Public-School Indoctrination Camps - How The Democrats Love Them
By Joel Turtel (11/13/06)
One reason public schools get away with wrecking our chiildren's education, year after year, is because they are run by by liberal politicians and school officials who passionately believe that government should control your children's mind, values, and future. As C. S. Lewis wrote, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Public-school socialist true-believers fall into this category --- for over a 150 years, education "progressives" have been tormenting our children with public schools, allegedly for our children's benefit. Like all fascist, socialist, or communist true-believers, these people absolutely believe that they know what is best for your children, and seek to ram their beliefs down parents' throats.
From the 1840s to the 1930s, public-school "progressive" activists like Horace Mann and John Dewey worked to create a public-school system like the one they admired in Prussia (Germany). Mann and Dewey considered public education a religion, with a holy mission to mold children and society. Simply teaching children to read, write, and do math was too commonplace a goal for them. Mann and Dewey wanted the schools to have total control over children's lives. This meant removing parents' influence over their children. Mann put it this way: "We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause."
Dewey had a socialist utopian vision for America and he wanted the common schools to achieve his vision. To create a government-dominated socialist America, public schools had to mold generations of children into the habit of obedience. In his "Pedagogic Creed" of 1897, Dewey wrote, "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. . ."
By the early twentieth century, public schools had expanded their functions into areas undreamed of in the 1850s. Schools took on the role of social agencies, with nurses, social centers, playgrounds, school showers, kindergartens, and "Americanization" programs for immigrants. Public schools became a major agency for social control.
Unfortunately, today's public schools are fulfilling Mann's and Dewey's "government- knows-best" vision with a vengeance.
There is hardly any area of children's lives that school authorities now don't push to control. Politicians and public-school apologists in many states are now lobbying for programs to make kindergarten compulsory. Yes, they now want to literally take 3 and 4-year old children from their mother's arms and stick them in public-school nursery-classrooms.
Public schools also now spend billions of dollars for psychological counseling, school-lunch programs, mandatory drug-testing, parent welfare-outreach programs, special-education classes, bilingual classes, early-childhood programs, drug and sex education classes, as well as programs for millions of "at-risk" or "special-needs" children.
This government-knows-best philosophy is the deepest reason why public schools get away with educational murder and can never be fixed. Public-school apologists believe that government bureaucrats and school authorities should dictate your children's education and the values they are taught. By implication, they believe that parents are an annoyance at best. More often, they believe that parents are a danger to their children's "proper" education and the values children "ought" to be taught by government employees.
To turn your children into dumbed-down, obedient little socialists and multiculturalist "citizens of the world," public-school authorities have to keep an iron grip on our children's minds and values. That is why public-school true believers will never voluntarily give up control over your children. They see themselves as noble idealists who know what is "best" for your children. That is why these arrogant little education despots defend the public schools and have contempt for your parental rights.
In the recent Democrat victory in Congress, the public-school indoctrination-camp chickens are coming home to roost. The majority of 18 to 25 year-olds, graduates of our socialist-indoctrinating public schools, voted for Democrats. These are the children who spent 12 years in public schools that systematically insult traditional American ideals and values. These are the schools that preach the multiculturalist trash that all cultures' values are "equal," and that American values of individual rights, economic liberty, and limited government are "selfish" or arrogant.
Well, our public-school "graduates" are now voters, and their socialist-indoctrinated mind-set now attracts them to Democrats like moths to a flame. God help this country, because public schools turn out millions of these brainwashed child-adults who haven't the faintest conception about the values this country was founded on, or have little respect or contempt for those values.
Parents, for your children's sake, walk away from the public schools. Also, don't depend on vouchers or charter schools, which are few and far between. Take control of your children's education and the values you teach them now by homeschooling your kids or enrolling them in a low-cost Internet private school of your choice. Your child's future is at stake, and so is, by the way, the future of our Republic and our liberties.
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