Posted on 12/29/2010 5:50:30 AM PST by IbJensen
As an advocate of full educational freedom, I am occasionally asked what America would be like if compulsory school attendance laws were done away with and the government got out of the education business.
My answer is that we'd probably become the best-educated nation in the world. Why? Because when parents are in charge of their own children’s education, they will seek the best they can get, and in this age of high technology and endless resources, the very best is available to anyone who wants to look for it.
Let's face it. The public schools use the most boring textbooks to teach bored kids what they really don't care to know. In fact, most public schools don't even teach kids to read properly. They use teaching methods that create reading disability. Now, if you were in charge of teaching your own children to read, would you use a teaching method that produced reading disability? Of course not. You'd seek out a program that produced learning success. Such programs do exist, despite the fact that many public schools refuse to use them.
My own reading program, Alpha-Phonics, was created to permit parents to teach their own children to read at home in the proper phonetic manner, thus avoiding the harm the government schools cause. Thousands of parents, as independent home educators, have taught their children to read with this program very successfully.
We tend to forget that the parents of the Founding Fathers were not compelled to send their children to King George's public schools, which happily didn’t exist. There was total educational freedom in the colonies, and that is why it was possible to get the finest education available — either at home or at an academy owned by an individual whose job it was to provide the best education possible.
Indeed, it was well understood what was meant by education. First, it required a grounding in the Bible, and learning the languages in which the Holy Scripture and theological literature was written: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. It meant developing the intellectual faculties, the ability to read and to use language. It was understood that the mastery of language, which is the basic tool of thought, was the key to intellectual development.
In today's public schools, children's brains are stultified by the use of teaching methods resembling a non-surgical prefrontal lobotomy. Bright, intelligent children are deliberately made stupid by teaching methods calculated to do just that. We know that children are by nature intelligent because they start learning their own language practically from birth. By the time they are ready to attend school, they have mastered a vocabulary in the thousands of words. And they have done all of this by themselves, by listening and imitating the people around them, without the help of certified government teachers or schools.
All children, except the very seriously handicapped, are born with an innate language faculty. All children, therefore, are dynamos of language learning. The Bible tells us why. God gave us the power of speech: because He wanted to communicate with those He had created. In fact, the primary function of language was to permit man to know God. In other words, knowledge of God was the first step in Adam's education. The second function of language was to enable Adam to know the world. The Bible says in Genesis 2:19: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
In other words, God made Adam into an observer of the natural world around him, a scientist, and a lexicographer — an expander of language, and a maker of dictionaries. Then God gave Adam Eve. The Bible says in Genesis 1:28: "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
So now language was to be used to know others and explore, discover, cultivate, conserve, and conquer. And finally, Adam was to use language to know himself, for language is the tool of thought, and we use language with our own inner dialogue in the solitude of our being.
Since we know what God made man into, the purpose of education should be to make a man into what God intended him to be: lexicographer, scientist, explorer, inventor, conqueror, farmer, conservationist, and also husband, father, head of his family, and educator to his children.
True educators, steeped in Biblical knowledge, have always known that the development of language and its uses was the initial purpose of education. In Deuteronomy we learn the religious and social functions of education: to know God, and to pass on to future generations that knowledge, that love, that admonition. Language is that means of cultural and religious transmission.
The Bible, passed from generation to generation, is a testament to the everlasting value of the written Word of God. An education system that denies this overwhelming truth cannot be accepted by a God-fearing people.
We read in the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Thus, the Word is the key to everything of importance in our lives. But compulsory school attendance has destroyed that foundational knowledge and appreciation. You cannot even mention the Word of God in a government school. If we had educational freedom, the Word of God could once more become central to the lives of the American people.
There is no doubt that we would become the best educated people on earth, because we would know what education is and choose the best means to achieve it. We would acknowledge our dependence on God for ultimate wisdom. We would cultivate the minds of our children so that this God-given world of incredible beauty, variety, and mystery would be open to their curiosity and interest.
The public schools of today deprive children of their right to be what God made them to be. That is their sin. Charlotte Iserbyt, in her magnum opus, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, proves through exhaustive documentation that secular educators are using animal training techniques developed by behavioral scientists to turn American children into mindless robots who respond reflexively to stimuli imposed by godless educators. The children are being conditioned to respond through reinforcement as predicted by their trainers. As trained animals, they cannot take dominion over anything.
Education is not the same as training. Animals can be trained. They cannot be educated.
The present system of education reduces man to animal status so that he is denied the knowledge that he was made in God's image. When human beings, especially children, are trained like animals, they are being denied what is truly human about them: their ability to use their minds independently of any trainer. It is criminal to deprive children of their human qualities and capabilities. But that is what is being done in the name of School-to-Work, Outcome Based Education, and other such programs.
Our schools now teach children death education, suicide education, sex education, and drug education. Charlotte Iserbyt has observed that anything that is taught with the word "education" attached to it is not really education. You don't call reading, “reading education.” You don't call arithmetic, “arithmetic education.” You don't call spelling, “spelling education.” In other words, what they are really teaching is death, suicide, sex, and drugs. By adding the word education to these subjects, the educators fool parents into thinking that what the schools are doing is not subversive of their children's health and well-being, but something beneficial. But we know that it is not.
How much longer will Americans permit their children to be robbed of their most precious human values? Homeschoolers no longer permit it. Although they represent a small percentage of families in America, their numbers are growing. Little by little, the word is getting out. Thank God for that!
If a school-sucking alien mothership appears, I’ll be fine. My husband runs code for them, so he has a ‘deal.’ But it’s also nice to know I’ll have some company on the mother ship.
Heh, I might have known Pat would have to hire a programmer. He only writes Greek.
All well and good. Except a bit more unlikely than revoking Medicare. Ain’t gonna happen.
Too many people think of education as a “right” to which all (even the willingly ignorant) must have “equal” access.
You certainly are entitled to your opinion, but your reference to “Greek kids” is confusing. You are aware that the article discusses Biblical and pre-Biblical Greek, aren’t you, and not Greek spoken today by “Greek kids”??? And forgive me if I am ignorant of what “IE” is, but Russian is a Sanskrit language using the Cyrillic alphabet, which bears very little relation to English. My dad, a chemist, was fluent in Russian because so much of the research he studied was Russian.
Large and intractable institutions can lose their legitimacy seemly overnight. Some examples are the Protestant Reformation, The American Revolution, the abolishment of slavery, universal sufferage, Jim Crow, equal work for equal pay, etc.
The truth is that states across this nation, and the federal government, are facing impossible budget pressures. The U.S. spends **more** on K-12 education ( not including college) than it does on the military ( federal, state, and local combined). Offering vouchers and tax credits of $3,000 to $4,000 per normal child and eliminating masses of government teachers, and other school workers, from future state pensions would do **wonders** for state budgets.
Also....With so much of the GDP going into K-12 education it is an enormous drag on the economy. This is money that could and should be invested in growing jobs. All the school taxes that are hidden in every product and service produced in the U.S. make our products uncompetitive abroad and drives businesses off-shore.
Once vouchers, tax credits, and charters are established, parents should gradually be expected to take on the full cost of educating their own children.
That's even worse. Including anything like that in school materials is basically child abuse.
Even though my verbal scores on the MCAT were in the 90 percentile, I still feel as if my education in the foundation languages ( Greek and French) of English was lacking.
In a free economy you would be completely free to educate your children as you wished.
The foundation languages of English are French and German, both of which make sense to study. At least German is the modern descendant of one of the the base languages for English.
I guess the public schools do serve a purpose then!!
There is no law of physics to prevent a private (and intelligently run) school from teaching modern/live languages instead of ancient/dead ones.
My daughter is minoring in Ancient Greek...I asked her “Will this help you on your MCAT verbals? Does it help you understand English better? Will you be able to go to Greece and speak with the natives? Is this useful AT ALL in the modern world?” Nope, nope, nope, and nope.
But she thinks it’s cool she can read the gospels in the original language.
Who gets to define the word "intelligent'?.
In my schools we just showed up at the school yard in the morning and lined up with our classmates when it was time to go into school in the morning. Same process at lunch time. During warmer months one of the gym teachers who helped organize and "officiate" sports games for the older kids during the lunch break would blow his whistle at the appointed time to let everyone know that they had to line up to go back into school.
Call me an oddball, but I don't understand why this process would require bells or loudspeakers.
Of course, things changed in high school, but only because the students moved from one classroom to another throughout the course of the day -- and therefore the automated bell system indicated the end of each period.
It wasn’t until 2 years ago my middle school started with bells. I liked it SO much better without.
One of the local elementary schools still has the old school bell in the tower. They use that for everything other than the fire alarm/tornado drill. Very sweet and quaint
Depending on your perspective, be it worldly or eternal,
you have to ask which one will do her more good in the
loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong
run.
meh....she has to minor in something, so I don’t have any strong feelings either way, I just kind of think it’s a funny choice.
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