If you have felt that something is drastically the matter with the public schools in America, you are right.
To know why you are right, you could red these two insightful, enraging books: Crimes of the Educators by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld and The Cult of Common Core (an insider’s view) by Steve McQueen.
The upshot of both books is that we need to return everything pertaining to education back to the local level. There is no need for a federal department of education at all. It began under President Carter, against the wishes of Republicans.
Washington, D.C. has three buildings filled with education administrators. Maybe you saw a collection of them a number of years ago, on the day of the first speech by Betsy DeVos as the new (now former) Secretary of Education. She was entering upon a hornet’s nest of antagonistic philosophies. I thought, how could the federal employees who were filling those buildings with their bloated salaries and equally bloated view of their role possibly understand, let alone solve, local problems of curriculum choices, violence issues, dispensation of money, etc.? You need feet on the ground to wisely and effective respond to such challenges. The hundreds individuals working in those buildings gladly rushed in to fill the vacuum left by ousting God, setting themselves up in effect as the new gods over the minds of other people’s children. They knew better about everything.
The subtle reason the dominant proponents of public education want such bureaucracy is to usurp parental preferences with a better agenda, held in the hands of a few elites, to steer the country in the directions they dictate for their purposes. We have no control over the ideologies of who the they are. But one thing is certain: they are after rearranging social issues, not cognitive ones. Sex education, drug education, multiculturalism, gender issues are all marks of it. Sensitivity training, group think, values clarification are all substitutes for the values that once came from the Bible, but now must be redefined without God.
Control over curriculum (i.e., shaping the minds of the population) from one central place leads straight to socialist/collectivist ends. In China those in control “persuaded” the people that the collective mind is better than the independent mind. That always leads straight to the use of force, and oppression to accomplish it—and truth suffers. A quarter of a million people were slaughtered during the last century to bring in such utopias, all over the world, unfettered. Who controls our children is everything. And yes—The best administration of schooling is local, and the best schooling occurs inside the local home.
To get started, read Razor Sharp Teaching Tips for Homeschool Moms.
