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Swallow Your Pride, Save Your Child
If you know the background of compulsory public education, you are aware of what this author points out. If you are unfamiliar with the educational philosophy undergirding public education, you need to understand it and he explains it well:
Some people minimize the educational crisis by declaring that the public schools were good back in their day, and have merely gone off the rails within the past few decades. False. The "father of modern education," John Dewey, published his first major work, The School and Social Progress, in 1899. He was an anti-rational, anti-freedom (and later Trotskyite) dissembler who saw socialism as the only corrective for society's ills, and promoted public education as the most effective means to socialism. He has been the dominant intellectual force behind the development of Western education for a hundred years. Furthermore, the reason for his quick rise to preeminence in education theory is that his "radical methods" were not fundamentally inconsistent with the goals of the earlier "philanthropic" advocates of public education, namely to produce a qualified but humble underclass that would not challenge the authority of an entrenched oligarchy. (President Obama's crony Warren Buffet has recently remarked that in the name of fairness, private schools ought to be banned outright, and all children forcibly distributed to government schools by lottery. Plus ça change....)
In short, the past century of public education displays the fate of today's well-intentioned public school parent writ large. Civilization always was, in effect, mitigating the compulsory school's damage at home. In the earlier stages, the progressive degradation was more subtle, but only because public education itself had not yet become a completely closed shop. That is to say, a hundred years ago many parents had spent relatively few years in public schools themselves; many teachers and school administrators had received alternative forms of education, as had their own teachers and university professors; government schools were still somewhat under the sway of educational models adapted from the pre-public era; and the progressive schools had not yet entirely displaced family, religion, and great literature as the primary moral influences among the majority of the population. Civilization therefore deteriorated slowly, rather than all at once.
But it did deteriorate: today's universal public education catastrophe is not a radical shift from the schools of "your day." It is the inevitable, logical outcome of a long war between authoritarians who sought to mold a compliant underclass of amoral collectivists, and responsible adults who sought to promote a happy and moral life for their children.
The lesson is clear: The authoritarians won. They always will, in the end -- until they are forcibly denied the souls they wish to corrupt.If you have children in public school and just can't homeschool, pray. There is always an alternative: another home schooling family that you could work with, a co-op school, an extended family member who would gladly support your plan. God, through the intercession of His home schooling mother Mary, will assist you to find an answer that is best for your family.
In the SOTU address, Dear Leader said he wanted pre-school to begin earlier, ostensibly so they can "learn earlier". Well, learn what earlier? The progressives want to start the brainwashing as early as possible. John Dewey was a humanist, a signer of the original Humanist Manifesto. Take a look at it; their goals are not at all hidden.
ReplyDeleteYou guys are so paranoid. I volunteer in our public schools and the only indoctrination going on is trying to get these kids to be able to read and write - most of the kids I work with have parents who both work and little or no guidance at home with regards to schooling. How on earth would it be possible for a two-working-parents family to homeschool? I volunteer to listen to kids read because they don't have parents available or willing to do that for 20 minutes a day. The schools are a blessing to these kids and you are not helping. Instead of homeschooling - volunteer in a district with at risk kids. WWJD? I think he'd do that!
ReplyDeleteI was involved in the sex ed fight in Fairfax County 30 years ago when they were teaching middle schoolers (12 to 14-year olds!) that the way to avoid STDs was "not to change sexual partners too frequently." Today the sex ed is much worse and the result is an epidemic of STDs among teens as well as pregnancy and abortion.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to support the government schools that's your prerogative. I'd rather help my own kids and their peers home school. Charity begins at home.
Teame, I do not know what state your are in, but some of the schools in California are really, really bad. At one supposedly good high school, a fifteen-year-old of East Indian descent wrote an article several years ago called "Do We Really Need to know This?" for a local East Indian newspaper. She told how her high school was passing out condoms, flavored dental dams (for oral sex) and others such things free to the students, probably paid for by Planned Parenthood. She and her parents were appalled, and they were probably not even Christian but Hindu. I also saw myself when I was in a science classroom how classes on sexuality were taught with boys and girls in the same class, and how their modesty was broken down because of this, with both male and female teachers teaching both sexes. One instructional assistant got rid of a book that said Johnny or Susie had two moms (practicing Lesbians) or two dads (practicing homosexuals), but now they are including such garbage in the actual curriculum, so that the teachers who do not approve cannot take it out. Many parents are sending their children to private schools or homeschooling, so they will not be exposed to all this. When I was growing up, California had some of the finest public schools in the nations, even in the poorer or working class areas where I was raised, but not any longer.
ReplyDeleteRegarding my last post, I did volunteer and work in public schools for years, but the behavior of some of the parents just got worse and worse, with children being shoved back and forth from one divorced parent to another, or being late or not even coming to school since the parents were on drugs and many more such reasons.
ReplyDeleteI retired early because I could not take any more program changes. We would learn a program, and after we became proficient at it, they would trash it and get another, and we would have to learn a new one all over again.
Our oldest daughter is home schooling her three small daughters. At three-years-old her twins already know how to read words and some sentence and do math above grade level. She and another young Catholic mother home school at my daughter's house. It is worth her staying home to keep her children out of such an awful environment. Her husband is an electrician and she has a college degree in nutrition, so they are not wealthy and rely on his support, but those who home school help each other out by exchanging books, educational materials, clothes and many other things.