Perhaps some quotes from several of the founding fathers on the value of public education will enlighten you.
And had another which I prepared been adopted by the legislature, our work would have been complete. It was a bill for the more general diffusion of learning. This proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square, like your townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; Thomas Jefferson 1786
If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security. Samuel Adams in a letter to James Warren, 1779. This seems n direct contradiction to your precious Lenin.
Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic. Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1821:
By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, 1782:
The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries. Thomas Jefferson in a letter to M. Correa de Serra, 1817:
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Ben Franklin, as quoted in Exercises in English Grammar (1909) by M. A. Morse:
Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.John Adams from his 1776 Papers:
The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.John Adams in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, 1854:
It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.Noah Webster in On the Education of Youth in America:
I think I will stick with REAL Americans, instead of the communist you all seem intent on worshiping.
As if modern public education in any manner reflects the classical education that the founders envisioned! You belie your own argument with your quotes filled with science, virtue and talent. Public education in this country long abandoned merit, virtue and morality.
The annals of academia are filled with the antithesis of such values. The grand proclamations by you gods call you to reject empiricism in the vain pursuit of leftist goals of atheism, communism, and egalitarianism. The current crop of youths enamored of uncle Bernie are the product of your beloved institution. I am not opposed to public education; I am opposed to a system of education teaches hate toward the people and country who support it.
Free schools under the direction of the parents whose children attend worked for hundreds of years. The advent of the unified school district and the emergence of the NEA destroyed that model. Though there are many wonderful teachers, they succeed despite, not because of, the system. For each one of those teachers, there are hundreds who are incompetent and some who are outright evil.
The children of the poor are not lifted to genious, but taught dependence, envy and hatred. Those who make it out intact are not representative, but anomalies who succeed in rare instances. The bulk of suburban schools provide a simulacrum of education for most of their students; however few survive the teach-to-test with their joy of learning intact. Memory dumps and google searches are great for passing tests, but neither equal thinking.
As Samuel Clemons said, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.”