Public schoolers: How's that indoctrination workin' out?

[Confederate Kahanist]

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I recently did something I haven't done in decades: I reread the Laura Ingalls Wilder series (the Little House books). The contrast between the schools of Laura's time (late 1800s) and the schools of today is staggering. Utterly incomprehensible.

To illustrate, consider some recent headlines:

    * Obama czar's "homo-genda" proposed for U.S. schools; Congressional legislation called "a sexual revolutionary's dream"

    * Look what they're erasing from U.S. history! American heroes could get swapped for hip-hop culture in textbooks

    * Survey asks students when they lost virginity; Results in newspaper show classes counseled "why not" be sexually active

    * Schools' assignment: Squelch family values; State lawmakers urge "meaningful" counseling for wrong attitudes

    * Liberal intolerance alive and well in moronic teacher from Oregon; Oregon teacher panel probes educator determined to "demolish" tea party

    * Bill would require sex education starting in kindergarten

    * Memo to public schools: Stop pushing sex! Group demands California implement programs promoting abstinence

Can you imagine these headlines happening during Laura's time?

Learn about the depths the secular culture goes to in corrupting your kids – read "The War on Children: How Pop Culture and Public Schools Put Our Kids at Risk"

If you read the sobering history of public schools, it becomes painfully clear that their purpose is not (necessarily) education; it's social change. "The public-schools movement began in the 1830s, led by Horace Mann," notes George L. O'Brien in "Government Schools in Crisis." "Supposedly, the goal was to ensure that every child would have access to an education. However, from the beginning there was another agenda, and that was to control what was being taught so as to create so-called model citizens. Public schools meant taking control of education from the parents and placing it in the hands of social engineers and the government."

The early successes of these social-engineering experiments were limited because most school districts were independent and under the power of a local school board (meaning parents). But then the "unified school" movement came along at the turn of the century, which destroyed the system of local control. After World War II, educational jurisdiction was transferred to state governments. Things spiraled down even faster under President Carter, who created the U.S. Department of Education.

"Once the parents lost control of the schools," laments Mr. O'Brien, "the schools quickly became laboratories for social-engineering experiments. … The central struggle, of course, is money. As long as the government schools take so much money from parents in taxes, it is hard for parents to afford to send their children to nongovernment schools. Attempts to change this through tax credits and vouchers have resulted in vicious counterattacks from the NEA among others."

Since schools are the mandatory gathering place of our society's future, it's the natural laboratory for any agenda – anything at all – to be forced upon our children. Since teachers' unions are extremely left-wing, it's the left-wing propaganda that gets pushed. Anything green, anything abortionist, anything feminist, anything homosexual, anything victimized, anything revisionist – it's all there, shoved down our children's gullets.

And since the liberal education machine is obsessed with sex – and make no mistake, liberals as a whole are obsessed with sex – schools are unwilling to comprehend, much less encourage, family values. Therefore, children become corrupted.

Which is why we now have sex education in kindergarten. Can you imagine this happening during Laura's time?

It's to the point where all the "agenda-izing" has pushed out academics. Who has time for science, history, math, English, etc.? We've got graduates who can't even find the United States on a world map. No wonder we're unable to compete with Korea or Turkey on international math scores.

It also means we now have government thugs whose job it is to catch desperate parents who lie and claim their children are living in a better district (so the kids have a chance at a higher-quality education) in order to force those children back to dangerous inner-city schools. "I was actually crying," said a grandmother, "and all I'm wanting to do is just to have my grandchild have a better education. … Why can't they just let parents to get in the school of their choice?"

Because, in the words of John Stossel, the government monopoly thinks it knows best.

As if this isn't bad enough, we hear from a furious mother in Wyoming – Wyoming of all places! – on the Rush Limbaugh show that her high-school son was told by his government teacher, "The old people just need to shut up and go along with what needs to be done for this country. … This country will be better off when the old people are gone."

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You know, all those troublesome old people who "laid their life on the line for this country so that [the teacher] has the freedom to spout this drivel that she's spouting." And this is just one teacher in a fairly conservative state. How much worse must it be in places like San Francisco or Boston?

The peer pressure in these schools – pressure to dress, act and speak only in certain ways – is so strong that it's taken otherwise decent kids and turned them into monsters. I can't count the number of children I know who start out wholesome and innocent – and by the age of 15 are slouching around, dressing like sluts, talking like sailors and having sex.

What would Laura think?

Schools have become little more than giant laboratories of social experimentation. When confronted with the massive failure of the public educational system, the only thing liberals can bleat like a broken record is "More money! More money!"

What they won't admit is that government monopolies fail. Their broken-record chant should be "More competition! More competition!" if they really cared about better education.

Of course not every teacher agrees with the radical left-wing garbage pushed in schools. Most teachers enter the profession with a sincere love of children and a desire to shape their futures for the good. But their often mandatory involvement with teachers' unions and government mandates wipes away their innocent and naïve interest, leaving behind jaded, bitter and disillusioned people who once hoped to shape our children with great care.

Homeschool your kids, folks. It's the only way to save them.