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By Lee Duigon
December 6, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

Even in this age of non-stop barefaced lying, no one has the temerity to say that with American public education, everything is hunky-dory. We spend more money on it than any country in the world and still can’t make it to the top, consistently falling behind such powerhouses as Finland and Poland, and even trailing well behind poor old England.

Not to worry—our education wizards have a solution. As of next year, they’ll test it out in selected guinea-pig school districts in New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. And that solution is… (trumpet fanfare) to tack at least 300 more classroom hours onto the school year.

The scheme’s head cheerleader is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Having interviewed him once, I know exactly where he’s headed. Indeed, he’s made no secret of it.

Ultimately, Duncan wants kids to be in school six or even seven days a week, for eleven—or even all twelve—months of the year.

He envisions America as a vast Chicago ghetto stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, poverty-stricken, fatherless, improperly fed, functionally illiterate, whose only hope is Government, and plenty of it. In his dream, the school displaces the family as the center of the child’s life and pretty much knocks the church out of the picture, too. It’s straight out of Plato, who, in his utopian Republic, said, “No son shall know his father, and no father, his son.” The welfare subculture is already off to a flying start in that direction.

A few rather affluent communities have already experimented with year-round school. It gives the kiddies time to learn such indispensable skills as calligraphy, sailboat management, and how to make models out of uncooked pasta. Eat your heart out, Finland!

You are more likely to find a rabid wolverine in a children’s petting zoo than an education theorist in a classroom. They have no idea of what actually happens in a public school. When the pupils are not yakking, text messaging, fighting, arranging to have sex—or even having it right there, if the teacher falls asleep—they’re busy with diversity education, multicultural studies, Obama-worship, and “sex education.” It’s so important to know how to get an abortion without your parents finding out!

America’s children already spend too much time in public school, not too little. In public education’s weird concept of “socialization,” they are rigidly segregated into age groups and learn to view their age-group peers as the most important people in their lives. They learn the great lesson of conformity. Meanwhile, from their unionized teachers they learn The Three S’es—socialism, self-esteem, and sexual anarchy.

For some hundred and fifty years, public education has been the tool with which secular statists, in the tradition of Plato and John Dewey, hope to eradicate the influence of Christianity. They’ve had much success, and year-round public schooling ought to finish the job. An extra 300 hours of it is only another step in that direction.

The bottom line is to do away with the family and the church and to make the state the be-all and end-all in the life of every citizen. That no economy in world history has ever been able to sustain such a monster cuts no ice with socialists. “Are you kidding? With the likes of us in charge, it’s bound to work!” That’s how every socialist thinks. A history of failure doesn’t faze them.

What America needs is more home schooling, much more, and Christian schooling for those who can’t manage it at home. According to every test ever devised by man, the homeschooled children run rings around those marooned in public school. They can even hold their own against the Finns.

One day, as I was vainly attempting to teach in a public school classroom, a poor, homely girl stood up and rapped on her desk. “Attention, everybody!” she said. “I want to tell you that I’m gonna have a baby!”

Wild applause ensued. When it finally died down, somebody asked, “Who’s the baby’s daddy?”

The girl paused to think it over. “Well,” she answered, “I’ve got it narrowed down to four or five guys who might be it.”

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More cheering. As for me, I sat at my desk with my head in my hands, muttering, “This isn’t happening, it’s only a dream. This isn’t happening, it’s only a dream…”

But it did happen, and it is happening—all over the country, as our culture melts down before our very eyes.

And we want more of this?

America can’t afford any more of this. We want more family, more church—not more public schooling.

So let’s stop doing it. Homeschooling and Christian schooling will make us well again. Rather than continuing to dump a trillion dollars a year (at least!) down the bottomless pit of public education, let’s take our children back.

While we still can.