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Public Schools, Public Menace

How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children

Excerpts

• "Parents, . . . what if, despite your children's good grades and glowing report cards, your public school cripples your children's ability to read, smothers their desire to learn, warps their values, and wastes twelve years of their lives? Worse, what if these schools deceive you and hurt your children so school employees get to keep their tenure-guaranteed jobs?"
• "A student teacher for a fifth-grade class in Minneapolis wrote the following letter to the local newspaper:
  

  ". . . I was told [that] children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, if, in, is, it, have, he, home, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

• "Let's recap the decline of literacy in this country over the last 150 years. By the 1850s, before we had compulsory, government-controlled public schools, child and adult literacy rates averaged over 90 percent, making illiteracy rates less than 10 percent. Today, . . . student illiteracy rates in many public schools range from 30 to 75 percent. This is an education horror story."
• "Even if you cut the numbers in half, statistically, more children are at risk of suffering long-term life-harm from the consequences of not learning to read well than from parental abuse, accidents, and all known childhood diseases and disorders combined. Even if you cut the numbers in half, the national cost of reading related difficulties is greater that the cost of the wars on crime, drugs, and terror combined."
• "Violence in public schools can literally kill your child. In the 2000-2001 school year, students were victims of about 1.9 million nonfatal violent crimes such as rape, assault, and robbery. This figure equals about 9,000 violent incidents every school day throughout America, or about one every three seconds."
• "Compulsory public schools, by their nature, are anti-parent, despite school officials' calls for more parental involvement and cooperation."
• "Compulsory attendance laws are school authorities' first assault on parental rights. . . In effect, these laws allow state officials to legally kidnap millions of children, allegedly to benefit the children by giving them an education (in the opinion of these officials). "Kidnap" may seem like a harsh word, yet wouldn't you apply that word to someone who took your child by force against your will?"
• "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. . ."
• "In effect, to allegedly protect children, school authorities now consider all parents as potential abusers. . . Often, children are disturbed and emotionally traumatized by the insinuations school authorities put into their heads."
• "Is there anything wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, shoplifting, taking drugs, premarital sex, insulting your parents, pornography, irresponsibility, or getting pregnant in junior high school? Not according to the values taught to children in many public schools today."
• "In classrooms throughout the country, Judeo-Christian beliefs are cast aside or ridiculed. Multicultural studies, environmental propaganda, and. . . pagan-religion classes now indoctrinate children with New Age religious beliefs, often without parents' knowledge."
• "The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on American school children. . ." (Thomas Sowell)
• "Mr. Gatto, an award-winning English teacher for twenty-six years, learned that it only takes about a hundred hours to teach a willing child to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. If this is so, what are public schools doing with our children for twelve years, while they turn them into functional illiterates?"
• "It's all a game. . . . Keep [the kids] in class for seven years and give them a diploma if they make it to eighth grade. They can't read, but give them the diploma. The parents don't know what's going on. They're satisfied. (Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities: Children In America's Schools) . ."
• "Consistently greeted by A's and B's on their children's report cards, the parents of Zavala Elementary School had been lulled into complacency, believing that both the school and its students were performing well. In fact, Zavala was one of the worst schools in the district, and its students ranked near the bottom on statewide standardized tests. When a new principal took over the helm and requested that the statewide scores be read out at a PTA meeting, parents were dismayed by their children's abysmal showing, and furious with teachers and school officials for misleading them with inflated grades (Andrew J. Coulson, author of Market Education: The Unknown History)."
• "Today, many parents pin their hopes for better schools on government-sponsored alternatives such as vouchers, charter schools, Supreme Court decisions, or the No Child Left Behind Act. . . I'm sorry to say that these are mostly false hopes."
• "[Parents], do as the citizen-slaves of communist East Berlin did when they fled to freedom in West Berlinvote with your feet. Consider writing-off the public-school system. Consider taking your children out of these schools, permanently."
• "A public-school system that coerces parents into giving their children mind-altering drugs that are potentially addictive, dangerous, or even lethal, is a moral abomination. A public-school system that has to drug millions of children to make them pay attention in class is a frightening and embarrassing failure."
• "If public schools sell bad education, year after year, why don't they go bankrupt? Why aren't they shut down? The answer is government compulsion. . . Unlike private schools, public schools rarely go out of business, no matter how bad they are because they get their "customers" [students] and their money by force [taxes]."
• "School taxes are compulsory for a good reason. Parents would not voluntarily pay a grocery store for rotten food. Similarly, parents would not voluntarily pay taxes for public schools that do a bad job educating their children. That is why local governments threaten homeowners with foreclosure if they don't pay their school taxes."
• "The argument that vouchers, charter schools, and other school-choice alternatives might destroy the public schools is one of the best arguments for school choice. Government-controlled public schools, not school choice, cripples our children's education and future, and banishes millions of inner-city kids to a lifetime of poverty and ignorance. We need to scrap the public school system, once and for all, and the sooner the better."
• "For those parents who have little time to spare, or don't feel confident in home-schooling their children, Internet schools are a wonderful new alternative. These schools take most of the home-schooling burden off parents' backs, yet can give children a low-cost, quality education at home. . ."
• "Home-schooling also gives parents control over the values their kids learn. It prevents school authorities from indoctrinating their children with warped values, pagan religions, or politically-correct ideas."
• "Suppose that you rearrange your life to homeschool your child and the experiment fails? The answer to this concern is, can you risk not trying? Isn't your child's future worth the risk? If you see a bad situation, the worst thing to do is nothing."
• "If home-schooled children study for only two hours a day, year round, they will get three times more educational hours on academic basics like reading, writing, and arithmetic than public-school students get."
• "Taking full responsibility for your children's education may seem scary, but there are many resources available to help you give your child a great education at home, with or without Internet schools or tutors."

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