On discipline in education

Discipline in education means the freedom of the instructor to establish a sober-minded learning environment, free of disruptions by those who are unwilling to dedicate themselves to the serious undertaking of learning. That does not mean the absence of humor, or even fun; but it does mean that both the humor and the fun are part of the learning process and not a disruption from it.

This, of course, means that the instructor must be at liberty to exclude from the learning environment those who have no commitment to the instruction and learning taking place. Such exclusions may be temporary or permanent, as the individual and circumstances may suggest. Discipline is for "disciples"--literally, "learners"; i.e., those with a willing heart to learn.

It also means that the instructor must be free to issue other disciplinary commands, such as the performance of disciplinary tasks when lack of self-discipline brings needless disruption or loss to the learning processes.

One of the problems with mandatory education until the age of 16 or 17 is that statistically (I hate to break the news to you!) half of all students are below average. That means that many students are best suited to technical and trade learning, rather than being burdened with advanced grammar, English literature or studies in ancient history. They would be happier, and the learning environment would be more profitable for other students, if such individuals were given the option to learn a profitable trade rather than sit in classrooms being force-fed things in which they have no interest whatsoever.

One cannot have a disciplined learning environment while people are forced to sit in such classrooms without anything approaching a heartfelt desire to be discipled in the course being taught.

Why they call it a 'BS' degree

On the role of discipline in education

Discipline in education means the freedom of the instructor to establish a sober-minded learning environment, free of disruptions by those who are unwilling to dedicate themselves to the serious undertaking of learning.

That does not mean the absence of humor, or even fun; but it does mean that both the humor and the fun are part of the learning process and not a disruption from it.

Of course, that also means that the instructor must be at liberty to exclude (either temporarily or permanently, as the situation may dictate) from the learning environment those who have no commitment to the instruction and learning taking place. Discipline is for "disciples"—literally, "learners"; i.e., those with a willing heart to learn.

It also means that the instructor must be free to issue other disciplinary commands, such as the performance of disciplinary tasks when lack of self-discipline brings needless disruption or loss to the learning processes.

One of the problems with mandatory education until the age of 16 or 17 is that statistically (I hate to break the news to you!) half of all students are below average. That means that many students are best suited to technical and trade learning, rather than being burdened with advanced grammar, English literature or Ancient History. They would be happier, and the learning environment would be more profitable for the other students, if such individuals were given the option to learn a profitable trade rather than sit in classrooms being force-fed things in which they have no interest whatsoever.

One cannot have a disciplined learning environment while people are forced to sit in such classrooms without anything approaching a heartfelt desire to be discipled in the course being taught.

On compulsory education by the state

In 1932 there were 128,000 school districts in the United States. while today there are fewer than 15,000. This shrinkage and centralization of decision-making has gone on at the same time our student population has grown to twice its size. This is to say nothing of the hundreds of billions of dollars, taken from taxpayers and spent by local, state, and federal government on education. Sadly, the result of all of this centralization and excessive spending has been only to diminish the quality education and a grand decline in the results produced for the consumers—the students and their parents.

Moreover, public schools are increasingly imposing politicized, standardized, one-size-fits-all curricula that neither accommodate individual strengths nor correct for individual weaknesses.

Long before "Goals 2000" and its dubious federal education program predecessors, some people foresaw the way in which public schools were being and would continue to be used to impose a political agenda that in turn seeks to reinforce political support for government means and institutions.

Education continues to be one of the most politically charged issues in our national culture, and the conflicts over education in America are likely to grow more polarized and polarizing so long as the political control increases. Indeed, for centuries the political control of education has engendered social conflict, and even led to civil wars and revolutions.

It is time to completely rethink public education, to clearly understand and unashamedly admit what works and what does not work. Return local control to schools; let parents direct their children's education; return school tax monies to the taxpayers and let parents freely choose the schools they want their children to attend. Beyond that, eliminate the stranglehold of teachers unions and the education establishment—both proven failures—on every school in America.

Let's put students first—not the teachers’ unions.

Part of the legacy of George W. Bush and the Republican Congress

Under George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress there was an explosion in the growth of big government on virtually every front. Large increases in spending were accompanied by huge deficits and a doubling of the national debt. Corporatism exploded, too, in the form of bailouts and there was increasingly centralized power in education, expansion of Medicare and rapid growth in government regulation.

George W. Bush did not veto a single spending bill in his eight years in office.

Where is America headed?

It’s our own fault. It’s not like we weren’t warned.

Of course, most of the people who warned us are dead—having died long ago.

In his own way, Plato warned us. He said that there are really only two important questions that will determine the course of a republic:

1. Who teaches the children?
2. What do they teach them?

Well, the greater part of a century ago—about two-and-a-half generations past—most Americans decided that the easiest way to educate succeeding generations was to turn them over to state-run schools with teachers trained in state-run colleges. And now—just now—we’re waking up to the fact that most of the citizens—products of a state-run education system—believe with all their heart and mind that the answer to almost every problem we face is (none other than) “the state.”

Who taught children? The state taught them.

What did they teach them? They taught them that “the state” is the solution; that collectivism—not individualism—is a better way; and that we are the problem and bigger government holds all the answers.

So, where is America headed?

Due to our own lack of vigilance for liberty—while we were busy “making a living” and enjoying what we made—those in whose minds it was to create a “new society” and a “new world order” have been diligently working day-in and day-out to take our republic and our posterity from us. I’m not talking “conspiracy theory” here; and this is not intended to hyperbolic rhetoric. There was no need for a conspiracy. All it took was for we, the people, to first be frightened into surrendering liberty in favor of “security” (falsely so-called) from Big Government. This was rooted in actions taken during the Civil War (another topic altogether), but blossomed into full fruition during the years of “The Great Depression.” The war years (i.e., WWI and WWII) also contributed to the willingness of us Americans to surrender more and more liberty in order to obtain more and more a sense of safety from all that could harm us.

Next came the years of prosperity and plenty. The generation that survived the lean years of the Depression sought to assure that their own children would lack nothing—plenty of food, plenty of clothes, plenty of everything. And, the generation that followed that one had even more bread and circuses.

Meanwhile, a relatively small number of ideologues were being influenced by radical new concepts introduced almost simultaneously on three different fronts. In the world of science, Albert Einstein set forth the concept of relativity in his famous “Special Theory.” By the early 1920s, for the first time, it was becoming increasingly popular to hold the idea that there really were no absolutes. What began as relativity in time and space emerged in the minds of many as relativity in the realms of good and evil, moral and immoral.

The transmutation of relativity from the world of science into other realms of human thought was augmented by the teachings of Sigmund Freud. Freudianism seemed to grow and expand until it was held by many in an almost religious sense. Freud’s body of work brought legitimacy to extrapolating from the relativity of the hard sciences (a la Einstein) to the relativity of moral values.

The third power that emerged was the philosophy of Karl Marx and Marxism, teaching that what one sees in the world of work is not the reality. That beneath the veneer of visible economic relationships was an “inner” and “concealed” essential pattern. These three—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein—all brought the same message to willing listeners: What you see is not what you get. Everything is relative and what appear to be absolutes are not absolute at all.

These concepts tended to undermine the American traditions of personal responsibility and duty toward a reasonably settled moral code. Nevertheless, these very concepts were taught in colleges and universities. More importantly, they were taught in colleges and universities to those who were going to be the teachers and administrators who would run public school systems where children of succeeding generations would be taught.

So, where are we headed?

If we do nothing—or do something, but do it too weakly, with lack of intent, or failing in vigor—we are headed for the predictable collapse of all democracies (for we have already surrendered most of our republic).

We must be careful of our path, however.

Those on the left, with their penchant for collectivism, have long sought enforcement of uniformity from the national government and the federal courts. They want everyone everywhere to be subject to the moral relativism to which they blindly fly. This, of course, is never what the Founding Fathers intended.

Those on the right have too frequently make the same error. Of course, they were often provoked to staking their moral claims in Congress and in the federal courts in reaction to what was being promulgated by the Left. Nevertheless, such actions are wrong, for the Founding Fathers planned for a national government that permitted and supported diversity within the unity of the nation.

In the mind of the Founding Fathers, the national government was to remain neutral in matters of a personal and moral nature. Even criminal law was to be determined by states and localities, and enforcement against criminal or immoral behaviors was to be left to states, counties and cities. The federal government was to have no interest in such matters.

Such a brilliant concept allowed for one state, county or locality to hold one set of standards for moral conduct (say, on prostitution or homosexual “marriage”) while another state, county or city might have an entirely different set of standards and laws. The nation could remain whole and unified while those who preferred one lifestyle over another could choose in which states or localities they would live based on the criminal and moral code in effect in each place.

Because the steps that brought us to where we are today are our failings—all of us citizens and voters—the path back must be to retrace our steps. We—all of us who are of such a mind—must contribute to the cause of re-educating our children, our friends, our relatives and our co-workers. We must undo the mis-education step-by-step, one person at a time. There is no magic wand to wave. There is only the hard work of finding the proper “compass” and retracing our steps back to a healthy republic and a healthy economy.

That is, if we can do it. If we can beat back the leviathan we have created.

That remains to be seen.

On private initiatives in education

By John Taylor Gatto

The government began to compel us all to send our children to school in 1952 in the state of Massachusetts, and from that state the compulsion spread south, west, and north. But did you know that in 1818, 34 years before compulsion laws began, Noah Webster estimated that over 5 MILLION copies of his Spelling Book had been sold? That's pretty good in a population of under 20 million, don't you think? And every purchase decision was made freely, by an individual or a family, and there were no federal, state or city tabs to run bulk purchases on -- each decision was made privately, and in each somebody forked over some cash to buy a book.

That would seem to suggest that most folks don't have to be compelled to learn, they do it on their own, because they want to.

Here's another 5 million copy fact. Did you know that between 1813 and 1823, a fellow named Water Scott sold 5 million copies of his novels in the United States? That would be about equal to a writer selling 60 million books today, but we all know that could never happen. The puzzle becomes even denser when you pick up a Walter Scott novel and try to read it. Let me quote from the opening of Quentin Durward, published in 1823, and read by a lot of kids back then?

"The latter part of the fifteenth century prepared a train of future events that ended by raising France to that state of formidable power which has ever since been the principal object of jealousy to the other European nations. Before that period she had to struggle for her very existence with the English, already possessed of her fairest provinces, while the utmost exertions of the King, and the gallantry of her people, could scarcely protect the remainder from a foreign yoke. Nor was this her sole danger..."

That's pretty heady stuff, isn't it? I've never read an adequate explanation in John Dewey how an unschooled agricultural mob could manage such material, but I assure you the sales figures are accurate and drawn from the research of a well-respected American historian, Merle Curti. And remember, there was no compulsion then so the readers had to pretty much want to tackle stuff like that in between plowing and strangling the chicken.

It seems almost unfair to tell you that there was another writer beloved of common Americans before we had government compulsion schools, but there was; he was a man from upstate New York who sold millions and millions of books, and who currently has a box-office bonanza movie on the boards called "The Last of the Mohicans." His name was James Fenimore Cooper and he wrote material like this for ignorant, unschooled Americans:

The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745, when the settled portions of the colony of New York were confined to the four Atlantic counties, a narrow belt of country on each side of the Hudson, extending from the mouth of the falls near its head, and to a few advanced "neighborhoods" on the Mohawk and the Schoharie...A birds eye view of the whole region east of the Mississippi must then have offered one vast expanse of woods, relieved by a comparatively narrow fringe of cultivation along the seas... In such a vast region of solemn solitude..."

Well, I'm sure you get the picture. Such attention to detail would take an ambitious college professor to attend to these days, a mere lecturer wouldn't have the span of attention for it. A transplanted Englishman, John Bristed, wrote in 1818 that the mass of Americans excelled every other people in the world in shrewdness of intellect, general intelligence, versatility and readiness to experiment with untried things. William Cobbett on his return to America in 1817 observed that every farmer was a reader, unlike the European peasant. How on earth did that come to pass and why isn't it true in our well-schooled era?

You and I are confronted with a great mystery: we had a perfectly literate country before 1852 when, for the first time, we got government schooling shoved down our throats. How we achieved this amazing literacy is wrapped up in the secret that reading, writing and numbers are very easy to learn -- in spite of what you hear from the reading, writing and number establishments. We aren't in the mess we're in today because we don't know how to do things right, but because "we" don't want to do them right. The incredibly profitable school enterprise has deliberately selected a procedure of literacy acquisition which is pedagogically bankrupt; thousands of years ago Socrates predicted this would happen if men were paid for teaching. He said they would make what is easy to learn seem difficult, and what is mastered rapidly they would stretch out over a long time.

The first thing that an effective system of school choice would demonstrate is that our children have been held captive by a method of literacy transmission that ignores reality -- and makes a very large fortune each year doing so. Eventually, with choice, the present system would run head-on into efficient competition that would destroy it. That would be inevitable because profitability would vanish once literacy is managed correctly.

Let me guide you to a few private businesses where literacy is managed correctly right now -- at a fraction of the public school cost. Before I do I want to caution you that the two places I'll cite use radically different methods from each other, are based on radically different theories -- but the outcome in both places is very impressive. We'll start at 8801 Stenton Avenue in Philadelphia in a place called "The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential" which has been teaching babies to read, and teaching mothers t teach their own babies to read, since shortly after the Second World War. Babies. By the time these kids are 4 what they can do would cause you to think murderous thoughts about your local government school. And what is diabolical is that the kids have a great deal of fun learning. Study sessions only last a few minutes, and the kids learn all the mathematical operations, too, fluency in several languages -- and the violin!

Well, don't believe me -- you have the address -- write them a letter and go see for yourself. IAHP isn't going anywhere, it's been there for decades. You might want to ask your local school superintendent why you haven't heard of this place -- presuming you're as impressed as I was.

Place number two is 20 miles West of Boston, a few miles from Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous Wayside Inn on the outskirts of Framingham. It's the beautiful Sudbury Valley School, in the old Nathaniel Bowditch cottage, which looks suspiciously like a mansion to 20th century eyes. A place ringed about with handsome outbuildings, private lake, woods, and acres and acres of magnificent grounds. This place is a private school, of course, with a tuition of $3,500 a year -- about 63% cheaper than a New York city public school seat costs.

Sudbury teaches a lot of things, but two things it does not teach anybody is reading and numbers -- and its kids range in age from 4 to 18!

Kids learn reading and calculation at Sudbury at many different ages (but never as babies), but when they are ready to learn they teach themselves. Every kid who has stayed for long at the school over the past 25 years has learned to read and compute, about 2/3rds of them go on to college without ever taking a standardized test or getting a report card, and the school has never seen a case of dyslexia. They don't even believe such a condition exists outside of a few physically damaged kids and the fevered imaginations of compulsion school reading specialists.

They don't teach reading and yet all the kids eventually learn to read and even to like it? A frustrating puzzle for many observers, but no more frustrating than trying to explain how Thomas Paine's Common Sense sole 600,000 copies in the year 1776 to a nation of two and a half million people, about 70% of whom were African slaves or indentured servants. It just boggles the mind to see today's graduate students in political science seminars wrestling with Paine (no pun intended) when young farmers whizzed through it with exhilaration over 200 years ago.

One final, more or less modern, example of how easy it is to learn to read well -- is myself. In 1941 when I went to first grade in Swissvale, Pennsylvania, a borough of Pittsburgh, at the age of 5, I could read fluently. For the first 200 years of our history most schools wouldn't accept children who couldn't read and count, so they must have learned it where I learned it, and where the Human Potential Institute children learn it -- at home. My first grade teacher, Miss Dane, came to our home on Calumet Street shortly after the term began to protest, "Mrs. Gatto," she said, "your son reads, I would guess, on the 6th Grade level. He is ruining my class and I want you to make him shut up, keep his hand down, and not answer any questions in class." How's that for pedagogy? I loved Miss Dane who was a wonderful woman so I'm not telling this story to insult her, just to give you something to think about.

I suppose the skeptical among you are wondering who this miracle woman was who taught me to read so well before I went to school at the age of 5? Well, her name was Frances "Bootie" Zimmer, and she graduated from Monongahela High School in 1929, the same high school that Joe Montana, the great San Francisco quarterback came out of about a half century later. There wasn't enough money to send Bootie to college but nobody despaired about that in those days because the country seemed to run very well without college graduates.

Did Bootie know some secret method of teaching that could have made her a fortune if she turned professional? I don't think so. What she knew was how to read to me every single day from the time I was 2 years old -- reach to me with me on her lap and her finger running under the words -- read tome from increasingly difficult stuff, none of which seemed hard because I was having so much fun. She read real fairy tales, not scientifically simplified ones; she read real history books and real newspaper stories and real grown-up storybooks including some tales from The Decameron. What she didn't read were scientific readers of any sort, the books with 364-word sanitized vocabularies and a lot of pictures.

Well, there we have the raw material for a revolution: the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the Sudbury valley School, Frances "Bootie" Zimmer...these are important clues to how deep the mess we are in really is, clues to what its nature is. Here is evidence that we already possess the engineering know-how we need to revolutionize schooling. And if you look closely, here too is a warning that the trouble we are in is not what it appears to be (an avalanche of dumb kids), but instead an avalanche of kids who have been deliberately dumbed down by an industry that will not stop what it has been doing just because it is killing us. When we consider the course 20th century government schooling has taken deliberately it is clear we are in the presence of no simple mistake in engineering but that of a powerful ideological agenda, one so passionately and grimly held by its proponents we might almost see it as a religion.

To understand how this happened, a brief tour through history is essential, otherwise you may continue to think that some tinkering or, God forbid, some more money will cure the disease of bad schooling. Come back with me then to 1812, when one of the founders of the immense DuPont fortune, a man named Pierre DuPont deNemours, published a book called Education in the United States. DuPont was many things but no one knew him as a soft-hearted fellow used to flattering people, so we can assign some credibility to his amazement at the phenomenal literacy he saw all around him compared to the European models he was familiar with. 1812. Forty years in advance of the passage of our first government compulsion school laws. Mr DuPont said that less than 4 people out of every thousand in the new nation could not read and do numbers well. He saw a world in which nearly every child was trained in argumentation (the old fashioned term for "critical thinking'). How would that be possible, do you suppose, without forced schooling?

And yet two decades later French aristocrat named deTocqueville wrote a book that's still in print, Democracy in America, in which he characterized us as the best educated people in history. And in 1838, still 14 years before the militia began marching recalcitrant children to school, another French aristocrat, Michael Chevalier, wrote a book that ranked the American farmer with the immortals of history, a book which said in effect that the farmer went into the field with his plow in one hand and Descartes in the other.

So from 1776, when Common Sense was selling up a storm to unschooled colonists, until 1838, when farmers were observed reading Descartes, the American people seemed to be doing fairly well for themselves educationally, making their own education decisions, using, inventing, or substituting for schooling -- as Ben Franklin did -- as best they saw fit. Individuals made their own decisions, not government experts. this was America, after all, not Prussian Germany.

How on earth did they do it? Almost immediately after the effective start-up of government factory schooling before the first world war it was obvious to anyone who cared to look closely that literacy was not what they were about, but that a redefinition of growing up was what was afoot. Growing up was not to be a socialization of the future labor force to suit some bureaucratic design determined by political experts. As the earlier lightly schooled America had proven, competency was not a scarce thing however you measured it - but the world of the government monopoly school set out to make it so. But the earlier, catch-as-catch-can entrepreneurial form of instruction offered abundant choices of useful ways to grow up, useful ways to read, write and think. Earlier schooling was about literacy, and that is why it succeeded. Literacy isn't very difficult to learn when the child perceives that the adults about him think that it's something important.

I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little, as schooling people contend. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up -- and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from their homes and families and neighborhoods and private explorations -- gets in the way of education!

That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. Surely. And yet last year in St. Louis I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to discuss the process of redesigning teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.

MIT said a few years back that formal equipment seemed to play almost no role at all in scientific discovery and that inventors presented with state of the art equipment usually went sterile from then on! So MIT and IBM, which are both tied to being judged on outcomes, think one way, and compulsion schools which are tied to rhetoric about inputs, think another. If you're input-paralyzed you tend to stare at your abstract system when trouble arises, but if you care about results you tend to look at what makes Joe do best and you don't make the mistake of thinking that Joe is Sally.

Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces: Sixteen million people in a nation that makes its voice heard all over the planet to such an extent that if you didn't know it was so small you'd swear it must be a world power. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do about it.

Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and second grades here, is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers t home too early. Does that sound radical, or is what we do the radical thing? It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can't be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12 years either -- it's 9. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the U.S. would be 75-100 BILLION dollars, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education.

Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan, and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbor with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you? Isn't that the question we should be asking?

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. IF that sounds like a shocking contention, it derives from a conservative reality that school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise, or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned -- as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out.

The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders. I don't know how much you know about Prussia, but it's instructive to consider that Prussia began to police the female womb in the year 1735, long before the French and Indian wars. In Prussia unmarried women whose menses ceased had to register with the police.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

1. Obedient soldiers to the Army.
   
2. Obedient workers to the mines.
   
3. Well subordinated civil servants to government.
   
4. Well subordinated clerks to industry.
   
5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
   

School should create an artificial national consensus on matters which had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the heads of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty six years after this form of schooling began the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, at the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose -- which was to create a form of state socialism -- gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

The Prussian purpose was collective, the American purpose, as it had come down from history, was singular. In Prussia the purpose of the Volksschule, which educated 92% of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8% of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles. For Prussia the ideal model society was not intellectual Greece or muscular Rome but solid, settled Egypt -- a pyramid of subordination where only the top leadership understood the big picture. Below this class were descending service classes, each larger than the one directly above it, each knowing less than the one above it until at the bottom almost nothing was known except how to do a small part of a larger task only dimly understood.

Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions. There were many more techniques of training, of course, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy markers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Let me cite two German thinkers on that subject. Erich Maria Remarque, in his classic, All Quiet on the Western Front tell us that the first world was was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the second world war was the inevitable product of good schooling. It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically -- schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyzes the moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped.

We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system, and relentlessly proseletyzed for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shoes. If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence.

In this fashion compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's Republic, a bad idea that New England had tried to enforcfe in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed home through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner", whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing" -- hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party".

Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this -- the children who could afford to be privately educated. They could avoid the American version of Volksschule if their families were prosperous or canny enough to catch on to the new game. By 1990 88% of all our children were being "public" schooled.

Three major ideas were transferred almost intact from Prussia and slowly worked into the final structure of our national schooling. Each of these ideas had, of course, to overcome major resistance. This seldom was done by direct confrontation but instead by a gradual process of wearing away the opposition. It was not until the conclusion of the first world war that the last avenue of escape from the trap was closed.

The first of this triumvirate of Prussian principles was the very sophisticated notion that State schooling did not exist to offer intellectual training, but to condition children to obedience, subordination and collective life. These social theorists included some of the greatest minds in history, including the most influential philosopher since Lord Bacon, Frederich Hegel. Each in his own way taught that general intellectual development will make central political control impossible, hence it is to be avoided. The will in children must be broken in order to make them plastic material. If the will could be broken all else would follow. Keep in mind that will-breaking was the central logic of child-rearing among our own Puritan colonists and you will see the natural affinity that existed between Prussian seeds and Puritan soil. Will-breaking had been carefully studied from time to time in European history, so to a leadership inclined that way, various devices proven in action were available -- best known of these was the English practice of "boarding-out" where children were sent to live with and work for strangers at an early age -- the constant stress of adapting to strange customs and practices usually produced a compliant, surface personality, easily manageable.

In the Prussian system, imposed over 50 years by the new State Education Departments, a Prussian management concept heretofore unknown in the U.S. was adopted. Children were not to be taught to think, but to memorize. They were to be discouraged from assuming responsibility for each other, because that weakened the grasp of authority, and they were to be intimidated away from the pursuit of their own natural interests for the same reason. Henceforth, teachers would define what their interests were. From this new logic of school management arose the need to eliminate the familiar one-room schoolhouse, the main vehicle of schooling during the first 40 years or so of the new government monopoly. The on-room school invested too much responsibility in the children themselves -- from such practices too much of the old, self-reliant, neighborly ways would be preserved.

The second important discovery of the Prussian method was that extreme fragmentation of thinking into subjects, fixed time periods, sequences, units, externally imposed questioning, etcetera would simplify the problems of leadership. Thoughts broken into fragments could be managed by a poorly trained, poorly paid teaching force; could be memorized even by a moron who made the effort; and lent themselves to the appearance of precision in testing and delivered beautiful distribution curves of "achievement". This form is curriculum (suggested by machine operation) was beginning to permeate Prussian factory operations, mining, and military life. It brilliantly solved the historical dilemma of leadership dependency on skilled craftsmen, too. A simplified workforce could be replaced quickly without damage to production. Such a workplace creates great psychological and social problems for the workers, true, but worker welfare was not a factor in this scheme.

That we have created such a workforce in the United States through our schools was never better illustrated than in the strike of the air traffic controllers some year back. These supposedly "highly skilled" men and women were replaced overnight without any increase in accidents through the system. The social costs of such a system, in alcoholism, suicide, broken homes, violence, despair, etcetera are not, as I inferred earlier, factored into the balance sheet.

The third premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children -- the State is sovereign over the family. In Western law that idea is known as the Parens Patriae power, I think, and at the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. You can see this philosophy at work in court decisions which rule that parents need not be told when schools dispense condoms to their children, or consulted when daughters seek abortion.

What is the evidence that a Prussian system of dumbing children down took hold in American schools? Actually the evidence is overwhelming. Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts f Germany during the 19th century and brought home the PhD degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins.

Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous '7th Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these, but Calvin Stowe's report, and Dallas Bache's report, Henry Dwight's report, and Henry Barnard's report, the reports of Dr. Julius and Drs. Smith, Griscom and Woodbridge all sent the same signal: Follow Germany.

By 1889, a little over one hundred years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. Harris is dead now, so we can't ask him what he meant by "over-education", but we can make a shrewd guess because Mr. Harris was among the leading German scholars in the nation. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the Commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role.

In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations -- the groups they belonged to -- not by their own individual accomplishments. In such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know hot to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts.

Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers are produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radical disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams.

Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was an important intermediary in the birth of modern American systematic schooling, one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations COMBINED!

G. Stanley Hall is a name to conjure with in many ways; he was the first American PhD out of Wilhelm Wundt's psychometric laboratories in Germany and subsequently a major eminence grise in the rise of American behaviorism, as the American promoter who brought Sigmund Freud to the United States to promote his theory that behavioral problems in later life can be traced to bad parenting and alleviated by expert interventions. Hall is also an important reason we have standardized testing in our schools.

But back to Dewey. Learning to read too well, said Dewey, caused children to turn inward and made them competitive and independent. The phonics method of teaching reading provided no motives to follow a teacher's lead for very long; it was selfish, even if it did work. It only appealed to the intellectual aspect of our nature -- the desire to get control of our own mind.

Reading, writing and arithmetic were not the purpose of this new form of American schooling, a form which substituted memorization for thinking and which we still have with us. In 1923 Dr. Cattell, of "The Psychological Corporation", a private entity composed of the inner circle of american schoolmen like John Dewey, announced the purpose of schooling to its clientele who were expected to support its enterprises in testing and teacher training. Dr. Cattell said this about the purpose of government schooling in 1923: "The scientific control of conduct is what schools are about. The scientific control of conduct is of greater economic importance than the use of electricity or steel."

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point.

Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, making people dumb for their own good became the point of our national forced schooling exercise. If you find that hard to believe, use the evidence of your own eyes and ears to confirm it. Do you think you can find a better way to teach? You're right, of course you can --but not a better way to teach obedience. Throughout the 19th century to a crescendo achieved at the turn of the 20th century, a small band of very influential people, substantially financed by money and ideas from the Rockefeller foundations and the Carnegie foundations, introduced a system of state socialism into our national education picture. Privately they had determined that this was the best course for the American democracy and with little wasted motion, and no public discussion, they pointed our nation toward that end.

Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. You keep the games and songs and pretty colors in balance with the soberer purpose. That's if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.

When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be, and was quietly celebrated as, a way to break the influence of mothers on their children once and for all. I note with interest the growth of day care in the U.S. and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds. The movement toward state socialism I've been speaking to you about today is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children's lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that its control requires. Herr Froebel disliked his own family intensely, a fact that may be useful to you when you come to regard the encroachment of school institutions on infancy.

A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake-down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.

While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people, and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts, next to the Defense Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies from positions apparently outside the loop until an analysis map of special interest is drawn. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to out-last any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.

An overview of the short history of this institution reveals as pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case. The net result of public alarm has been to diminish worthwhile alternatives, surely the richest of all the ironies, a cosmic reversal testifying to the secret systems of nourishment available to schooling, exactly as it is.

After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good and some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. The structure is too brilliantly designed to allow that. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change, or degrades it, and no watchdog mechanism exists to effectively combat how that happens -- nor is it possible, in my opinion.

Teaching the way children learn involves a dynamic too complicated to bureaucratize. Failure to see that simple truth, or our simple inability to act upon it in a monopoly situation when it is seen, dooms all in-system reform to trivialization. There are no incentives for the "owners" of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition. Indeed, I'm afraid that competition too tightly monitored from a central point, as it would be in a national test situation (which involves wildly incorrect assumptions about learning that are too complicated to go into in this essay), will not touch the existing monolith.

What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that nobody of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favorable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast in a material sense. We all eat whether we do this school thing right or not.

But the future is not so clear. Perhaps materially a case can be made that our position of advantage is too great at this point to squander, but when we enter the arena of emotional capital, of simple satisfaction with life and joy in living, our relative position has been slipping for many years. That holds true whether we compare ourselves to certain other nations or to standards we set for our own lives based on values, traditions and myths.

Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the day-times of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.

And the courtroom of the people is the free market. Over 50 years ago my mother, Bootie Zimmer, chose to teach me how to read. She had no degrees, no government salary, no encouragement, yet her non-expert choice has given me a wonderful and interesting life. I have never been a public charge.

Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation.

CONFERENCE ON PRIVATE INITIATIVES IN EDUCATION

Indianapolis, Indiana November 13/14, 1992

Sponsored by: Educational Choice Charitable Trust, The Philanthropy Roundtable, Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the State Policy Network.

Attended by educators, legislators, corporate executives and other interested parties from 25 states and the U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.

KEYNOTE SPEECH: John Taylor Gatto

Author, Educator, Teacher of the Year (New York, 1989), Lecturer.

Quality has declined as federal intervention has increased

"Schools - in America we created at the local level and administered at the local level for many years the greatest public school system in the world. Now through something called federal aid to education, we have something called federal interference, and education has been the loser. Quality has declined as federal intervention has increased." -- Ronald Reagan (1976)

Concerning a Second American Revolution

May God forbid either another American Revolution or another American Civil War. The Civil War was fought over secession, and I have already expressed my views (at LinkedIn.com) on that, so I will not opine further here on that matter.

As to a second American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson warned us that it may be necessary to have a revolution every 200 years or so, just to set government again on a sound footing. Here, however, is the danger: This is NOT 1776 and we will never again, in this nation, have group of people like the colonists (many of whom had experience tyranny and oppression first-hand) nor such staid leadership as was present in our Founding Fathers. I cannot imagine what an ill wind might arise were we to take men of power and influence today and ask them to construct for us an entirely new Constitution.

You must remember, if one were to start an armed rebellion, we would not be supporting our nation and our Constitution, for even though many in the battle might hold to the ideals expressed in our present Constitution, it would be necessary to violently overthrow the existing government and establish an new one. That is the nature of violent revolution.

We have a method for changing our government in a non-violent way. You and I have forsaken that way through our own idleness and indolence, through self-serving and an unwillingness to fight the fight for liberty EVERY DAY instead of just when things "get too bad."

Plato warned us millennia ago that for preservation of a republic there are ONLY TWO IMPORTANT QUESTIONS:

1. WHO gets to teach the children, and

2. WHAT do they teach them.

More than an hundred years ago, the American citizenry decided that state-run schools were an acceptable solution for the education of our children. Despite warnings to the contrary, the vast majority of citizens took the path of least resistance and surrendered their children to COMPULSORY MIS-EDUCATION promulgated first by the states, and then, ultimately (under Jimmy Carter), by the federal Department of Education.

When our children are educated by the state, what in your wildest imagination makes you believe that these children will not ultimately be conformed to believe that the government is the solution to EVERY PROBLEM?

This has gone on for so long now that even our colleges of education are wholly contaminated by this philosophy. Almost every new teacher and administrator comes into the state-run school system fully saturated with nothing but foolishness about government, economics, politics, the environment and more.

This present generation in the U.S. has never KNOWN tyranny, never FOUGHT AGAINST tyranny, never really STOOD UP for anything much more than their own SELF-SATISFACTION. (Sometimes that self-satisfaction involves making themselves feel better by "standing up for the poor" or "hugging a tree," but, in the end, it is self-satisfaction.) That's why it is much simpler to establish a solid constitution, a new government, free markets and a sound monetary policy in places like the Czech Republic today than it is to do the same thing here in the U.S. The people in the Czech Republic -- most of them -- experienced 40 years of oppression and tyranny and they know what they DON'T WANT again! Many in the U.S. electorate that voted for Obama, on the other hand, considered their vote of no more significance than casting a vote for their favorite on "American Idol."

I believe there is a way back. I have written an article that describes that way. It is available here.

Thanks.

What Are We Going to Do About It?

Plato reminds us, in THE REPUBLIC, that there are only two important questions:

1. Who gets to teach the children?

2. What will the children be taught?

More than 100 years ago, Americans thought it was a good idea to turn our children's education over to state-run schools. Did they not suppose that these state-run schools would offer a statist education -- an education that, in the end, would find the government to be the solution to every problem? This problem isn't just in our elementary and secondary schools anymore. The problem is not even just in our state-run schools at all levels. The problem has been allowed to go on for so long that now the schools of education -- even in most private colleges and universities -- are being run and the instructors are teaching from a statist frame of mind.

We now have an electorate that has very nearly 100% been affected (read: infected) by this statist mentality. Many in the current electorate -- especially amongst the newly recruited voters -- think that electing a president is no different that voting for their favorite on "American Idol."

If we are going to reclaim the United States, we have a HUGE PUBLIC RELATIONS and EDUCATION TASK ahead of us. We, of all nations, deserve the government we get -- WE elected them! And that goes for those we put in our governments at every level -- city, county, state, and in Congress as well as the White House, including SCHOOL BOARDS and BOARDS OF EDUCATION.

So, what are WE going to do about it? Whine? Complain? Or take action?

It's Not Just the Main Stream Media

Unfortunately, it's not just the main stream media that are to blame for our current situation. Government-run schools do NOT, by and large, instruct the next generation to have a keen understanding of the proper role of LIMITED GOVERNMENT, the value and workings of FREE MARKETS, or the need for a sound MONETARY SYSTEM.

Instead, the average 20-something or 30-something today actually BELIEVES that government IS the real and proper solution to the problems they face, that free markets do NOT work, and they know absolutely nothing (other than the denominations of bills and coins in their wallets) about monetary policy and its impact on their day-to-day lives.

If We Lose This Battle, We May Lose the War

Wise men have always understood than men of equal intelligence, equal brilliance, and equal learning may hold differing viewpoints on the same issue. To hold these differing opinions under the same circumstances requires that the men with differing opinions must, in the end, be seeking differing goals out of the circumstances in which they find themselves.

This is the situation in which we find ourselves today, we have a radical left-wing President-elect supported by a Democrat Congress that is, in turn, supported by the radical left-wing of the Democrat party. I repeat, Congress is not supported by mainstream (or even "Main Street") America, but rather driven by their own leftist avant garde agenda.

I implore you to consider carefully how closely the present leftist agenda in the newly elected federal executive and freshly reinforced Democrat Congress reflects that agenda set forth by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes: Understand here that the intent is the "nationalization" of private property for "public purposes." We are seeing the first steps being taken in this direction with the acquisition by the federal government of "stakes" in U.S. banks.
   
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax: Increasing taxes on the so-called "rich" has been the hew and cry of the Democrats for years. However, in the recent election cycle Obama made it his war cry.
   
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance: The Obama administration has already laid out its plan to increase the "death tax" to 55%. That would put the U.S. half way to the goal of the "abolition of all right of inheritance," would it not?
   
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels: Here's one the Democrats have not seized upon, as yet. The question is, how long will it be before those who stand for the U.S. Constitution and its original intent are labeled as "rebels"? Will the government then seize their property in "self-defense"?
   
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly: Is not this the direction in which we are headed with the $700 billion placed in the hands of Henry Paulsen to "rescue" the U.S. citizenry from the present "crisis"? NOTE: This "crisis" itself is entirely the making of the long-term philosophies and encouragement of the liberals and Democrats.
   
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State: With a history of undermining privately owned and individually operated transportation (the personal automobile) through policies that have made them increasingly expensive to own and operate; and, over the same period, being powerful advocates for "public transportation," I believe we can see that the leftist Democrat agenda is certainly showing tendencies in this direction.
   
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan: This is indicative of a plan for the federal government to take more and more of the private economy under its control. In just the last several months we have seen moves in two specific areas: banking and automobile manufacturing. However, we have a "promise" from the President-elect and the record of prior attempts by Democrats in Congress to take control of the healthcare sector of the U.S. economy.
   
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture: Was it not Barak Obama's words that he would establish a "citizen army"? The similarity of language is stark and frightening.
   
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country: Here is the one missing point from the presently exposed leftist agenda of the Democrats.
   
10. Free education for all children in public schools: Of course, "public school" education is only for the masses. It's not good enough for the Obama's, nor is it good enough for most of the Congressmen and Senators that are such "supporters" of "public education" for us, "the teaming masses." Of course, the purpose of the "free education" has proven to be more for indoctrination than for education, for surely we are witness to the fact the average product of "public education" is far better indoctrinated than educated by almost any measure.
    

Fellow citizens, if you love this great nation as I do, I beg of you that you stand up with me and fight against any acts of this Congress or the forthcoming federal Administration that would tend along these lines. Arm yourselves with the knowledge of the telephone numbers, fax numbers, and addresses of your Congressmen and Senators, House and Senatorial committee members of pertinent committees, and support with your finances organizations that are taking historic stands against the onslaught of leftist legislation and actions.

We must fight for those who do not yet see! We must fight for the generation that has been indoctrinated by public education -- for those who foolishly thought that a vote for Barak Obama was like casting a vote for an "American Idol" contestant.

We must fight NOW! For I fear that if we lose this battle now, we may lose the war. So much damage may be done and so many things my be cast into law that will be virtually impossible to reverse in the future if we do not now take a firm stand.

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Obama's Limousine-Liberal Hypocrisy

Worth repeating:

"Barack and Michelle Obama are poised to commit a classic act of limousine-liberal hypocrisy -- in this case, turning their backs on tens of thousands of inner-city kids in Washington, D.C. Public schools, it seems, are good enough for poor and middle-class families, but not for rich families like the Obamas.

"In July, when he addressed the NAACP's annual convention, Sen. Barack Obama expressed his devotion to American public schools, vowing he would not 'walk away from them' by supporting school-choice programs like Sen. John McCain did. ... There were 59,616 students enrolled in the D.C. public schools in 2006, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If McCain's plan to increase by 2,000 the number of vouchers available in the District were enacted, taxpayers would still be spending $15,798 per student per year to send more than 55,000 kids through a school system where about nine out of 10 students do not learn to read or do math at grade-level proficiency by the time they 'graduate' from elementary school.

"What is Obama's plan to deal with this? Spend $18 billion more in federal tax dollars on public education (as he promised in his campaign) -- and send his own kids to extremely expensive private schools. Currently, Obama's two daughters (ages 7 and 10) attend the University of Chicago Lab School, where tuition is $18,492 for grades 1-4 and $20,286 for grades 5-8. When Michelle Obama visited Washington this week, she toured only two prospective schools for her daughters: Sidwell Friends, where lower-school tuition is $28,442; and Georgetown Day, where tuition is $27,445 for grades 1-5."

Credit to columnist Terence Jeffrey as reported in "The Patriot Post" 17 Nov 2008, Vol. 08, No. 47.

An Open Letter

04 November 2008


President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500
FAX 202.456.2461

Senator Norm Coleman
320 Senate Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
FAX 202.224.1152

Representative Jim Ramstad
103 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
FAX 202.225.6351


Esteemed and Honorable Gentlemen:

I am well aware that your offices likely receive thousands of comments and letters. Some, I am certain, from genuine “kooks”. I am also aware that the “proper” thing to do is to write just a few sentences for, we are told, that anything more than that will not get read.

Perhaps that last part is a contributor to the problems that plague our current political system and had led the United States to its current unfortunate state. I dearly love this great nation as, I am certain, do you. This letter is not intended to be specific finger-pointing but, rather, what I hope to be a pouring out of my heart with some thoughts that might be of some value in returning the United States to its former glory and greatness. (Here I trust God that something has not been irretrievably lost.)

I say it will be a pouring out of my heart, but I believe also that it will be considered, perhaps, harsh. But is “harsh” not sometimes the thing that causes us all to awaken – to consider where we have been or where we are going?

The Republicans – over the last 100 years or so – have, seemingly, not understood, or at least not taken action on, the underlying nature and intent of the leftists that are among us. Perhaps this is, in part, due to our unwillingness to recognize these leftists for what they are.

I would first contend that if we are unwilling to name a matter by its real name, we are greatly disadvantaged in dealing with the matter at hand.

Here I take the liberty of enumerating a few specific areas where, I believe, we are specifically at risk due to Republican inaction over the last century:

1. Republican officeholders have been unwilling or unable to recognize that leftists are willing to take everything the right will give without making any bona fide concessions on their part. This is precisely the same tactic taken by every leftist government or political group that has existed since the rise of socialism as codified by Marx and Engels. The political negotiations of the left are almost never with any general intent other than to take advantage of the gullibility of their opponents and their opponents foolish willingness to yield in the name of “reaching across the aisle.”
   
   
2. Republican officeholders have been unwilling or unable to recognize that leftists, if given the opportunity, will endeavor to control the education of children from the cradle to adulthood in order to indoctrinate them to socialist concepts. The Republicans have collaborated with the leftist – perhaps unwittingly, but collaborated nonetheless – in a program of federally funded education that has permitted the leftists to dominate education from preschool through graduate school.
   
   
3. Republican officeholders have been unwilling or unable to recognize that the leftists will always endeavor to divide in order to conquer. Leftist rhetoric will always pit Blacks against whites, rich against poor, women against men, and more in order to intimidate those on the right from taking any public stand against the leftist agenda. This dialectic is a false one, but unless the Republicans are willing to take a strong stand against the lies beneath these false dichotomies and expose them, their mouths will be forever shut.
   
   
4. Republican officeholders have been unwilling or unable to recognize that leftists will endeavor to control the press in order that they will be free to drive forward with their agenda under the protective cover of what (even in this nation) has become nothing more than propaganda. It is certainly not "news" or "journalism". Unless the Republican officeholders are willing to take the issues directly to the American public in public forums or via (now) the alternative media, the Republicans will forever be handicapped by this disadvantage.
   

I believe we can blame the current state of affairs in the U.S. on the bulk of Republican officeholders who are, for the most part, spineless – unwilling or unable to stand up to defend what is best for this great nation. They are unwilling to suffer “bad press” because re-election is their primary (or, seemingly, their sole) goal. It appears that they no longer have a heart for the greatness of our nation. They no longer understand or support the U.S. Constitution. Most of them seem to have no willingness to PAY THE PRICE for speaking the TRUTH.

Great leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan were willing to pay the price of “bad press” in order to fight for what was best for the nation. They did not move “to the center.” Instead, they took their arguments to the people and move the people to the position that was in the best interest of the nation.

My hope from this letter is only that some of my heart – if deemed worthy – would be shared with other Republicans. I do not count the job of being a politician in today’s world as “easy”, but if our nation is to survive as something more than another mediocre political entity that populates the world stage, we must find men among us who are willing to take a stand for something other than re-election.

Please, do not take this as negative, but rather as I place it in your hands as constructive criticism. Consider it. Even, pray about it.

"I am opposed to Socialism because of its inhumanity; because it saps the vitality of the human race which has no vitality to spare; because it lulls to indolence those who must struggle to survive; because the theories of good men who are enthralled by its delusions are made the excuse of the wicked who would rather plunder than work; because it stops enterprise, promotes laziness, exalts inefficiency, inspires hatred, checks production, assures waste and instills into the souls of the unfortunate and the weak hopes impossible of fruition whose inevitable blasting will add to the bitterness of their lot." – Edward F. Adams

Very truly yours,

Richard D. Cushing