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In
his July 10 column, "Ozzie
and Harriet School Funding," Chris
Braunlich compared the one-size-fits- all
"Ozzie and Harriett" school-funding
model of the 1950s to the varied needs of a more
diverse school population today. Making funding
more humane and more efficient sounds like a nice
idea. But attempts to fine tune government schools
cannot work.
Government
schools are designed to brain wash children into
thinking what the government wants them to think.
The entire system must go!
We
must have as complete a separation between state
and schooling as we have between church and state.
What we get now is the "religion" of Big
Government. Big Government Liberalism has replaced
Christianity as the moral core of education.
Government schools are the "seminaries"
where children are made to march in lock step with
the religion of Big Government. To save society we
must return to a Christianity-based, home school
system where parents are in charge of their
children--- as were our founding generations.
The
purpose of the government school, as envisioned by
the Prussian state in the wake of its humiliating
defeat by Napoleon, was to forge loyal citizen-
soldiers. This translated in America into as a
perceived need to separate children of immigrant
parents from old customs and religious influences
— especially Catholicism -- and make "true
Americans" out of them. From fear of large,
mostly Catholic immigrated populations, the
homogenized Protestant religious influence of
early government schools under the likes of Horace
Mann eventually became hostility to all Christian
influence under John Dewey.
Along
the way, Europeanized, secularized academia picked
up the religions of Darwinism and Socialism.
Hostility towards business and "too
much" private property led to worship of
government as the answer to all our problems.
Results include the New Deal and Great Society,
which have turned Americans into serfs. Americans
now believe that private effort cannot cure
poverty nor handle emergencies. Government schools
have replaced Christianity with an unstated
Marxism: The word Darwin is itself now purged from
5th grade science books as "too
controversial."
Socialism
is the economic paradigm, against which capitalism
is seen as inherently dangerous, even evilly
"selfish." The Welfare State has
replaced the monastery as dispenser of health and
welfare. The government encourages birth control
and shrunken families are replaced by "social
security," which is itself bankrupt.
This
Titanic won’t float much longer. It will drag us
down economically, as it already has
intellectually and spiritually, no matter what
funding formulas are used. School vouchers and tax
credits are only a transitory solutions-- fraught
themselves with danger of government control.
Ultimately we have to separate the content of
education away from the government which trashes
our values. English habits of limited government
and the rule of law are necessary to freedom,
progress, and even morality.
It
would be hard to find a more Christian people, in
spite of nearly a century of persecution, than
those wonderful Mexicans. What
they lack is what we have— but are losing: The
very ideals and habits which the government
schools are working diligently to destroy. Thrift,
hard work, honesty, perseverance, Christian
ethics— even charity towards the less able. All
of these are re-created as shallow "because I
say so" virtues under the secularized
government schools.
Visit
the halls of American junior academe and the walls
are festooned with posters not unlike those that
plastered the American conscience at the depth of
World War II— or of more recent unhappy memory,
the Soviet Union. It will take a generation. Moses
had to lead his people in the desert for 40 years
to undo the Egyptian influence. No doubt it will
take as long to wean Americans from Big
Government— especially Big Government Schools.
The
next generation of Ozzie and Harrietts will see
Mom at home baking cookies— and home-schooling
her own children. But only if we conservatives
have the vision and the leadership.
--
August 7, 2006
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