The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What ‘Education’ Teaches

Posted on | July 1, 2015 | 118 Comments

My stance as a critic of public education began while I was in fifth grade at Lithia Springs (Ga.) Elementary School, but it was not until our eldest daughter spent a year in kindergarten that I realized that the system is inimical to liberty. Your local public schools are destroying America, and are ultimately a greater threat to our nation’s survival than ISIS.

The first lesson of school is, your parents are idiots.

See, this is why we need school: If parents were smart enough to teach their own children how to read and write, there would be no need for this massive government bureaucracy to provide education to our youth. Silly parents! How dare you think yourselves competent to educate your own child! Education is only possible when conducted by a government-trained expert and provided in a government-controlled classroom under the direction of government-certified bureaucrats.

The second lesson of school is, your parents are wrong.

This was not really a problem so much when I was in school four or five decades ago, when our parents and our teachers shared similar or identical religious, moral and political beliefs. Adult authority in that time and place spoke in a single voice that was patriotic, Christian and dedicated to basic values like hard work and honesty.

One might discern, in the values of my parents’ generation — raised in small towns or on farms, survivors of the Great Depression and victors of World War II — a sort of philosophical fusion between Stoicism and Calvinism. Children were expected to learn how to endure hard times and disappointment without complaint. Our parents despised the “spoiled” child who was weak, prone to self-pity and whining, because he had not been properly disciplined. Our teachers all came from similar backgrounds and shared these basic beliefs, and thus were not disposed to indulge misbehavior or to grade us leniently. Corporal punishment was the norm, and the unruly student did not dare question the authority of the teacher to administer such punishment.

The moral consensus of the American Century — a set of values shared by parents and school officials — has since evaporated, and has been replaced by multiculturalism and other “progressive” ideas, which are based on the assumption (ubiquitous in the modern education profession) that parents are all ignorant bigots, so that the duty of the school is to enlighten children with sophisticated beliefs.

Because parents are stupid (unqualified to teach their children anything) and wrong (deficient in sophisticated values), the school’s core purpose — the fundamental mission of the system — is to undermine parental authority and destroy the basis of respect between parent and child.

Once you understand this about modern education, a lot of phenomena that are otherwise inexplicable begin to make sense. For example, why is it that we have gone from a system where public education began with first grade to a system in which schools now have kindergarten and pre-K programs? Once upon a time — and not ancient history, but when I was in school — the government education bureaucracy didn’t begin “educating” children until they were 6 years old. Now, the government takes control of children at age 4, and yet there has been no discernible scholastic benefit from this expansion of bureaucratic authority. Second-graders today are certainly no more competent at spelling and arithmetic than were second-graders in 1966, despite the fact that today’s second-grader is typically in his fourth year of public education.

Gotta get ’em early, you see?

The process of undermining parental authority must begin as soon as children are potty-trained, for how else shall they learn the complete omnipotence of government, to which everything is owed and to which nothing can be denied? Your parents are incompetent idiots whose values are wrong — the sooner the child learns this, the better.

Schools nowadays are very bad at teaching facts, but very good at teaching attitudes, especially those attitudes the enable and empower the continual expansion of government power. An uncritical reverence toward certain intellectual abstractions — “Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!” — is drummed into the child’s head in lesson after lesson. One often encounters college-educated young people whose minds are full of hopeless confusion, so that when attempting to engage them in political discussion, we find they spew forth a mishmash of phrases cobbled together from the preamble to Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the poetry of Emma Lazarus, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Pledge of Allegiance and perhaps a few lines from various patriotic songs. To this jumbled mass of phrases, the young fool is ferociously devoted with what can only be described as a religious zealotry. A single four-word phrase from the preamble to the Constitution — “a more perfect Union” — seems to have been deliberately misrepesented to these young fools. No one has taught them that the Framers were merely describing their purpose to replace the imperfect Union (between the states) as governed by the wartime improvisation of the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they have been taught that this phrase is a sort of mystical commandment to future generations, who must continual strive to make a heaven-on-earth perfection of the government. Well, then, what sort of “perfection” do you suppose they had in mind?

“Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!”

When you are dealing with college-educated fools who seemingly cannot even comprehend plain English (e.g., “Congress shall make no law”) you frequently find that they have smuggled into the debate certain premises that they have never had any reason to examine objectively. A negative view of the past — a place full of slavery, greed, war, sexism and other oppressions — is so pervasive in modern education that the young fool can’t seem to understand why, in his enthusiasm for Democracy, he is embracing ideas that predate the birth of Christ by at least three centuries. Being devoted to this ancient idea with a nostalgic reverence, how then does he justify his enthusiasm for Progress? And how is it, we may ask the young fools, that despite all the Democracy and Progress of the past century, the United States is in some respects now farther from actual Equality than it was when Lyndon Johnson was president?

Our schools do not teach facts about history, political science and economics, but rather teach attitudes about these things. The attitudes they teach are the attitudes approved by the Board of Education, whose members owe their offices to contributions and endorsements from the teachers unions, which in turn are a key constituency of the Democrat Party. In most school districts, at least 75% of the teachers and administrators are Democrats, and in the colleges of education, quite nearly 100% of the professors are Democrats. Could anyone therefore be the least bit surprise that in 2012, Obama won 60% of voters under 30?

“Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!”

This rant was inspired by a couple of encounters on Twitter today, first with a conference of feminist educators sponsored by the Gender and Education Association:

Promoting feminist scholarship and practice in gender and education internationally, nationally and locally
Providing an influential feminist voice
Promoting and problematising knowledge on gender and education
Encouraging teaching, learning, research and publication on gender and education
Providing a source of expertise and knowledge for policy makers
Creating networks to facilitate the exchange of information between our members.

In other words, these radical ideologues seek to implement an agenda based on feminist gender theory — the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — in the grade-school classroom. You get the drift.

After I’d riffed on that a while, I got a phone call from my brother Kirby and, in the course of our conversation, he brought up the Atlanta public school cheating scandal, which put a number of professional “educators” in prison.

For years, I have advocated maximum feasible non-cooperation with the government education system. Get your kids out of public schools, always vote against any referendum for new taxes to fund the system, and never vote for any school board candidate who is endorsed by the teacher’s union. Furthermore, under no circumstance should any honest, intelligent person support the system by working for the system. Better to be working as a convenience store clerk than to assist this corrupt system as a teacher, librarian, or other employee.

The myth of the Good School and the Good Teacher are essential to public support of this system. If honest, intelligent people refuse to work in the system — so that the only people employed as public school teachers are as stupid and corrupt as the criminals who operate the Atlanta public schools —  then the system will collapse under the weight of its own failures. Larry Elder once pointed out an important fact:

One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44 percent of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools. In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41 and 39 percent of public school teachers, respectively, pay for a private school education for their children. In Rochester, New York, it’s 38 percent. In Baltimore it’s 35 percent, San Francisco is 34 percent and New York-Northeastern New Jersey is 33 percent.

Public school teachers recognize how wretched the system is, and yet continue to work in the system. Why? Because the public schools pay teachers enough that they can afford private school tuition, because teachers are paid more than the taxpayers who actually fund the school system that employs the teachers!

Anyway, after I went off on a Twitter tirade about the wretched taxpayer-funded catastrophe of public education, one of my followers criticized me for “painting with a rather broad brush.” Well, yes — I’m an extremist in this regard. I don’t want to hear any proposals to reform public schools. I want to hear proposals to abolish public schools.

Shut them down.

Fire all the employees, sell all the buildings, buses, books and other equipment at auction to the highest bidder. Use the proceeds of this asset liquidation to create a tax-exempt public trust that will subsidize low-income parents to send their children to the private school of their choice. Relieved of the burden of funding a government school system, counties and municipalities could enact drastic tax cuts that would unleash economic growth so that the middle classes could afford private education without any subsidy. All children would be privately educated because, once the abolition of public schools becomes a matter of policy, states will pass constitutional amendments forbidding governments from providing, regulating or otherwise interfering with education.

Damn the government school system — a foul and unholy thing! Consign it to the fiery pit of Hell, from whence it emerged!

Remember, I’ve been thinking about this since the fifth grade.

 

Comments

118 Responses to “What ‘Education’ Teaches”

  1. Hanzo
    July 1st, 2015 @ 8:21 pm

    End of America for sure. Beginning.Middle.End of story.

  2. jrj119
    July 1st, 2015 @ 9:33 pm

    I’m sure that Common Core will fix all of the minor problems you mentioned…Comrade.

  3. Jason Lee
    July 1st, 2015 @ 9:39 pm

    “Fire all the employees, sell all the buildings, buses, books and other equipment at auction to the highest bidder. Use the proceeds of this asset liquidation to create a tax-exempt public trust that will subsidize low-income parents to send their children to the private school of their choice. …states will pass constitutional amendments forbidding governments from providing, regulating or otherwise interfering with education.”

    Some of the best ideas I’ve heard all year.

  4. Scoob
    July 1st, 2015 @ 9:55 pm

    I agree with your assessment of the public school system. However, the left has been clever in structuring their indoctrination. I recently spoke with a state representative regarding ESA accounts. One comment that he made was that you should NEVER criticize the public schools because rural folks like their public schools as a source of jobs, community (replacing churches), and education. The rural schools seem to escape many of the crazy mandates placed on urban schools, as they are often not enforced outside large urban areas.

    Which makes sense. The left places the enforced indoctrination mandates on the urban schools to create future voters where the voters are. Meanwhile, they bribe the rural schools with jobs, but not with the mandates. Hence, the left controls elections by indoctrinating vast swaths of urban voters, but rural folks also like their public schools absent indoctrination making reform very difficult.

    One could argue that we want additional choices in education to improve all education, including public through competition. But criticizing the public schools per se may lose the rural folks who like their public schools.

  5. Lulu
    July 1st, 2015 @ 10:41 pm

    Most parents either were indoctrinated themselves or are clueless apathetic and selfish – they will not pay for something they can get for free and certainly would never invest the time to homeschool

  6. concern00
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 2:00 am

    I like that. Our parents won WW2 and secured a world peace.
    What have your parents done? Well they’ve advocated and celebrated rights for sodomites and what a fight it was against those bigots. Our hashtags won the day. Whew! (wipes brow)

  7. DeadMessenger
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 2:45 am

    Here’s a couple of absolutely true stories of run-ins with idiot teachers that I had before I started to homeschool. Note that before I homeschooled, I was already teaching him lots of things at home, you know, like a smart Mom might do, you know, like reading the classics, and other “boring, useless” stuff.

    In kindergarten, my son had a little crush on a girl in his class named Julia. He said to her, one day, within earshot of his educationally retarded teacher: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Julia is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief.”

    The teacher takes him to the office to complain that he was “sexually harassing” and “threatening” young Julia. I was called in, as was Julia’s mom. In this meeting, the teacher bungled the whole thing, claiming Shaun called her “the sun” and threatened to kill her. Knowing my son – let alone any kindergartner – wouldn’t make a ridiculous statement like this, I thought for a minute, and asked, “Wait, did he say, ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?”, and before I could continue, Julia’s mom finished the quote. Turns out she taught drama at the community college. And she thought that it was cute and precocious that Shaun could quote Shakespeare.

    The teacher and the principal were stunned. Probably because of Shakespeare being a dead white guy and all. Before I left, I told the teacher and the principal that they weren’t “allowed to talk to me anymore”.

    Another example was in second grade where he was given this math problem: There is 50 feet between bases on a baseball field. Tyrone hits a home run. What is the net distance he runs?” He and I talked about this. Trick question, I said. The NET distance is zero. His “teacher”, who claimed to have math training, marked it wrong. I went down there to complain. The teacher said, “The answer is 200 feet.” I said, “Wrong. The TOTAL distance is 200. The NET distance is zero.” A “lively” (i.e., threatening) discussion ensued, with me indicating a desire to get her fired for gross stupidity and incompetence, and actually drawing a diagram, as I’d done with my 7-year-old, to explain the difference between “net” and “total”. I actually had to go to the Superintendent of Schools to resolve this one. The Superintendent was my former High School principal, and he didn’t even get it until I started used the example of “total deposit” and “net deposit” in one’s bank account.

    Here are two really good reasons to homeschool. ‘Cause damn.

  8. DeadMessenger
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 3:13 am

    And all it does is take some time. Not even a lot of time. I bought used curriculums at the local homeschool exchanges dirt cheap, and then resold them when I didn’t need them anymore. You get the teacher’s edition, usually, with the curriculum if you choose well, so you don’t have to actually know anything.

    What’s more, school can be on your schedule. It’s your school, after all, so it can be night and weekend school. AND, you can make up your own classes. For my high school kids, we watched the movie “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, and they were required to choose and read three books from which the movie’s characters were taken, then write book reports tying the characters in the books to the dialog and behaviors of the characters in the movie.

    In my state, at the end of the year, a certified teacher has to check samples of work and sign off on what the kids learned. She thought this class was brilliant. And there were others that I just made up like this, and they kind of merged with the kids’ likes and dislikes. Such as a class on Biblical history and archeology.

    It was actually fun for all of us. And I worked a full time job, with overtime, while I homeschooled. I could use the time I used to take going down to the school to b1tch as, actually, a healthy part of the homeschool time, considering all the threatening phone calls, notes, and school visits involved. (Because 80% of the teachers and 100% of the administrators were flippin’ incompetent and/or certifiable.)

  9. Adjoran
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:09 am

    Notice please that the shift in public education from education to indoctrination begins with Carter and the Department of Education, which signaled the era of ever-increasing federal control. That was 1977. Perhaps not coincidentally, the peaks of both adult literacy in the US and newspaper paid circulation came in 1975. It’s been downhill ever since.

    While I cannot disagree with the efficacy of your proposed solutions, they are not politically possible directly. A more reasonable goal would be universal vouchers for 1-12, parent-directed, with no preference for existing public schools which would have to earn their budgets within a given period of transition.

    Since neither kindergarten, preschool, or nursery school has ever been demonstrated to make any difference at all in childhood education by the 3rd grade, they should not be funded by vouchers.

    Of course elimination of the federal Department of Education is required, and any standards can be left to the states, with the sole proviso they must be evenly applied and verified.

  10. Adjoran
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:10 am

    Common Core was a good idea in theory, but in practice the educrats were able to write the standards, which negated the whole concept.

  11. Adjoran
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:11 am

    Vouchers would allow those with good public schools to enable them to thrive and prosper, penalizing only those which disappoint the parents.

  12. Adjoran
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:24 am

    The distance between bases is 90 feet, anyway.

  13. Quartermaster
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:34 am

    Evenly applied and verified? At what level?

  14. Quartermaster
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:35 am

    60′ in little league.

  15. HouseofSuffering
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:52 am

    I would say that I was publicly educated all my life and turned out fine, but then Mother disagreed.

  16. ErnestMDunn
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 5:56 am

    Next few days start your new life…theothermccain… < Find Here

  17. robertstacymccain
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 6:05 am

    Wait a minute — your kid was reciting Shakespeare in kindergarten? My kids are rather precocious, but a Shakespearean soliloquy? Wow!

  18. Art Deco
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 6:30 am

    Overstated, but true.

    Right now, public agency is neither a necessary nor proper conduit for the delivery of educational services. You have public schools because of a collective sense of what is prudent distributionally: that youngsters of every social stratum should be able to consume a baseline of the services schools offer. This can be achieved through voucher distribution, provided the schools accepting vouchers as payment are debarred from charging tuition so that you do not have the dog-chasing-its-tail subsidies you currently have in higher education. You can allow parents to cash out their issued vouchers for a fragment of their redemption value (say, a share of their direct tax payments divided by the number of vouchers they were issued) and send their children to tuition charging schools or to homeschool them. The only state-run schools would be adjuncts of the sheriff’s department and the state prison service and these would be regimented loci attempting to stuff remedial schooling into incorrigibles no one else will take.

    You’ll need a regulatory architecture (as you have for philanthropies now) which constrains school trustees and employees from looting, you’ll need state regents’ examinations for quality control, and you’ll need the state attorney-general to be able to sue to have schools which perform poorly on league tables to have them relieved of their franchise.

    Another thing state legislatures might do is close the extant teachers’ colleges and remove any provision in state law which commands schools to hire certified teachers or penalizes them for not hiring them. Instead, a new set of certificate programs might be inaugurated and you’d let the market decide on their utility. You’d have initial screening examinations and then those admitted would take a modest portfolio of methods courses (where they learn about lesson planning, not RAAAAACISM), followed by an internship, followed by a stipended apprenticeship. The precise portfolio of methods courses and one’s placement would be derived from the type of certificate one was seeking (elementary classroom, academic secondary, special education, coaching, art, music, vocational secondary, &c). There would be some prerequistes to enter the program depending on the sort of certificate sought (e.g. just the exam for elementary classroom teachers, the exam and 35-70 credit hours in one’s subject for academic secondary teachers, trade certificates plus the exam for academic vocational teachers, &c), but no requirement of a baccalaureate degree. The certificate program might take 2 years, about 2/3 of it hands-on.

  19. robertstacymccain
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 6:33 am

    Here is the thing: I love education, but I always hated school. By the age of 10 or 11, I was aware that we were being treated like trained poodles, made to jump through hoops — to do make-work that served no actual educational purpose, but which everyone had to do as a demonstration of our compliance with system. “Obey!”

    This was intolerable to me as a 10-year-old who was already reading at a collegiate level, even though our elementary school was “tracking” — that is to say that, based on our standardized test scores, we were divided into four classes, 5A, 5B, 5C and 5D. Even in the 5A class, however, there was this idea that “education” meant we must grind through work — a sort of assembly-line production process of assignments — without regard to whether this work had any real educational value.

    What they were actually doing, of course, was attempting to train us — operant conditioning — to be bureaucratic drones who would, presumably, go onto careers in offices where we did white-collar clerical work.

    Or, rather, like teachers making lesson plans and grading homework assignments.

    That is to say, our teachers’ objective was to turn us into carbon copies of themselves.

    Being “good in school” was an end to itself, from the perspective of the educational system, and students were graded accordingly. Therefore, although I was among the brightest students in school — but cursed with restless energy and a vivid imagination — I was consistently downgraded and subjected to punitive discipline for not complying with the system’s goals.

    It was impossible to be objective about it as a child being shoved through this meat-grinder. Still, I had a precocious recognition that this one-size-fits-all system was badly designed and poorly operated. It was not until I became an education editor and a parent, however, that I gained a perspective on the deeper structural problems with the education system. As a nation, we are pouring billions of dollars annually into a system that is broken beyond repair, and which is failing our children.

    Like I said: Maximum feasible non-cooperation.

  20. Brett
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:02 am

    My stance as a critic of government education began in the first grade, when I was instructed that Americans were free individuals, but were obligated to submit to the dictates of the majority.

    I pointed out the obvious contradiction. I was placed in the corner and haven’t been allowed out since.

  21. robertstacymccain
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:05 am

    It is a fact that in rural communities, being employed as a school teacher puts one in the affluent upper class of society. In a town there are relatively few white-collar private-sector jobs, the school teacher earning $60,000 a year is a real Success Story, and the assistant principal with a master’s degree earning $75,000 is Donald Trump. The school superintendent who has a doctorate degree in education (an Ed.D., not a Ph.D.) and earns $90,000 a year is quite nearly royalty in a rural community. He or she is always called “Doctor So-and-So” and is rivaled in prestige only by the head coach of the high school football team (if, that is, the team is a winner).

    Suppose a rural county has 40,000 people, of whom 8,000 are school age children. If the average class size is 20, this requires 500 teachers and probably 300 others employees ranging from administrators to bus drivers. Well, if this is not the largest employer in the county, the school system is certainly one of the largest employers. The system offers tremendous job security and government pensions that usually kick in after 25 or 30 years, so that the teacher qualifies for a full pension at age 50 or 55. To criticize this source of employment — knowing that the rural county likely gets a substantial percentage of its school funding from state and federal revenues — is extremely unpopular, because these hundreds of teachers are among the most-admired members of the community.

  22. Robert Stacy McCain: What “Education” Teaches | Constantinople (Not Istanbul)
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:20 am

    […] Very good article and well worth your time to read […]

  23. ConstantineX1
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:21 am

    Government schools don’t treat the parents and students as customers of a service. They treat students as pawns to be indoctrinated and parents as annoyances who should just shut up, pay their taxes, and don’t question or interfere with their indoctrination.

    Liked this one so much I linked it on my blog so you’ll get maybe 5 page views from it 🙂

  24. robertstacymccain
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:45 am

    Every conservative/libertarian sees the taxpayer-funded, government-operated aspect of public education as problematic. There should be some means by which parents can exercise choice, rather than being compelled to shove their children into this broken system and accept whatever happens. Yet my critique goes beyond this. If private schools merely replicate the structure and philosophy of the public system, seeking to produce a higher-quality outcome without really doing anything different, then “choice” is an illusion.

    This is one reason why the home-schooling revolution is such a promising development. Our own experience with our children confirms in practice what a libertarian theory of education can only suggest: Absent the conformist pressures of a bureaucratic system, it is possible to tailor curricula and pedagogy to fit the individual child’s aptitudes and interests.

    The fact that our oldest daughter actually became a teacher (in a private school, I won’t say where, because people who hate freedom might harass her) is interesting and perhaps ironic. She graduated from a private academy with honors at age 16 and got her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude. Yet the crucial period of her education was the seven years she was home-schooled, from age 7 to 14. She is extremely bright and her education was accelerated during those years, She entered the academy at 10th grade, the youngest member of the sophomore class and younger than all but two of the freshmen that year.

    Among the many things we learned was that the seven-hour school day, with classes divided up into hourly periods, is necessary only to the institutional setting of “school.” Homeschoolers can achieve extraordinary results with only four hours of “school” daily, if their home life also offers meaningful opportunities for education — lots of books, art, music, etc. Also, the large family (we have six kids) tends to produce useful work opportunities in the home: Bathing and feeding the baby, assisting younger siblings with their lessons, doing other chores — kids actually learn stuff that way. I think about my twin boys reading catalogs and magazines about motorcycles or whatever and not thinking of this as “education,” even though they were (a) reading material that involved specialized vocabularies and (b) acquiring useful knowledge that was of interest to them.

    The basic rudiments of education — reading, writing, math, science, history — do have to be taught directly and, especially in terms of very young children, this requires a good deal of unavoidable drill and memorization. However, once the child is eight or nine years old and is reading at or above grade level, many of their most valuable learning experiences won’t be about doing “lessons,” but rather about pursuing their own curiosity about the world around them.

    Exactly how much any school can deliver the kind of educational experience my children got from homeschooling is difficult to say. Parents are (or should be) so deeply invested in their own children’s success, and so attuned to their own child’s personality, that it is difficult to imagine any teacher doing a better job educating the child than could their own parents.

  25. Trudy W. Schuett
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:50 am

    Public school is more about babysitting than education. Both parents are working, so what to do with the kids?

  26. robertstacymccain
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 7:55 am

    Newt Gingrich once described high school as “subsidized dating,” which is quite apt.

  27. Art Deco
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:32 am

    I agree with you that private school teachers are commonly problematic. A way around that over time is as follows: end the role of NCATE as an accrediting agent, close extant teachers colleges, offer a reformed certification process which emphasizes apprenticeship, and end state mandates regarding the preparation of teachers. Also, eliminate any and all provisions in state labor law which would extend rights of collective bargaining agency to any corporation other than a company union. Leave the NEA and AFT to run pension and insurance programs &c. Let schools hire anyone they care to so long as their pupils perform adequately on league tables drawn up from state regents’ examinations. The one devil in the detail is the composition of the examinations themselves. Vigilance by state legislatures is necessary re that.

    There is no way around institutional schooling for most. A great many parents are not equipped to teach their children a great deal for one reason or another. Institutional schooling is a manifestation of division of labor. While we’re at it, I attended school for 6 1/2 hours a day ca. 1975. Academic instruction when I was in high school did not amount to much more than 4 hours a day, and about 10% of that was studio art and the like. The rest of the day consisted of gym classes, time in the cafeteria, and study halls.

  28. kbiel
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:33 am

    One ring…er…curriculum to rule them all.

  29. Art Deco
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:44 am

    His perspective may have been a bit distorted. He married one of his teachers a year or so after he graduated. He was 19 and she was 27.

    I have a hard time imagining that myself. One of the few TILFs where I went to high school was a science teacher who was there only briefly. She had a great big (Italian) bear of a husband who collected her most days; nice chap, but intimidating just breathing in and out. There were a couple of handsome lady coaches. One of them recently retired from another district and got an award on her way out the door. She’s spent much of her life as a dyke, sad to say, which is a surprise given that she was petite and well-groomed. I cannot locate the other with this intertubes thingy.

  30. Art Deco
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:51 am

    I’m going to dispute that.

    1. The federal Department of Education inaugurated in 1979 was an assemblage of already existing programs in the old HEW department and other loci. The department may have manufactured some novel evils since their incorporation, but all that they started with antedated Carter. Federal interference with primary and secondary schooling began big time with various and sundry Great Society initiatives in 1965, foreshadowed by legislation driven by Sputnik-panic in 1957-58 and Earl Warren’s brainstorm that the black robes would make a Jim-dandy school board (with regard to which see Arthur Garrity’s Boston disaster).

    2. I’d have to say my history teachers were liberal by default and the administrators were as well. Two were active on local Democratic committees. I’m past 50. Now, I’m from New York and not Georgia, so my milage is not the moderators.

  31. Matt_SE
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    I think there were two reasons for the expansion of education to include kindergarten:
    1) The unspoken breakdown of stable families, so that children could be removed from that environment as soon as possible. That certainly applies to most African-American children (70%+ born to single mothers). Increasingly, it’s metastasizing to everyone else.
    2) To serve as daycare for all those single moms who have to work during the day.
    Both of these are the fault of Democrats and their war on stable families.

    PS: I admit that it also serves the purpose you describe.

  32. Scoob
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    True, you have broad support for vouchers, but a politically active minority (boards of education, public teachers) who will fight tooth-and-nail to kill them. In other words, you have support for vouches that is a mile wide and an inch deep, while the opponents of vouchers have money, volunteers and resources to oppose. And that is our political puzzle to solve.

  33. Art Deco
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 8:59 am

    I’m from New York, not Georgia, so maybe things are different in small towns. The thing is, you have prosperous local businessmen, the local medical profession, and the small corps of lawyers. You also have a few engineers, e.g. the director of the water works. You have people who are reconciled to long commutes. Where you have a college (and that’s very common in small towns in Upstate New York), you have the faculty and administrators there. Schoolteachers and administrators have a great deal of competition for community standing. If you go out into purely rural areas where you have country homesteads and residential villages without much more than a convenience store / gas station, it’s different. The thing is, there often is not much ‘community’ in those sorts of locales as people focus on nearby towns.

  34. Art Deco
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:02 am

    I had kindergarten. So did my brother, who is near retirement age. It’s not a novelty.

  35. Gunga
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:06 am

    A hammer is a good tool, in theory. If I were were forced to have only one tool, it would be a hammer…because with a hammer, I could beat the crap out of anyone who would try to force me to have only one tool. A hammer can be a good tool when dealing with the educational system…

  36. Matt_SE
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:11 am

    I would assume it started as another education fad, with the assumption that if *some* education is good, more must be better. I wouldn’t be surprised if the genesis went back 100 years based on that logic.
    The evidence to the contrary is more recent, and is suppressed by the self-serving bureaucracy.

  37. Zohydro
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:12 am

    We could solve all these problems and more with the public schools locally once again if there were a means to crush the power of the teacher’s unions! School administrations and the local school boards are all hamstrung by these parasitic unions… I’ve read that SCOTUS will take up a case (Friedrichs v. California Teacher’s Association) in its next term that might do just that, but I’m not optimistic…

  38. Matt_SE
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:15 am

    “I don’t want to hear any proposals to reform public schools. I want to hear proposals to abolish public schools.”
    There’s a push for educational reform every 20 years or so. I’m old enough to remember at least two cycles.
    Horrific figures are published, the educational establishment says “we need to do better…mistakes were made,” and then nothing happens (accompanied by a chorus of “Don’t blame the teachers, you conservative MONSTERS!”).
    Decades of proof are in, and the verdict is that the educational establishment is corrupt to the core.

  39. Matt_SE
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:27 am

    Whatever distance you want, cisheteronormative oppressors!

  40. Southern Air Pirate
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:40 am

    That is because the reforms pushed are the approved ones from the industry. They aren’t reforms in anyway or shape. Just ideas to make you believe that change had occurred. That or they scream that reforms would occur but there is no money. So we need to jack up tax rates to pay for the studies to show the reforms proposed wouldn’t work in today’s world.

  41. Southern Air Pirate
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:41 am

    @SPAM

  42. Mike G.
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:43 am

    I’m past 50 and believe it or not, I remember prayer in public school…and this was in a big city school in SoCal.

  43. theBuckWheat
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:43 am

    It always takes young parents a while to recover when I tell them that every one of them is homeschooling their children, that is up until them moment they turn them over to the government to begin indoctrination of values that are foreign to the parents.

    It is a signal of the cost of government (“public”) education when children who are educated in that system are compared to their age peers who have been homeschooled. The median test scores are more than one whole grade different. In the case of my own daughter, it was two grades. In fact the local school system could not properly place her because in part they did not have any who was qualified to evaluate parts of her portfolio.

    Economist Russ Roberts has an excellent weekly podcast interview series (econtalk.org) One interview covered the cost to the nation in terms of GDP when a child graduates and enters the work force only a single grade level below average. The lifetime cost is staggering in terms of total earnings, and then by implication, in terms of taxes.

    If you multiply this by the number of children who graduate from public high school each year, it is tens of billions of dollars. In fact this particular expert implied that our public school system is costing of several TRILLION dollars in lost opportunity earnings every year by how poorly it does its job.

    Given how public teachers unions are one of the principle ways that socialist politicians launder government money back into donations to help keep socialists in office, public education extracts a horrible cost on our liberty and our collective prosperity.

  44. robertstacymccain
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:47 am

    “Personnel is policy.”

    A core problem with the educational bureaucracy is that the people who run the system control (through teacher-training programs and the certification process) who can be part of the system. The schooling establishment a club, a fraternity, perhaps in some aspects a cult. Because only certain types of personalities rise to positions of authority within this system, there is a conformity of beliefs and attitudes built into the machinery so that even if an innovative superintendent or principal were able to come up with more effective methods, he or she would have difficulty implementing this innovation because nearly all the teachers are of the Standard Bureaucratic Type.

    The system cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed.

  45. theBuckWheat
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:47 am

    It is one thing for government to support education by assembling a team of experts to publish a reference curricula, it is another thing entirely for government to impose that on the entire nation. At the very least, it destroys liberty and presumes there are no other better solutions.

  46. Finrod Felagund
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:48 am

    When I was in the 3rd grade, my teacher realized I was ahead of the class and gave me a 7th grade math book to work on.

    When I got to the 4th grade, my teacher was dumb as a box of rocks and stuck me back in the 4th grade math book. It’s no wonder I was not well-behaved.

  47. Mike G.
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:50 am

    I’m past 50 and believe it or not, I remember prayer in public school…and this was in a big city school in SoCal.

  48. Dana
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:50 am

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    Furthermore, under no circumstance should any honest, intelligent person support the system by working for the system. Better to be working as a convenience store clerk than to assist this corrupt system as a teacher, librarian, or other employee.

    Such a prescription abandons the system completely to the wolves at the gate. If all honest and intelligent people refuse to work for the system, then only the homosexuals and perverts and feminists will remain.

    If it is better to work as a convenience store clerk, then you will have people who have no choice but to send their children to the public schools; they won’t earn enough to afford parochial school tuition, and they won’t have the time to home school their children.

    Nor is it enough to decline to vote for school board candidates endorsed by the NEA; conservatives have to run for school boards themselves, and change the system from within.

    We will not abolish the public school system, and anyone who seriously believes we will, absent a nuclear holocaust, is on some serious recreational pharmaceuticals.

  49. Southern Air Pirate
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 9:50 am

    I am reminded of a story when my cousin and her daughter and a scandal about drugs in school from a few years back. The short version is that my cousin who is a teacher in another district had her daughter going to school where they lived. Come middle school and the usual hormonal response to being at school and life. The daughter got into trouble. Not much just a few late assignments and a couple incidents of speaking back to a teacher (over what is the true American History. Zinn’s version which was the textbook for the disctrict or Tuchman’s version which is what my cousin studied and believed in). So there they are in a meeting with the vice principal for students and the school mental health councilor. After discussing everything the councilor whipped out a script pad that was already prestamped with the district psychologist name and signature. Then said words to the effect of it sounds like your daughter needs a behavior pill or two. My cousin got wide eyed and looked around and then asked where the councilor medical degree was from and license to practice medicine was. The principal gave a statement of this is how it’s always been done here and blah blah respect the administration and can have your job because I know your district super. My cousin explained the law and that by the law had to report this drug dealing. The short ending the report was made the district fired a number of people for rule violations and my cousin was not rehired at the end of contracts by the district she worked for it ended up being proven to her that the body is corrupt. So she went to work as a private school teacher where the students care and the parents make up the board who approve topics. The funnier thing is that my cousin now teaches at a parochial school and the school teaches more science than her former atheist fellow teachers believe could be possible. They also teach it deeper than what the public education requires.

  50. Finrod Felagund
    July 2nd, 2015 @ 10:02 am

    Here’s how to report spammers to Disqus so (hopefully) their account gets shut down:

    First, right-click on the timestamp of the spam (the one above right now says ‘4 hours ago’). Click on ‘Copy link’.

    Now right-click on the spammer’s name and click on Open Link in New Tab.

    Switch to the new tab you created, then look for and click on the flag in the upper right corner.

    Under ‘Choose why you’re reporting this user’, choose Spam and click Next Page.

    Find the box labeled ‘A DIRECT LINK to a spam comment (or discussion) posted by this user:’ and paste the link you saved at the beginning of this into the one-line text box, and click Next Page

    You’re done!