Do We Need Year-Round Public School?

From NewsWithViews

By Lee Duigon

I don’t have television in my home, but when I’m in a doctor’s waiting room, I have no choice: television has me.

So there I was, waiting, with the doctor’s TV set too loud to ignore, trying to decide which of its offerings was worse—the in-depth analysis of Kim Kardashian’s divorce after two months of marriage, or retired TV noozie Tom Brokaw babbling away about how America’s kids need year-round public schooling.

As brain-rottingly loathsome as the Kardashian material was, Brokaw’s earnest prattle is the more toxic to our culture.

Consider the damage done by a mere nine months a year of public schooling. Don’t be fooled by public education’s miserable failure to teach reading, writing, history, mathematics, science, critical thinking, and other such fripperies. Public education succeeds brilliantly in turning children into teat-sucking, leftist, de-Christianized duds.

It’s quite an achievement. The schools teach children to disbelieve anything they hear from their parents or their church—but at the same time to swallow, whole, everything held out to them by teachers, Democrat politicians, liberal “news” media, college professors, and any old poop with a grey ponytail. Simultaneously the schools breed radical skepticism and radical credulity.

Give public schools just nine months a year, and we wind up with college-“educated” Wall Street protesters in Che Guevara T-shirts and not a functioning brain cell between any two of them. We wind up with a mysterious “community organizer” in the White House. The country winds up $15 trillion in debt.

If that’s what a nine-month school year does to us, what havoc might be wrought by sentencing our children to a twelve-month school year, with no time off for good behavior?

Just now, on the radio, I heard a New York Congressman say, “I believe in the separation of religion and the government.” Voila! This is why we have an irreligious government, and this is why government schools are irreligious—because in fruitlessly attempting to separate religion and government, all you do is set up the government as a religion unto itself. The state is a jealous god, and if there were 15 months in the year instead of twelve, statists like Tom Brokaw would press for a 15-month school year.

To estrange children from the Christian religion, the schools of the government religion stuff young minds with abominations and absurdities. If your local school district doesn’t yet have “gender coaches,” just wait—it will. These are the ones who will teach your kindergarten children, “You can be a girl one day and a boy the next day, whatever you feel like being on that day.” Meanwhile, there’s a good chance your neighborhood middle school already has a “gay/straight alliance.” There are thousands of them, nationwide. And because Christianity is the dominant religion of America, there’s a good chance your local school is already praising Islam, witchcraft, and atheism, and encouraging your children to “explore” them.

You could weep for pity and frustration. Almost every one of those poor, pitiful dunces protesting they know not what entered this world as a perfectly normal human baby. No one is born with a degree in Gender Studies, a $100,000 student loan debt, and no more use to anybody than a two-legged stool. They are shaped that way by public school—with help from predatory politicians, a morally diseased “entertainment” industry, clueless parents, and slacker churches.

Finally, although it hardly bears mentioning in company with all these other issues, America spends an incalculable amount of money to provide a school year only nine months long. No one dares to venture a reliable estimate of the total cost of public education, but it can’t possibly be less than $1 trillion a year. If you think that’s hard to bear, wait’ll you see the bill for 12 months of public school a year.

But in making war against our way of life, statists have unwittingly shown Christians how we ought to proceed.

If they can set up anti-Christian schools, then we can set up Christian schools—thousands of them: home schools, church schools, neighborhood cooperatives. Unless God has hardened our hearts and softened our heads, Christian families can surely take back the education of their own children.

The pagan, statist reconstruction of America has been going on, uninterrupted, since the latter half of the 19th century. With all that time and work behind them, why do they have conniptions if anybody even whispers “Christian reconstruction”? With all that time and work behind them, they’re still so insecure that they feel the need to gobble up the last three months of the year. Why are they so insecure?

Because they know that if we try, with God’s blessing, we can undo in 20 years what they have done in 150.

 
Lee Duigon, a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist. He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar, available on www.amazon.com

Website: LeeDuigon.com