, any more than he looked at the content of the textbooks in high school. He has no way of evaluating the content of the textbooks. His own education was the product of earlier, similar textbooks. He also does not look to see if each class has an assigned study guide that refutes the errors of the textbooks. This is because no such study guides are ever published. This is because the professors in the classrooms believe the content of the textbooks. They have no complaints. So, the parent is paying free market prices to get a Keynesian education for his child. He is paying free market prices to get an education whose content is the same at the local tax-financed community college, which is dirt cheap, and the local state university, which is cheaper than the Christian college. How smart are the parents?
12. “The college is accredited. They will get a good education.”
The most suicidal question of all that is asked by a dutiful Christian parent is this one: Is the college accredited? This is another way of saying: Is the college staffed by people who believe in tax-funded education, neutral education, and submission to the state-licensed accrediting agencies? Accreditation means submission. It means submission to the enemies of Christianity. Christian parents want to be sure that they are paying top dollar to get educations that are certified by their religious enemies.
13. “My kids will have high-paying jobs after they graduate in the humanities.”
This indicates a complete lack of awareness of what has happened to the job market since 2008. In fact, it began happening in the job market two decades ago. The universities have cranked out millions of students with degrees that do not entitle them to any special consideration, other than this one: the students were submissive enough to sit in classrooms for five consecutive years. Businesses that want to hire submissive, uncreative, and bored employees go out and recruit such people from America’s college campuses.
Something like 57% of all college graduates today are women, which means that approximately 50% of the graduates are going to go into low-paid jobs. Jobs for which mainly women qualify are low-paid jobs. Nobody wants to say this, because it is politically incorrect, but it is the reality of college graduation. Except for those women who major in physics, chemistry, engineering, and other natural sciences, and who are employable at high salaries, the ones coming out of the humanities are unemployable except at low wages. Therefore, the men who graduate with the same degrees in the same majors are equally unemployable at anything except low wages.
Then, wonder of wonders, the student finds out that he was unwise to take on at least $25,000 worth of college debt, which is the average today. The parent finds out that he was unwise to have turned over the bulk of his retirement portfolio to his children, who come out of college with nothing more than third-rate hunting licenses for jobs.
CONCLUSION
Parents do not want to see this, because they want the state subsidy. They do not homeschool their children. They do not select which books their children were read. They do not design the best program of education for each of their children. They send their kids into tax funded schools, which operate in terms of a one size fits all curriculum, which is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, which today is very low indeed.
All this comes from an initial assumption, namely, that the state has both the authority and the legitimacy of providing education. Out of that presupposition flow all of the subsequent errors.
The original article is here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/10821.cfm
