Bigger Threat: Terrorism or Public Education?

10-10-2014
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Former talk show host Neal Boortz once said that the National Education Association teacher’s union is a bigger threat to America than al Qaeda.

That might sound ridiculous. But, as Boortz said, “Look, al Qaeda…could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people…We would recover from that. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers' unions in this country can destroy a generation.”

Ever since social engineers John Dewey and Horace Mann began to re-make the school house into a factory for little leftist cogs over 100 years ago, public education has increasingly eroded public morality, the family, patriotism, and learning.

One could fill a library with all the bizarre and evil social experiments foisted upon children trapped in public school classrooms. This week’s atrocity was the “Purple Penguin” story, spread through the news media and on Facebook.

National Review reported:

“(The Lincoln, Nebraska) school district has instructed its teachers to stop referring to students by “gendered expressions” such as “boys and girls,” and use “gender inclusive” ones such as “purple penguins” instead.

“Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys and girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” instructs a training document given to middle-school teachers at the Lincoln Public Schools.

“Create classroom names and then ask all of the ‘purple penguins’ to meet on the rug,” it advises.

The document also warns against asking students to “line up as boys or girls,” and suggests asking them to line up by whether they prefer “skateboards or bikes/milk or juice/dogs or cats/summer or winter/talking or listening.”

“Always ask yourself . . . ‘Will this configuration create a gendered space?’” the document says.

Faced with a national fury, Lincoln School Superintendent Steve Joel was not backing down; telling the Lincoln Journal Star that he “would not stop efforts to reach all students, including those who are gender non-conforming or transgender.”

My mother is a retired public school teacher. I graduated from a public school. But government schools have become political fiefdoms of the Left and are, more often than not, at war with Christianity, traditional American values, and the rights of parents.

They are also centers of child abuse. Kevin Williamson nailed it when he wrote the following about American public education, in response to that crazy Sandy Hook commission report released recently, which said that homeschools should be monitored.

In a piece entitled, "They Are Coming for Your Children," Williamson writes,

"(G)overnment schools are in fact the single most destructive institution in American public life, and they are the bedrock of the Left’s power, providing billions of dollars in campaign contributions and millions of man-hours for Democratic campaigns.

But they do more than that: They are the real-life version of those nightmarish incubator pods from The Matrix, and home-schooling is a red pill. We entrust our children to the state for twelve or thirteen years, during which time they are subjected to a daily regimen that is, like the school buildings themselves, more than a little reminiscent of the penitentiary: “bells and cells,” as one of my teachers used to call it.

They are instructed in obedience and compliance, as though the most important skill in life were the ability to sit quietly and follow instructions; those children who are more energetic than the authorities care for are given psychiatric diagnoses and very often put on psychiatric drugs: Since the 1980s, the rate of antidepressant prescription for children has increased five-fold, while the rate of antipsychotic prescription has increased six-fold.

The Left’s model of society is still the model of Marx and Bismarck: one big factory to be managed by experts. The government schools are an assembly line for human widgets, who are in theory there to be taught what the state requires them to know in order to fulfill their roles as workers, administrators, and other bits of human machinery.

That is the assumption behind President Obama’s insistence that “if you quit on school, you’re not just quitting on yourself — you’re quitting on your country.” Students are also there to be instructed in the official, unspoken state ideology: submission to official power.

The Left’s organizing principle is control, and the possibility that children might commonly be raised outside of its control matrix is an existential threat from the progressive point of view. Institutions such as free markets and free speech terrify progressives, because they are the result of arrangements in which nobody is in control. The idea that people could be teaching their children practically anything, without the input of credentialed education experts, is a nightmare."

Parents are responsible to God for how they raise their children. And sending children to government schools has become all but indefensible.

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