Swallow Your Pride, Save Your Child
If you know the background of compulsory public education, you are aware of what this author points out. If you are unfamiliar with the educational philosophy undergirding public education, you need to understand it and he explains it well:
Some people minimize the educational crisis by declaring that the public schools were good back in their day, and have merely gone off the rails within the past few decades. False. The "father of modern education," John Dewey, published his first major work, The School and Social Progress, in 1899. He was an anti-rational, anti-freedom (and later Trotskyite) dissembler who saw socialism as the only corrective for society's ills, and promoted public education as the most effective means to socialism. He has been the dominant intellectual force behind the development of Western education for a hundred years. Furthermore, the reason for his quick rise to preeminence in education theory is that his "radical methods" were not fundamentally inconsistent with the goals of the earlier "philanthropic" advocates of public education, namely to produce a qualified but humble underclass that would not challenge the authority of an entrenched oligarchy. (President Obama's crony Warren Buffet has recently remarked that in the name of fairness, private schools ought to be banned outright, and all children forcibly distributed to government schools by lottery. Plus ça change....)
In short, the past century of public education displays the fate of today's well-intentioned public school parent writ large. Civilization always was, in effect, mitigating the compulsory school's damage at home. In the earlier stages, the progressive degradation was more subtle, but only because public education itself had not yet become a completely closed shop. That is to say, a hundred years ago many parents had spent relatively few years in public schools themselves; many teachers and school administrators had received alternative forms of education, as had their own teachers and university professors; government schools were still somewhat under the sway of educational models adapted from the pre-public era; and the progressive schools had not yet entirely displaced family, religion, and great literature as the primary moral influences among the majority of the population. Civilization therefore deteriorated slowly, rather than all at once.
But it did deteriorate: today's universal public education catastrophe is not a radical shift from the schools of "your day." It is the inevitable, logical outcome of a long war between authoritarians who sought to mold a compliant underclass of amoral collectivists, and responsible adults who sought to promote a happy and moral life for their children.
The lesson is clear: The authoritarians won. They always will, in the end -- until they are forcibly denied the souls they wish to corrupt.If you have children in public school and just can't homeschool, pray. There is always an alternative: another home schooling family that you could work with, a co-op school, an extended family member who would gladly support your plan. God, through the intercession of His home schooling mother Mary, will assist you to find an answer that is best for your family.
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