Here is another post for our celebration of School Choice Week. Earlier this month American Thinker posted an article by Daren Jonescu with the above title and many of the posted comments following it were as interesting as Jonescu’s piece. Readers of this website already know where I stand – the public school tax dollar monopoly must be ended and the slaves should be freed from the plantation.
What follows are a few excerpts from Jonescu’s article, and then a few excerpts from the posted comments.
[Childrens’] souls and potential are daily being siphoned off by an education system designed to produce subjugated spirits, mere slogan-vessels, whose (carefully nurtured) dominant passions are born of greed, sloth, lust, and envy, which can easily be subdued and manipulated by the power elite’s petty material promises, entertainments, and demagoguery.
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Advocates and administrators of private schools — secular or religious — produce evidence and argument for the myriad advantages of rescuing children from the public system quickly, and the eminent feasibility of doing so.
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Education is a slow process in an individual soul. As a societal shift, it is even slower because, at the outset, most people will not be involved in the revolution, and because even those who are will vary in competence and results. Are those who use this argument against immediate action on education imagining that a rejuvenated society will arise spontaneously from the coming economic and social collapse?
As things now stand, it is no exaggeration to hypothesize that the majority of people will enter the coming period of tumult ignorant of human nature and history, conscienceless, and lacking both practical skills and the independent character to acquire them. What kind of society is likely to emerge from such a population in a time of unrest and hardship?
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Future generations will need all the virtue, intellectual dexterity, and historical perspective within their potential if they are to withstand the hard times ahead, and emerge as free men and women. Delayed action at this late date will have tragic consequences.
So act.
Remove your own children from public school now.
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[T]aking the long view, how do you weigh the value of a renewed spirit of individualism, self-reliance, and civic responsibility against the perpetual enslavement of the state-dependent herd and the submissive socialist “labor force” that are guaranteed to ensue — that are meant to ensue — from the continued machinations of the progressive public school establishment?
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Work as though your life depended on it — your liberty certainly does — to get any child within your sphere of influence out of the public school system, immediately. Political solutions will come last, not first, as future generations of self-sufficient and strong-charactered individuals make their stand against a withered and debunked authoritarian establishment. The greater the number of such free-souled individuals, the starker and more humiliating the contrast with the downward-ratcheting “standards” imposed by the growth-stunting racket we used to call public education.
A final point: a humiliated tyrant, such as will result from a significant public school exodus, will become even more brazen in his oppressive urges. Men of real and steadfast virtue will be needed then. Start producing such men today.
In December I linked to another post from this author titled “The Case Against Public Education.” I introduced it with two sentences:
Daren Jonescu at American Thinker makes the case well. I’d only add that eventually people are going to have to wake up to the sad reality that public school teachers aren’t saints, but instead, have been complicit in the disaster.
I’m obviously not alone in those sentiments, and one commenter on the Jonescu’s January article said this:
The problem in our culture with regards to education is that it is unpopular to criticize teachers. We view them as some sort of demi-saints, who care about the kids, and sacrifice accordingly. This is baloney. Certainly, those people exist, but in my experience, most of them are typical state employees (at the place I worked in, I knew 2 people who were exceptions – the principal and one of the teachers I worked with). They are more worried about how much health insurance they’re going to get, how many retirement benefits they’re going to get, and minimizing their workload and responsibility.
We have to break this illusion in our society.
Here is a short exchange by two other commenters:
Commenter 1:
My mom says that government run education should be considered unconstitutional. It is similar to an ‘establishment of religion’.
Commenter 2:
Good point – it has become an establishment of anti-religion.
Lastly, here are two excellent quotes that show up elsewhere on the web and appear to be accurate.
“Education is too important to be left to the State.” ~ John Stuart Mill
“The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their common sense.” ~ G. K. Chesterton