Government-Run Schools Geared To Serving Themselves

As a nation, we’ve evolved to hold these truths to be self-evident: life, liberty and the pursuit of publicly funded education. Some contend it is a must if our democracy is to survive.

Thus, once again, Congress increased funding to government education and advanced the workforce bill that could kill independent and competitive education by denying graduates of these systems work permits.

Thanks to publicly funded education, many people believe America’s constitutional republic is a democracy. A constitutional republic elects representatives of character to make laws based on the Constitution. However, a democracy is ruled by the masses, as polled at any given moment. Hopefully, children are still reciting “and to the Republic …” in the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

This year, listen closely to the government schoolchildren who learn to promote the collective over independent thought. The collective mentality failed in the former Soviet Union and it will fail here, unless you believe the Berlin Wall would still be standing if only it were federally funded.

Government control of education has not and will not guarantee excellence. The good news is that ever-growing numbers of families are sacrificially opting for private and home schooling. There are no illiterate graduates from these schools that employ time-proven methods of education supported by validated research. But instead of looking to successful schools for reform, the government has turned to corporate America for even better-funded folly.

Big business, no longer with American allegiances but global allegiances, has been more than happy to pay. For example, when Boeing says it wants full employment for our children, it is not speaking in the American sense of “a job for everybody,” but in a global, socialistic sense of “a body for every job.” That’s the brilliance of euphemisms like “school to work” or “work force training.”

America is being dragged sleepily from a free citizenship to collective worker. These cherished distinctions were challenged in Olympia this year in a public hearing on Senate Bill 5333, which would’ve guaranteed that children who pass a knowledge-based test could not be denied access to college or a job because they were private- or home-schooled. What could be more obviously right?

Yet, the education lobby vehemently opposed this bill and protested that they have come too far in re-engineering our schools. As one Democratic senator said, it’s the government’s job to look out for all the children of the state and make sure they meet the state’s criteria for a certificate of mastery (another euphemism for “work permit”). In the silent echo of her comment, you could hear an awakening in the hearts of mothers that there may soon be more to pay for choice in education than the price of tuition.

But, why must there be one and only one way to educate all children? It’s because private schools operate in a free market and understand they have customers - tuition-paying parents - they try to please.

Government schools also strive to please those they perceive as generating their money - the education lobby, according to Doug Wilson of the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. Can you imagine the fire department being shocked that we actually expect them to put out fires? What if they kept coming back for more money, only to use it for meetings on progressive ways to think about fires?

Hundreds if not thousands of citizens try to tell legislators that when public schools fail to educate, they are rewarded with more money; the state’s compulsory education laws trap the neediest children in the ruins. But we haven’t elected people of character who can hear it.

However, when private schools fail to educate, they lose students to successful schools. What if the 60 percent of our state budget spent on publicly funded schools was left in the hands of the citizens to pay for the schools of their choice? Parents who hold no hidden agenda over the children would be free to make the best choices for them.

Congress, thinking democratically, believes America wants education full of false promises about raising the bar and deceptive practices such as dumbing-down tests and doctoring the scoring methods until taxpayers can no longer determine the effectiveness of the schools.

Government-run education is a derailed, 100-year experiment that Wilson calls, “mediocrity in education and excellence in bureaucratization.”

Government-run choice is also doomed to fail. Performance proves quality, but state accreditation proves only state control.

The socially anointed consider such talk blasphemy. Thus, every other option of education reform but this one will be explored - and I mean every other one - to distract us from arriving at the one option that would make a difference.

In the cacophony of protest, notice the ones who cry the loudest - those who stand to lose the most political influence and money. But education will never be reformed as long as it is state controlled and the pawn of political pressure groups.

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