Public Education: The Sick Dinosaur on Fed Life Support
by Samuel L. Blumenfeld Recently by Samuel L. Blumenfeld: How To Cure Dyslexia
It is said that the dinosaur had a tiny brain in a huge body, which undoubtedly contributed to its extinction. This huge body also required an enormous amount of food for its survival. The public education establishment has the same characteristics: small brain, huge body, enormous appetite for taxpayer money – its only means of survival. The government school is also obsolete, a product of 19th century utopian reformers who believed in the perfectibility of man and a secular government education as the means to salvation. None of their ideas have panned out. The idea of centralized, government-controlled education was imported into this country from Prussia in 1843 by Horace Mann the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, who believed that Americans could adapt the Prussian system to American needs. It had everything our statist control-freaks wanted: government education of teachers in state seminaries; a state directed curriculum; state-approved textbooks; compulsory school attendance; truant officers; and obedient parents. Toward the end of the 19th century, the system became the perfect means to indoctrinate children to become the obedient subjects of the growing industrial-government establishment.
Although Americans at the time, in the 1830s and ‘40s, were enjoying full educational freedom and patronizing the growing number of private academies, Mann and his fellow statists saw the public school as the best means of imposing social control over the children of the poor immigrants who were flooding the United States as well as Americans who greatly valued private education. But the whole idea of centralized, government-monopoly education is totally incompatible with the values of a free society. But these statist ideas, which swept over America in the wake of the industrial revolution and the rise of socialism, are now being seen by more and more Americans as impediments to true education. The computer has heralded a post-industrial information age in which decentralization and privatization are now the imperatives of the future development of a dynamic, high-tech, market economy. The government school is an anachronism. Not only does it no longer serve the basic purposes of education, and not only has it become a huge parasite on the national economy, but it is blocking the development of the new technology-driven private institutions that will be needed in America’s future. The public is addicted to government education because it has been with us for 169 years and most people cannot even imagine education without government control. Even though about two million parents are now homeschooling their children quite successfully without government supervision, the vast majority of Americans still put their children in government schools because they’ve been led to believe that they are too stupid to educate their own kids. The professional teachers, controlled by their politicized labor unions, have become educators for a variety of reasons.
Their colleges of education have trained them in how to dumb down the kids while giving the impression that they are actually educating them. That is probably the greatest magic act of self-deception ever put over on a supposedly intelligent group of people. The lumbering dinosaur’s preoccupation with politics is an indication that it knows its survival depends not on pleasing the easily deceived parents but on controlling corrupt state legislators who prattle incessantly about their concern for “the children.” And the more incapable the system becomes of delivering academic excellence, the more it will rely on politics for its survival. Even George Bush, a Republican President, had the gall to saddle America with No Child Left Behind, which has just about left everyone behind, including the taxpayer. Of course, the education larcenists have become experts at pretending to reform education, but these reforms cannot work because the collective brain that has produced them is not only lacking in reasoning power, but exhibits the symptoms of disease and retardation. A school system that no longer educates but deliberately dumbs down its students is a corrupt freak that no more resembles a genuine institution of learning than a nest of rats in the sewer pipes of New York. Who will deny that distributing condoms to middle- and high-school students is about as corrupt an idea as has ever been promoted by so-called educators who are clearly guilty of contributing to the delinquency of minors? Who can deny that separating education from Biblical moral values has simply delivered the schools into the eager hands of the devil? And who can deny that the young adults emerging from our high schools are not only poorly prepared for college but are morally confused and ill-equipped to deal with the problems of our society? February 16, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The New American
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