Points the President Needs to Brush Up on About Schools

School is our most obsolete institution, more so even than world-accommodating churches and the post office. School serves no purpose except to be the platform for satanic school union officials to bribe us into neglecting our kids, high-expense and high-mind-poison babysitting, in the age of distance education: free University Distance Learning (for no pay you can get the core education equivalent to a Bachelor's, and find an institution to "challenge" your degree requirements), Kahn Academy and LinkedIn-Lynda.com computer training.

A properly designed universal self-selecting curriculum approved, not even by small local school boards at the 1-room level, but by that most basic curriculum committee, the Family, would find, in the words of champion teacher John Taylor Gatto, that basic phonics-based literacy can be attained in 40 hours of properly formulated instruction, and basic numeracy in 42 hours of Singapore- or Saxon-based math instruction. But what will homeschoolers do with the rest of kids' time?

Let them shadow us in our real-time work. Get them outdoors. Read "the good books" to them. Foster their dreams, don't crush the imagination, set their primary educational goal, attaining self-employment at a modest level of income, like the Amish, rather than scoring well in standardized testing that doesn't even prepare them to be good drones in monopolized hyper-mega-biz. Help kids find their own future in volunteering, mentorship, and self-initiated small enterprises, so that after an average 2 small-biz failures, they can come to a high probability of attaining self-reliance.

Compulsory universal education came from Prussia, which found it essential to make their whole common citizenry into uniform soldiers and factory drones who wouldn't question orders, after Prussia's defeat to Napoleonic France in 1806 at the battle of Jena. This at the hands of Napoleon's common soldiers, privates and corporals who were encouraged to carry "a field marshal's baton in their rucksacks", to disobey orders from headquarters, seize initiative and mow down the fearsome Prussians top-heavy with useless aristocrats.

Compulsory-universal Prussian education became the world paradigm, after failed pre-Marxist "New Harmony" utopian-commune leader, American Robert Owen convinced Prussian King Friederich Wilhelm IV to adopt dumbing-down to hobble commoners' education and crush their imaginations. American Horace Mann worked to spread universal-compulsory education to all 50 states and, ultimately, ail industrialized countries including Japan, with whole-word vs. phonics, to hobble students' educational development. (But John Dewey paid Big Capital back big time: 4 of John D. Rockefeller's 5 sons whom he sent to Dewey's experimental Lincoln School, contracted dylexia there from stupidized "see Jane run" whole-word "literacy instruction".)

Financial capitalists, J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller Chase-Manhattan, put a strong mixture of intellectual-hobbling poison into compulsory-universal education curricula starting first in the 1880s, because the self-reliance and ingenuity of self-employed Yankee small farmers, engineer-mechanics and entrepreneurs posed a threat to the centralized capital-money accumulation of financial capitalism. Andrew Carnegie "generously" gave pensions to teachers in the new universal-compulsory schools, but only if they would dump their idealism and submit to the deliberately dumbed-down curriculum.

One and a half centuries later, schools no longer serve any of this hidden agenda. We don't need a homogenized citizen army, in fact, our stupidized kids' mental-hobbling posed a crisis to military recruiters a generation ago, because kids couldn't make even the minimal qualification to be in an all-volunteer army. (Incoming recruits' unbiased, average military testing scores: WW2, 94%; Korea, 87%; Viet Nam, 64%.)

The other main, hidden agenda item when poisoned, universal-compulsory education was first rolled out between 1880-1910, was under Frederick Taylor's dark-science of time-management, to produce a nation of docile factory drones. (Do you know any kids who are going to work in a factory?) The education-hobbling crisis results in industry-wide vocational-training as far as possible away from the filthy rich, stinking Augean stables of NEA public education, unionized lobbyist bribery. (Has Momma Grizzly, Sarah Palin yet shucked off her enmity to charter schools in favor of school unions? ) Medium and small biz has to work around the moronic "educational" output of our Department of Education dictated public schools.

After the election, if Google and the Dems don't steal it, count on Education Secretary Betsy de Vos to roll out direct payments to homeschooling parents, charter schools, and those schools throwing off the tyranny of the NEA and state teacher unions like the California CTA. If those "education experts" at Harvard Law don't manage to kill homeschooling and charter schools at the Supreme Court.

Virtual Study Hall is the Best Contemporary Model for True Education. "We're all homeschoolers now." Virtual Study Hall is a contemporary update, for today's conditions, of the highly successful One Room School model of 200 years past, enlarging the scope of Homeschool socialization groups to encompass the primary education enterprise itself, centering on instruction and study.

Study Halls supply a vital, missing element of study progress, for students to coordinate between textbooks and instruction. (The continual demand of junior students for the teacher's attention in the open classroom, tends to limit the effectiveness of the teaching and study enterprise to the lowest common denominator; a group instructor who is both giving the lecture and monitoring students' individual progress, can only go the speed of the slowest student.)

In the Study Hall, elder students help more junior ones, as they did in One Room Schools. The quiet environment naturally promotes studiousness, on the model of virtue as the incremental practice of building up good habits. But the chief difficulty in the current situation is insuring remotely linked study hall participants have the proper environment of quiet and focus to foster concentration on the course of study.

Another vital issue for homeschooled, former public school students, is working around attempts by central school authorities to hobble progress by linking it to the policy of systematic, calculated failure of the past century. So, homeschoolers need to update themselves with a primer on the policy of failure.

The Hall of Shame of the 19th-20th Century of Mis-Education Saboteurs

Consideration of a bullet list of the historical architects of failure can help homeschoolers now to sidestep the futile outreach of the school hierarchy.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the prophet of mis-eduation, was the seminal corrupter of the educational enterprise, pushing the delusory mythology of "natural education" to promote fallacious idealism about "happiness, spontaneity, and inquisitiveness", so students' tendency to lose focus could overturn the natural study hierarchy and attain dominance of the educational enterprise.
Robert Owen (1771-1858), proprietor of the failed, pre-Marxist utopian New Harmony commune, was able to influence Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, to institute mandatory state education, overriding Homeschooling and the One Room School.
Horace Mann (1796 -1859) succeeded in spreading the false gospel of mandatory state education to all American states and many world countries. Horace Mann promoted whole-word, non-phonetic reading instruction.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) subjected mandatory state schools to the principles of the dark science of scientific management, instituting standardized testing against the interests of students' individual educational attainment and treating them as factory employment industrial products.
John Dewey, working with William Kilpatrick promoted whole-word reading after the first long-term reaction against Horace Mann's efforts in that regard. (Four the of five sons of John D. Rockefeller Sr. contracted dyslexia at John Dewey's experimental Lincoln School, which Rockefeller endowed.) John Dewey applied the "box-cutter" to the pandora's box of anti-intellectual miseducation, for the expanding class of leftist "education" planners to dumb-down primary education. John Dewey significantly enabled leftist eggheads to dissolve the traditional education enterprise and spin hairbrained pipe-dreams about how to conduct institutionalized "education" policy--"child-centered education"--without ever taking stock of the actual damage being done to millions of people's lives.

Ideology From the Ivory Tower Down to the Normal Schools. Intellectuals spin etherial theories about how the little people must live, but don’t pick up the tab. John Dewey destroyed primary 1-6 education between 1920 and 1940, from Columbia Teacher’s College for “trainers of trainers”, to mis-educate generations of teachers at Normal Schools across America, effectively jettisoning of the Western civilization legacy of Good and Great Books from America’s schools across the board.

By the first quarter of the 20th century, broad public awareness of socialist mis-educators' destructive plans caused them to veil their actual intentions in smuggled phrases like "democracy" and "progressivism".

At the beginning of the 20th century, education was subjected to the broad action of monopolization of all institutions, cartelizing the educational enterprise that had been the natural domain of families and local towns.

Instead of senior students of the One Room School assuming Headmaster and Headmistress roles at the local level, Teachers must be mass-processed through Normal Schools (Horace Mann). Mega High Schools with thousands of anonymous students must replace the intimate, home and local educational enterprise. School Districts must be combined into larger and larger districts, so that the NEA could dictate Federal Educational policy.

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