Is the Sun Rising in the East?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The scores are in from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, which, every three years, tests 15-year-olds from the world’s most advanced countries.

For the United States, the report card is dismal. The U.S. ranking has fallen to 17th in reading, 21st in science, and 26th in math.

Florida, one of America’s diverse mega-states, competed separately in the PISA exam, and scored below the U.S. average.

In the academic Olympics, the American superpower is a mediocrity.

The Case for Educational Pluralism

Alternatives to the state-funded educational monopoly.

From First Things

By Ashley Rogers Berner

Public education means different things in different countries. In the United States, it means government-funded and government-delivered schooling—schooling that is supposedly ideologically neutral but in fact reflects a progressive tradition strongly committed to beliefs and to an educational philosophy rejected by many Americans. Not surprisingly, we now fight a great deal about public education. Other democracies fight about education, too, but less divisively, because for them, “public education” means educational pluralism: government support for diverse institutions that reflect a wide variety of beliefs and commitments.

One hundred and fifty years ago, America’s elites, faced with waves of (mostly Catholic, ethnic, and poor) immigrants, concluded that only state-enforced uniformity could effectively make one people out of many. Once bitterly contested on grounds of religious liberty, this belief in the uniform common school, and its ability to create citizens out of disparate groups, is now so embedded in our consciousness that we cannot imagine public education otherwise. 

The Failure of American Public Education

Published in The Freeman, February 1993

By John Hood

Many American critics believe that the major problem with public education today is a lack of focus on results. Students aren’t expected to meet high standards, the argument goes, and the process of education takes precedence over analyzing education results in policy-making circles.

This is a valid argument (as far as it goes). Indeed, it can be taken one important step further. We not only fail to hold individual students accountable for poor performance, we have also failed to hold the entire government-controlled school system accountable for its performance since at least World War II. Public education is itself a failure. Why shouldn’t individual students follow its example?

Wisconsin Photo Says It All

America's Public School System: Brutal and Spartan

"Education in Sparta" by Luigi Mussini

From NewsWithViews
By Joel Turtel

The public school system in America has become a dismal failure. But education in many other times and cultures has been quite successful. The ancient Greeks, whose civilization was at its height around 550 B.C., founded Western civilization as we know it. The Athenian Greeks invented or perfected logic, drama, science, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, literature, and much more. Yet ancient Greece had no compulsory schools.

Other than requiring two years of military training for young men that began at age eighteen, Athens let parents educate their children as they saw fit. Parents either taught their children at home or sent them to voluntary schools where teachers and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle gave lectures to all who wanted to learn. These great teacher-philosophers did not need a license to teach, nor did they have tenure. The ancient Athenians had a free-market education system. The thought of compulsory, state-run schools and compulsory teacher licensing would have been repulsive to them. The Athenians respected a parent's natural right to direct the education of their children.

In contrast, Sparta, Athens's mortal enemy, created the first truly state-run, compulsory education system on record. Individual Spartans lived and died for the State, and had to serve the State from birth until sixty years of age. Their society was a brutal military dictatorship in which male children literally belonged to the city rulers, not to their parents.

The Spartan military government took boys from their homes and parents at the age of seven and forced them to live in military-style barracks for the rest of their lives. Spartan men were life-long soldiers whose highest duty was to obey the commands of their leaders. It is no coincidence that Sparta had compulsory, state-run education. If a society believes that children belong not to parents, but to the State, then the State must control children's education by compulsion.

Are our public schools any different than the brutal Spartan society in the way they treat parents and children? Today, school compulsory-attendance laws force parents to hand over their children to government employees called teachers for eight to twelve years. In effect, our local and state governments claim that they, like the Spartans, own our children's minds and bodies for twelve years. Parents who refuse to hand over their children to the public schools can be, and have been, locked in jail for disobeying the compulsory-attendance laws.

In this respect, our public schools today are just as brutal as the Spartans. The difference is only in degree. Where the Spartans stole children from their parents to serve a lifetime in their military, our local governments create laws that let them, in effect, legally kidnap our children to serve twelve years in their education boot camps called public schools. The brutality of the principal is the same.

Both the Spartans and our public-school officials think they own our children, and have utter contempt for parents' rights.

How Children are Sexually Corrupted in Public Schools

From News With Views
By Joel Turtel

One of parents’ most important duties is to protect their children from harmful sexual values and behaviors. Yet many public schools force potentially harmful, sometimes shockingly explicit sex education on their students. Most of the time, parents have no control over the content of these classes. Occasionally, a group of parents finds out about a particularly obnoxious sex education class and protests to the principal or local school board. The class may be dropped, only to be replaced by another class that teaches equally objectionable material, again without parent’s consent. School authorities’ attitude towards parents on this issue shows their anti-parent bias, and their contempt for parent’s rights to control the values their children are taught.

Many school authorities insist that children need comprehensive sex education from kindergarten through high school. They believe parents can't be trusted because they have shameful feelings about sex or have “outdated” moral or sexual values. School authorities, claiming that they know best regarding sex education, usurp parents’ role, allegedly for the “good of the children.” In doing so, they show contempt for parents’ rights, values, and common sense.

Read the rest of this entry >>

NY Parents Grilled in 'Religious Sincerity Test'

A family in New York is fighting for the rights of parents to opt their children out of vaccines.

From OneNewsNow

Ron and Rita Palma of Bayport, New York, have been fighting for the right to opt their children out of the vaccines that public schools require children have before attending school. Parents are allowed to opt out of the medical requirement if they cite objections on religious grounds. The Palmas did so, citing their Catholic faith as a reason, but they were met with resistance from the Bayport-Blue Point Union Free School District. Rita Palma explains.

"I handed in my letter, handed in my application, and they called me in and insisted that I come in for a face-to-face interview," she shares. "Now I know other people in the community who have gone through this, so I talked to some lawyers. I knew that they [school officials] were within their legal boundaries, and I really didn't think that it was going to be all that much of a problem. You know, my feelings were true, my beliefs fit squarely with the law -- so I complied."

But Palma says she and her husband were grilled for two hours by the school's attorney, David Cohen. She refers to the session as a "sincerity interview." Following is an excerpt from that meeting:

Cohen: "If you believe God is on your side, does that mean he's not on the side or can he be on the side of somebody who believes in immunization?"

Rita: "Mr. Cohen, I wouldn't know. I know my deepest, most spiritual beliefs. I don't know the belief system of others and..."

Ron: "And nor do we control God."

Rita: "Yeah."

Cohen: "Okay."

Rita: "I wouldn't know."

Rita says the attorney concluded that her beliefs were not "sincere" enough and decided to deny her vaccine waiver. She is now taking her fight to the New York State Capitol.

Videos of the Palmas' session with Cohen are available on YouTube (Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3) (view all three parts).

Intimidation

In an interview with OneNewsNow, Rita Palma claims David Cohen, the school's attorney, tried to intimidate her in the questioning process.

"He has been named in enough publications where I'm sure he has experienced some pressure -- and some not-so-nice pressure -- from other sources criticizing his actions," she says. "My assemblywomen actually wrote a letter to my school district...criticizing their actions."

Rita is currently working with state lawmakers to pass New York Bill A00883, which would amend existing law to ban so-called "religious sincerity tests."

"Rather than appeal this decision, the route that I chose to take is to change the law," says Rita. "[I hope] to really compel school districts to accept the [opt-out] letter at face value, and make it illegal for school districts to close the door and ask you what your belief system is all about."

Rita is also working to help pass New York Bill A00880, a bill that would make medical waivers accepted at face value. According to Rita, she handed the school a medical waiver from her doctor that would exempt her son from vaccines, but the school rejected that as well.

OneNewsNow asked Rita if she had considered private school or home school. She replied that her children really like their current teachers, and apart from the vaccine issue they have no complaints. Rita also explains that private school would put undue financial pressure on the family; but if they do decide to switch schools, she wants the choice to be hers -- and not something the public school forces them to do because of the vaccine issue.

Rita operates the website MyKidsMyChoice.com, which assists parents who also wish to opt out of childhood vaccines.

The People Behind Those "Great Public Schools"

Marcia Neal, a retired high school teacher, is seeking a seat on the Colorado State Board of Education. Her diagnosis of Colorado's education system:

"The top half of the students are well-educated, the bottom half receive extra help, but the middle half we are leaving out."

Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

The public school establishment says that allowing parents to seek out the school they believe can best serve their child will destroy the public schools. This is an honor student from Lexington High School in Lexington, South Carolina, a well funded public school in an affluent community. Behold the best of public education!