May 27, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Public Education is
the Primary Factor in the Perversion of our Culture and History:
"Dissident Mama" Writes: “I Don’t Love Public Education”
Friends,
Back
on May 13 of this year MY CORNER took a look at our educational system, and
what we might call our “educational crisis.” [see: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/may-13-2018-my-corner-by-boyd-cathey.html]
Perhaps the most successful myth that has been foisted off on a gullible
citizenry is that the education of our children, specifically from kindergarten
through high school, is the responsibility of the “public,” that is, of the
government. And implicit in that assumption is that the natural rights and
duties of the family over the education of its offspring must in nearly all
situations take a back seat, must be diminished and not interfere with the
prior and dominant role of the state.
By
and large, since the early 20th century this myth, this assumption,
has been considered undebatable truth. No one, not even most resolute
conservatives, will question its basic veracity and the resulting need to
continue funding, to showering with taxpayer dollars, what has become the most
expansive and most successful conquest of the revolutionary managerial state in
its advance to complete control over our society.
Yes,
illegal immigration may eventually change the cultural and ethnic make-up of
America, and, yes, our overextension in foreign military adventures may get us
into unwinnable wars and eventually wreck our economy. But none of that would
be possible or successful without the operation of the government-run “public
education system” and the ideological—yes, ideological—indoctrination that the
system has progressively engineered over the past century and a half.
That
is not to say, certainly, that there haven’t been dedicated teachers or that
there haven’t been selfless and dedicated educators and administrators who
really did concern themselves with the proper education of our young. My mother
was a teacher during the 1930s (graduate of North Carolina State University)
who actually went back when I was in high school to get a Master’s degree in
reading and teach several additional years.
Like thousands of other dedicated teachers, she was no apparatchik or
agent of the managerial state, she was not a revolutionary seeking to indoctrinate
her students and “free them from the tyranny of the traditional family.” She
believed in imparting the essentials of those subjects—reading, good writing,
simple arithmetic, and logic—that she understood came to her as a concession
from parents So thought most of my
teachers both in grammar and high school, as I suspect believed many, if not most
of the teachers half a century ago.
But
that, you see, is the problem. Our public education system contained in its
very foundation those principles which would eventually bring it to where it is
now. If back when my mother was teaching the idea that schools were still an
extension of the family was still held to be true, the ineluctable basis of
state/government control was nevertheless implicit…and ever expanding in scope
and authority.
How
many American citizens would—today—suggest that our public schools are “an
extension of the family,” much less really believe it?
No;
our public education system has become increasingly, without doubt, the major
vehicle, the major crucible, for the creation of progressivist revolution—whether
it be the observed actions, for example, of those frenzied and unhinged
students in Broward County, Florida, reacting (on gun control) after a mass
school shooting, or less visibly, the multifaceted efforts at “socialization” of
students concerning racism and gender. After all, those rabidly radical college
students at Berkeley and other major universities did not just arrive tabula rasa—they were carefully groomed
and prepared before college, in our
primary and high schools.
On several
occasions in MY CORNER and in various published articles in journals I have cited and quoted the great
Southern writer and philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney [see, for example, “Robert
Lewis Dabney and His Attack on Progressivism,” The Unz Review, October 9, 2014, http://www.unz.com/article/robert-lewis-dabney-and-his-attack-on-progressivism/], in his famous debate with Virginia’s first
Superintendent of Public Instruction William Ruffner in the 1870s. Dabney
understood where the mania for taxpayer-funded “public education” would lead,
and he warned of its consequences.
Here
is what I wrote on May 13, summarizing Dabney:
…how is it
possible to educate a child if the moral and ethical values of religion are not
taught but proscribed, for did not “public education” directly imply such
avoidance? Given
the developing status of relations between church and state and changing
constitutional interpretations, the state could not endorse one religious
belief over another. Thus, Dabney observed, state-sponsored education tended to
become secularized. But if education were not Christian, then it would
inevitably become anti-Christian. Could education really be education if it
educated “the mind without purifying the heart?” In Dabney’s view: “There can
be no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without
Christianity.” The Achilles’s Heel of
state-supported public education, in addition to its assertion of state rights
over parental rights in a child’s education, was its inevitable and systemic
use by “demagogues, who are in power for a time, in the interests of their
faction.”
Dabney
and the partisans of privately-supported and family-controlled education lost
that debate, practically speaking. And with the advent of social and political
Progressivism in the early years of the 20th century, public
education was seen as a key, in many cases, the key to the future, to better
jobs, to success in life, to prosperity, in fact, to real happiness.
Nevertheless,
even with the totem of “free public education” firmly fixed in the public mind
as absolutely essential and its centrality in any political election program or
campaign—not to mention the billions of dollars to be spent by both by local
and state authorities and the Federal government—nearly every study, almost
every report card on education, both K-through Grade 12 and college, indicates
an inverse proportion of results to expenditures. It seems the more money we
spend on what is called “education,” the worse our schools and colleges become,
at least in those basic skills that the educational process is supposed to
implant.
But
despite that disastrously failing academic report card, for the proponents of
progressive public education the past century’s educational history has been extremely
successful. For our state-run educational system has been almost completely
converted into an ideological hot house, a Dr. Strangelove laboratory, the graduating
products from which become the willing recipients of the venomous cultural
Marxist pablum fed to them on the college level, and future voters who pull the
Democratic voter lever and who militate in the growing armies of those who demand
an “end to (white) racism” and “white supremacy,” “full gender equality” (including
the full embrace of everything from transgenderism, same sex marriage to gender
fluidity), “open borders” to all immigrants, direct action on supposed “climate
change,” and the “suppression of hate speech” (which will mean whatever the
latest dominant narrative says it is).
And
lest we think this contagion uniquely located just on the ostensible “Left” in
the American political and cultural spectrum, its effects are felt nearly as
strongly in what passes for intellectual thought on the conservative (pseudo) “right,”
especially among the dominant Neoconservatives, who claim to represent the “conservative
opposition.”
Pick
just one “darling” of so-called “conservative college youth,” Ben Shapiro, for
example, or the omnipresent Jonah Goldberg. I have written about both of them
at some length and the horrendous damage, the incredibly destructive and, yes,
inherently Leftist (often thinly disguised) narrative they spew forth before
such audiences as Young Americas Foundation and the College Republicans.
Shapiro, in particular, has taken it upon himself to appear on dozens of
college campuses [see, on Jonah
Goldberg:
http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/04/april-26-2018-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html
and, more particularly, see on Ben Shapiro: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2017/09/september-27-2017-my-corner-by-boyd.html]
Last
August 17, 2017, for example, Shapiro wrote that Pat Buchanan, because he did
not believe the airy Neocon assumption that the words in the Declaration of
Independence that “all men are created equal” meant absolute equality in birth
and opportunity (a demonstrable historical and metaphysical falsehood that the
Founders rejected), was—and I quote—“a white supremacist” and worse, by
implication a racist and, by association, an “anti-semite” (surely the coup de grace from Shapiro, who never
misses an opportunity to ostentatiously wear his yarmulke and complain that he
is the nation’s number one target of “anti-semitism”) [see: https://www.dailywire.com/news/19908/pat-buchanan-goes-rails-believing-all-men-are-ben-shapiro;
see also the excellent critique of
Shapiro at VoxDay, May 25, 2018: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-historical-revisionists.html?m=1]
How
does Never Trumper Shapiro’s gross ignorance of American history and the
American Founding, and his explicit acceptance of the Marxist template differ
from his supposed opponents over on the “farther Left”? Not much…yet he has
become a major voice, an icon, for “conservative youth.”
So
much for efforts by such “conservatives” to convert the programed automatons extruded
out with groans and grunts by our public education system.
Such
displays should convince us of the utter decay in our educational structure and
the need not for “reform,” but a
total rethinking and dismantling.
One
of the finest and most cogent examinations of our public educational system I
have read recently appeared on that excellent blog site, “Dissident Mama” [see:
http://www.dissidentmama.net/] by a
fellow North Carolinian, whose analysis while concentrating on what has been
going on in the Tar Heel State, also delves into educational theory and
practice, and the history and deeper questions that should provoke us all to
resolute action [see: http://www.dissidentmama.net/i-dont-love-public-schools/]
Her essay is excellent, and I urge you to read it, as well as the other items
she has authored.
Here
is the essay, “I Don’t Love Public Schools,” in full:
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I don’t love public schools
So, we’re all supposed to “love” North Carolina government
apparatchiks … er, I mean, public school teachers … who headed to Raleigh last
week, demanding more money for an utterly failing institution. Forget the fact that
K-12 funding is nearly 40% of the state budget, making it NC taxpayers’ largest
expenditure. Let’s not mention that teachers are already on the path to getting
another raise, making it their fifth consecutive pay increase (6.2% at an
average of $4,412), according to NC Sen. Phil Berger.
I have a degree in journalism from a prestigious university,
and if I ever made $50k+, I would’ve had to have become an overworked,
married-to-her-job newsroom editor (and by “work,” I mean all 12 months of the
year). My husband is a highly accomplished software developer and feels
extremely blessed to get a 3% cost-of-living raise annually, of which his
politically correct company did not bestow upon rank-and-file employees this
year.
Yep, these are the same activists who have the backing of
supposedly limited-government Republicans. I mean, public schools are an idol
of worship. It’s why teachers are constantly pulling on heart strings. Such
selfless public servants!
We’re giving “so much of ourselves for your children (yet) being
paid next to nothing,” wrote one hysterical teacher in a viral Facebook post. He then complains
in fanatic form about the trials he incurred due to a busted air conditioner
and a kid with a broken arm. Boo-freakin-hoo.
“We call this life,” he said. But “the difference is that I am
working a job that most see as a valuable resource of utmost importance, and I
cannot pay for anything.” The self-proclaimed #MeToo-styled victims known as
sniveling public-school teachers don’t know how good they have it … or do they?
The drama queens not only get good pay for 9 months of work, they
reap the benefits of being part of the NC retirement system plan in which
employers contribute 17.3% and employees contribute 6%. These “hurting”
teachers are also eligible for highfalutin’ medical,
vision, dental, workman’s comp, disability, and life insurance plans.
What’s love got to do with it?
Yet, they want more, and want to attain it through the same
tactics used by the globalists and their infantile “March For Our Lives” dupes.
Ditch school. Have families pick up the slack. Rant and bully. Wallow in the
nauseating lauding of their cause. Well, that doesn’t sound much like love to
me. Sounds more like bureaucratic privilege.
Interestingly, NC’s not even at the top of the “Nation’s Report
Card” – a ranking of each state’s public-school achievements, otherwise known
as “educational fraud,” according to economist Walter E. Williams. When parsing the data in the recently released 2017 National
Assessment of Educational Progress, he writes, “It’s not a pretty story. Only
37% of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25% did so
in math.”
“Among black students, only 17% tested proficient or better in
reading, and just 7% reached at least a proficient level in math.” And NC
finds itself ranked only 13th on this pathetic list. Where’s the “value” in that?
Admittedly, the metrics used in deciding such a paltry pecking
order is no doubt arbitrary, counter intuitive, and more about non-essentials
than it is having anything to do with the essence of true education, but still,
c’mon. It’s a scam, y’all.
Show me the money
How dumb can we plebs be to keep funding the madness which makes
young people intolerably stupid? We’re supposed to believe that the $8,687 that was spent per NC pupil wasn’t enough to produce
competent individuals? Man, if I had that money for each of my three children, I’d have 26,061 of my own dollars back
in my pocket to use for their real education.
Of course, I’d never be that imprudent with my family’s earnings,
nor could I ever spend that much money on books, curriculum, learning apps,
co-ops, field trips, school supplies, supplementary camps, enrichment courses,
online learning memberships, sports, music lessons, etc. Homeschoolers are
frugal because it makes practical sense.
We buy and sell at used-curriculum sales, and on
curriculum-sharing boards on social media and on eBay. We barter. We loan out
and borrow. We give away. Waste, inefficiency, and spending beyond our means
are not options when the heavy hand of government’s not your sugar daddy. We
have a financial incentive to be responsible with our money, maximize value,
and avoid debt; the state does not, which is why they always ask for more.
And even with increased salaries, benefits, and pensions for
school teachers, there’s no pay off. If there was, we’d see tangible results.
Still leftist governor Roy Cooper’s proposed budget aims to double-down on the coercive “taxation” (otherwise
known as theft) and abysmal stewardship of the NC taxpayers’ labor by $1.5
billion, including an average raise of “over 8% for teachers and instructional
support personnel, with no educator receiving less than a 5% salary” spike.
Must feed the insatiable beast!
Forget NAXALT, focus on the big picture
Well, what if the teacher isn’t worthy of a raise? In the private sector, the
under-performing employee would not only not get additional
pay, she may be demoted or fired. Hey, maybe the bad teachers should just throw
themselves into those second and third jobs we keep hearing so much about in
pro-public-school sob stories veiled as hard-hitting journalism.
I know, I know. There are indeed top-notch, passionate public
school teachers. But from what I hear, they’re overworked and hamstrung in
actually educating kids.
They have to waste precious time pulling up the slack created by
negligent, lazy, and ineffectual teachers, tenured educrats, and inept
administrators, teaching to the test, and dealing with PC advocacy foisted into
the classroom. No wonder so many quality teachers experience burnout and flee
for the private sector.
I’m not castigating the NAXALT (“not all X are like that”)
anecdotes: the good apples within the festering, rotten, corrupted cart. What
I’m saying is that they’re fighting a leviathan that was by design. It doesn’t
deliver on its educational promises not because of lacking funds or meanies
like me. It’s that what folks think of as the academic promises are, in fact, a myth.
Prussia, pedagogy, & progressivism
The highly centralized system is a manifestation of the Prussian model of
schooling, which was implemented in
Massachusetts in 1852 at the behest of influential “education” reformer Horace
Mann. This was the birth of modern compulsory education as we know it, in
which attendance was mandated and kindergarten was
introduced.
Also borne out of this progressive movement were teacher colleges
(known as “normal schools”), national standardized tests, national curriculum,
including heavily secularized instruction, salaries via taxation for the
professionalization of teaching as a public service, teacher certification, and
funding to build schools. Whatever it takes to have “Free education for all
children in public schools,” as the 10th plank of The Communist Manifesto states.
The above image is from The
Prussian Elementary Schools, written
in 1918 by Vermont-born “educator” Thomas Alexander. “The elementary schools of
Prussia have been fashioned so as to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of
the lower classes,” he continued.
So the school system “must impress upon the youth how
Prussian kings have continually taken pains to better the conditions of the
working class from the time of the legal reforms of Frederick the Great down
until today.” Just trick people into loving their own oppression, and maybe one
day they’ll even view it as a “human right.”
Tyrants, tutors, & talents
People had to be convinced that the “reform” was benevolent, a
paternalistic social good, an “external form of liberty,” as Alexis de
Tocqueville described in Democracy in America. It could be accomplished if only
citizens came to think of their “tyrants” as “tutors,” the French philosopher
said when warning of the great risks of embracing democracy. It reduces
citizens “to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals,
of which the government is the shepherd.”
Sadly, this sounds all too familiar (minus the industriousness
part). But this mindset was a radical departure from traditional American
education, which had produced virtuous fruits before the schooling of mass
dependency. “America was literate beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and not
merely book-literate,” explained John Taylor Gatto, former public-school
teacher in his book, Weapons of Mass Instruction.
“Americans were broadly proficient in the formidable ‘active
literacies’ of writing, argumentation, and public speaking; things which had
actually been a crime to teach ordinary people under British colonial rule.”
People were smart, self-reliant, and quite capable of handling the
responsibilities of liberty.
Foreigners like Tocqueville, who visited America in the
1830s, “were surprised and impressed with what the new [republic]
demonstrated in action about the talents of ordinary men and women – abilities customarily suppressed in Europe among the
common classes,” Gatto continued. This included virtual across-the-board literacy for women born around 1810, remarked
Rutgers professor Jack Lynch.
From the Founding and through the early 19th century, education in
America was mostly voluntary and private, and was working splendidly without
“free common schools.” It was “decentralized, entrepreneurial, and driven by the
demands of individual parents and local communities, not school districts or
states,” commented Neal McCluskey, education policy analyst for the Cato Institute.
A putrid petri dish
That is, until the end of the War Between the States.
This is when Mann’s New England model – which had already been adopted in
various forms throughout the North – was forced upon the South and then spread
like a disease across the across the country, leaving a path of socialist decay
in its wake.
“The transformation
of school from a place of modest ambitions centering around reading, writing,
arithmetic, and decency into a behavioral training laboratory ordered up by
‘certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the
industrial process’ (as Harvard president James Bryant Conant wrote), has acted
to poison
the American experiment,” explained Gatto.
the American experiment,” explained Gatto.
The Union’s aim was realized: finally moving away from an
“entrepreneurial economy to a mass production economy, which … wrenched the
country from its freedom-loving course and placed it along the path toward
industrial capitalism – with its need for visible underclasses and a large,
rootless proletariat to make it work.”
“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
— H.L. Mencken
Gone was the bottom-up methodology and classical content of
traditional community-based and family-controlled education. Goodbye one-room
schoolhouses. Hello putrid petri dish of social engineering pushed as Puritan
work ethic. And this racket would eventually catapult the government and its
“education” experts to a superior position over children than that of the
God-given rights of the parents.
A Yankee coup
This takeover was a well-financed idea backed by the wealthy
progressive modernizers and reformers, the Peabody family of New England. In fact, Alexander was a professor at the
George Peabody College for Teachers when he published his dissertation turned
book. And Mann just so happened to be married to Mary Tyler Peabody.
New York’s Rockefellers were supporters of the Prussian
schooling model over authentic education. And Scotsman-turned-Yankee Andrew
Carnegie also believed that public schools should divorce the masses from those
pesky notions of seeking knowledge, wisdom, and truth.
“Educational schooling, said Carnegie, gave working people
bad attitudes,” wrote Gatto. “It taught what was useless, it imbued the future
workforce with ‘false ideas’ that gave it ‘a distaste for practical life.'” You
know, useless ideas like freedom.
Elitist pedagogue William Torrey Harris served as U.S.
Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. The Connecticut politician used
Christianity to push for coercive schooling for American Indians in order to
boost industry. “We must establish compulsory education for the good of the
lower race.” Aw, aren’t progressives so sweet?
We’ve “institutionalized
non-learning.”
— Andrew Pudewa, home-educator & founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing
— Andrew Pudewa, home-educator & founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing
Similar to Karl Marx, Harris was a disciple of Prussian
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Harris “was intensely radical,
regarding children as the absolute property of the political state, and he was
a personal friend of Andrew Carnegie – the steel man who nourished a hope
that all work could be yoked to cradle-to-grave schooling,” Gatto said.
And let’s not forget another Vermonter, John Dewey, who “asserted
that an individual’s mind was essentially property of the larger
society,” explained Brett Veinotte, founder of the School Sucks Project. Dewey “came along roughly two
generations after the system’s implementation … (and) seemed to understand that
the schools were a profound power for indoctrination. He wanted to use this
power for an even ‘greater good’: the inculcation of collectivism.”
Be the 5%
It’s okay to fess up that you don’t love public schools
either. Even if you’re one of the folks who likes to say “I’m a product of the
public schools, but …” before bashing the government-schooling monopoly, you
must stop giving the state any credit for your God-glorifying attributes,
career success, healthy and responsible life choices, critical-thinking skills,
or talents.
You attained those in spite of public schools. My guess is
you, just like me, possess those character traits due to your familial
upbringing, faith, personal research, continued lifelong learning, and
real-world experience.
Admit it. You wanna be part of the 5% who refuse to be “subservient
to the ruling house.” The statists will say you’re “anti-education,”
“anti-child,” perpetuating “privilege,” and guilty
of an attack or an assault,and
that your displeasure with the status quo is akin to war and it’s brutal. They’ll claim you’re racist or even white-supremacist. So what?
If you’re part of the 95% who are so bound in the chains of
“servitude” that you think the rest of us are the unreasonable ones, well, we
5-percenters should call you out. We know the power elites believe that
“Education has too much potential a control tool to be left to individuals,
families, and markets,” said Veinotte, and that evil must be resisted.
Let’s take “education” back from the state and reduce the
threat of violent force against property owners, children, and society. Let’s
spur a movement which stands against a government system that’s doing exactly
what it intended: miseducating and indoctrinating citizens with the cancer of
progressivism. No more “reform.” Let’s topple the unlovable.
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Be sure to check out my forthcoming blog, unpacking both the
psychological and physical dangers of government schooling.
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