Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Why we must destroy the government schools

A touching letter arrived last week from a woman in Henderson: "To the editor: The article in today's (Nov. 9) Review-Journal about" (a local elementary school principal allegedly) "putting a child in a dark closet brings back a horrible memory. My first day of kindergarten, which was 65 years ago in Detroit, was one which I have never forgotten. "When my mother left me that very first day, I was scared and so I cried. I cried so much that the teacher put me in the coat closet and left me there all morning. The only light was the light from under the door. There were lots of coats hanging because it was February. Maybe the light from under the door caused me to think all those coats were shadows of people. "To this day, I hate the dark. I sleep with two small lights, I must always have my head facing the hall so I can see out, and I am very claustrophobic. That is one of the meanest things that can be done to a small child for punishment."

And here I thought the mandatory government youth camps were "for the good of the children." On Nov. 19, a group called "ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History" placed a full-page ad in the Review-Journal, urging Nevadans to demand that the current crop of presidential candidates to "go on the record on where you stand on fighting extreme poverty and global disease that affect the one billion people around the world." The group urges candidates to take a number of stands, including an embrace of "universal primary education."

Notice it doesn't say "universal literacy." It seeks plans to impose "universal primary education" -- which any government or U.N. bureaucrat worth her salt will interpret as a call for universal mandatory state-run schools. The two are not identical.

Tracing the way Prussian-style statist education was brought to this country in the early 19th century by Horace Mann and his associates, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, a research fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, made clear in his 1981 book "Is Public Education Necessary?" that the whole scheme was never about improving literacy, that "literacy in America was higher before compulsory public education than it is today. ..."

Digging into a January, 1828 edition of the American Journal of Education, Mr. Blumenfeld found an indigenous confirmation of what the visiting Alexis de Tocqueville was to confirm in 1831 about American literacy rates prior to the institution of the compulsory government school: "There is no country, (it is often said), where the means of intelligence are so generally enjoyed by all ranks and where knowledge is so generally diffused among the lower orders of the community, as in our own," the Journal reported. "With us a newspaper is the daily fare of almost every meal in almost every family."

No, "The reasons why this country adopted compulsory public education really had very little to do with education," Mr. Blumenfeld discovered. The founders of our public schools had something much bigger in mind: nothing less than the elimination -- through careful indoctrination of the young -- of the old pattern of selfishness and independent thought and action that had doomed their early communist experiments in places such as New Harmony, on the banks of the Wabash.

Mr. Blumenfeld concluded his historic 250-page book as follows: "After more than a hundred years of universal public education, we can say that it nowhere resembles the utopian vision that drove its proponents to create it. ... It has turned education into a quagmire of conflicting interests, ideologies and purposes, and created a bureaucracy that permits virtually no real learning to take place. ... "The only bright spot in the whole picture," Mr. Blumenfeld continued, "is the technological wonder that capitalism has brought to mankind.... Neither liberal altruism, not universal public education, nor socialism lifted the poor from their lower depths. Capitalism did.

"Is public education necessary?" Mr. Blumenfeld asks. "The answer is obvious; it was not needed then, and it is certainly not needed today. Schools are necessary, but they can be created by free enterprise today as they were before the public school movement achieved its fraudulent state monopoly in education. ...The failure of public education is the failure of statism as a political philosophy. It has been tried. It has been found wanting."

Learning and education are wonderful. The question is whether it's wise to allow this truism to justify the creation of a vast schooling monopoly and unionized jobs program for reliably thankful socialist worker-voters by a state which has obvious incentives to use the resultant vastly expensive propaganda academies to turn a once free people into a docile and malleable mob, eager to trade our dwindling wealth and freedoms for the largely mythological "services" of a burgeoning government master that sends us shrieking from pillar to post, seeking "protection" from global warming or Iranian nuclear power plants or whatever it is they've dreamed up this month.

For "The whole aim of practical politics," as the great iconoclast H.L. Mencken warned us, 80 years ago, "is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Reform? One wave of "reform" has followed another for generations. An institution cannot be "reformed" if its bad results are inherent in its underlying structure. We cannot see that the problem is the government schools, because after a century and a half we find it hard to imagine what our society would be like without them. But we must try.

We recoil in horror from the practices of more "primitive" peoples who routinely subject their children to genital mutilation and other painful rituals, insisting the continuity of such practices is necessary to maintain their cultures. Yet how much more are each succeeding American generation's views and values warped to accept the "normalcy" of collectivism, enforced mediocrity, and government dependence by 10 to 15 years of incarceration in these state Conformity Camps?

Each year millions of moms wipe away tears as they launch their firstborn 5 or 6-year-olds into the terrifying maw of this trillion-dollar government make-work program, inhabited by older inmates already inured to the culture of violence, toadying, extortion and intimidation. Admonished to be brave, these courageous little troopers do their best to adjust to a frightening and inherently insane world of clanging bells and rushing bodies, reeking of poster paints and floor-sweeping compound and cafeteria mashed potatoes.

Failing, they burst into tears, and -- like our 71-year-old correspondent from Henderson -- quickly learn indelible lessons about how "the system" deals with those who won't knuckle down, "get with the program," learn to tease and torture and steal the lunch money of the next smallest kid in line. We must do the unthinkable. We must destroy the tax-funded, government-run, compulsory public schools.

Source




Britain: Schools minister neglects homework

Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full "passenger vehicle licence" - "a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus".

Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.

Schools minister Jim Knight didn't know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.

Had those ministers or Hampshire's education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.

But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?

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Latin America's education gap

Here's a new statistic that should sound alarm bells in Latin America: The region is falling increasingly behind China, India and other Asian countries in the number of students it sends to U.S. universities, which are still ranked in international studies as the best in the world. According to the new Open Doors report by the New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE), India remains the country that sends the most students to U.S. universities, with nearly 84,000 students, followed by China with 68,000 students – 76,000 if one includes Hong Kong – and South Korea with 62,000. By comparison, Mexico has 14,000 students in U.S. universities; Brazil, 7,000; Colombia, 6,700; Venezuela, 4,500; Peru, 3,700; Argentina, 2,800; Ecuador, 2,200; and Chile, 1,570.

While the number of Indian students in U.S. universities grew by 10 percent last year, and that of Chinese students by 8 percent, the number of Latin American students fell by 0.3 percent. These are startling numbers: Even communist-ruled Vietnam, which until recently was in the stone ages in terms of its insertion in the world economy, has more than 6,000 students in U.S. universities – twice the number of Argentina, whose economy is nearly three times bigger.

Why are there fewer Latin American than Asian students in U.S. universities? It's not because of economic reasons: While Latin America is not growing as fast as Asia, its economies have grown by an average of nearly 5 percent over the last four years, which is the region's best performance in 25 years. And it's not because the governments of China, India, South Korea and other Asian countries are paying for the foreign studies. To my surprise, when I asked Chinese education officials about this during a visit to Beijing two years ago, I was told that less than 5 percent of the Chinese students in the United States had government grants. Virtually all of the Chinese students' expenses are paid for by their families, they said.

IIE officials say Asian families have a long-standing culture of investing in their children's education, a tradition that may date back to Confucius, the Chinese philosopher born in the sixth century B.C. who advocated focusing on education as a key pillar of social progress.

Peggy Blumenthal, a senior official of the IIE, told me this month in a telephone interview that Asian students are also more likely than Latin American students to get financial help from their U.S. universities because they tend to come with part-time jobs as assistants to professors. While nearly 70 percent of Asian students are graduate students, and nearly half of them can pay part of their tuition by working as assistants to professors, most Latin American students in U.S. universities are undergraduates who rarely get teaching jobs, she said.

What may be even more troubling for Latin America, Asian students tend to concentrate in business, science and technology. "Overwhelmingly, Asians are graduate students and pick business, management and engineering," she said. "Among Latin American students, there are more undergraduates, and they tend to concentrate in humanities, communications and social sciences." My opinion: This is a troubling trend for Latin America because in a knowledge-based world economy in which countries that produce sophisticated goods get the biggest income, you need scientists, engineers and business managers trained at the world's best universities.

And if you look at the two best-known rankings of the world's best universities – the London Times' Higher Education Supplement's list of the 200 best universities in the world, and the University of Shanghai's ranking of the world's 500 best universities – U.S. universities overwhelmingly dominate the first 100 places. Unless Latin American families follow the steps of their Asian counterparts and invest more in their children's education – including graduate studies in the United States, Europe or wherever the best universities in their fields of study are located – they will continue losing competitiveness, and the gap separating them from Asia's booming economies will continue to widen.

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