From our archives
American values and altruism have had an overall positive impact in the world and allowed the U.S. to become the greatest and most free nation on earth over the last 3 plus centuries. Not much has changed in the 18 years since we first noted this.
One example is the altruistic (and Christian) drive to *public* education that started in New England in the early 19th Century and expanded through community supported “blab” schools and other parochial and secular types of schooling until the early 20th century. During *public* school’s evolution it was originally driven by the idea that the State and Community had a responsibility to make basic schooling *AVAILABLE* to all the children of our citizenry. This is good, altruistic and fitting to liberal philosophies espoused by the founders of the country.
In the 20th century *public* schooling began to mutate slowly into its current bureaucratized form. Larger and larger entities of government became involved (beyond the local level) and sought *control* and *oversight* (another word for control) of the education of the citizenry’s children. Along with this mutation came a perversion of the original driver of *AVAILABILITY* of education to all children into a much more dangerous and insidious point of view and philosophy of the *purpose* of *public* education. My point is aptly illustrated by an opinion by the New Jersey Courts regarding home schooling of children. The “jurists” were quite bald and plain in their opinion that it is the *STATE* rather than the citizens themselves who are responsible to control and command issues surrounding the education of our children.
Its ironic how it has worked. The more the the mutated evolution has progressed and the more we have fed it with its own victims moneys, the worse the education of our children has become. The lower they perform seems (I can’t cite data at this time) directly related to how much more the *STATE* controls the education of children. They (the educrats) certainly are more brazen as *paying* for days you choose to keep your children out of school.
This change in the driving philosophy of *public* education is a perverted, warped and wrong construct for a free country. It directly contravenes our founding principles of limiting the scope and power of government to ONLY those things that can only be accomplished by government. Many in the educrat establishment display, when they aren’t stating it openly, an assumption that the STATE knows better than the parents regarding their children. That the STATE, in essence, has primary control and ownership of the citizenry’s children. This is a pervasive and growing trend. One that *YOU* and all concerned and active citizens should resist, fight and be extremely wary of.
Freedom of education resources: Learn in Freedom, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Homeschooling references: Home School Central, The Homeschool Legal Defense Association