Here are ten reasons why parents should keep their kids in public schools:

1 – Public schools can cripple your child’s ability to read. The schools use a special reading-instruction method to do this called whole-language (or balanced literacy). But that’s a good thing. Why do kids need to read anyhow? It only gives them ambitions to go to college. Parents have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for college tuition these days, so if your child can’t read, you end up saving a lot of money.

2 – Public schools can wreck your child’s ability to do math, with “fuzzy” math curriculums. But that’s a good thing. That way, your child will not strive to be a scientist or engineer and make a lot of money. Having a lot of money causes stress, and you don’t want your kids to be stressed in life, do you? Also, if your child grows up to be a supermarket check-out clerk, you don’t have to worry. The machine scans in all the prices and will tell your child how much change to give back to the customer.

3 – Public schools violate your God-given parental rights to choose who teaches your child and what he is taught. But hell, aren’t we swamped today with too many choices anyhow? It’s only reasonable to let education “experts” who have been trained in our finest “teacher” colleges tell us how to educate our children. After all, haven’t these education “experts” done a superb job educating our children up to now?

4 – Public schools give your child a “well-rounded” education. Your child’s day is filled with shocking sex-education classes, multiculturalism classes that spit on American values, save-the-earth environmental propaganda classes, drug-education classes that give your child all the dope about these drugs so he can choose wisely, and violence- prevention classes for those kids who get violent from being bored to death in public-school classrooms.

5 – Public schools give your children great socialization. Where else can your kids smoke a joint in the bathroom, meet roaming drug dealers in the schoolyards, be raped or assaulted by violent bullies on the prowl for victims, and join a racial clique that promotes harmony among the students? That’s a lot better than the “bad” socialization of homeschooling that “isolates” kids from this wonderful interaction with their peers.

6 – Public schools give your kids a great sex education. As parents, we don’t want to talk to our kids about embarrassing sex matters anyhow, so this takes us off the hook. Your child’s sex-education classes will teach her why homosexuality is a “normal” lifestyle and why sexual promiscuity is OK, as long as you remember to “protect” yourself. If your teenage daughter then decides to experiment and gets pregnant, that’s great also, because the welfare office will give your daughter monthly welfare checks, food stamps, rent subsidies, and free health care. What more can you ask for?

7 – Public schools will give your child free drugs. Yes, Ritalin is now the drug of choice for millions of school children. But isn’t that a good thing? Ritalin will help your son stop “fidgeting” and “pay attention” in class, even though he is bored to death. Ritalin also helps the teacher maintain discipline in the classroom. After all, if your son disrupts the class by “acting out,” the other kids can’t learn anything, right? So Ritalin is a wonderful way to mentally strap-down your child to his desk.

8 – Your child can “participate” in your school’s Teen-Screen program. These are “mental-health” screening programs that help determine if your teenager is mentally deranged. A health “expert” in your public school will ask your child questions such as, “have you been unhappy lately,” or “do you get along with your brothers and sisters?” From your bewildered child’s answers to these illuminating questions, the health “expert” will give his opinion as to whether your child might have a mental “disease.” He might then “recommend” that you take your child to a psychiatrist who might start your child on a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. But hell, having your child labeled with a mental “disease” isn’t that bad, is it? Your child will lose the confidence to go to college, and we’re back to advantage number one, where you’ll save a lot of money on college tuition.

9 — Your child can stay in school for twelve years. Well, maybe he won’t know how to read a bus schedule or his own diploma after twelve years, but twelve years go by fast, don’t they? Why teach your child to read at home with phonics so he becomes a great reader in only two years? My God, what will your child then do with all his free time once he can easily read War and Peace? He might actually come to love learning.

10 – Finally, public schools are cheap day-care centers. We all work hard these days because income, real estate, social security, and dozens of other taxes loot half our paychecks, and big-government-created inflation sharply increases the cost of everything we buy. So since we can’t save a penny, we can’t afford private day-care. That’s why we need public schools to house our kids while we make a living to pay the bills.

Parents, there are many other reasons NOT to keep your child in public school, but I hope you get the point by now.

Tweet This Post

“We” have to give the schools more money. “We” have to pay the teachers more. “We” have to get parents more involved in their children’s public schools. “We” have to get parents more involved in their children’s homework. “We” have to find a way to close the achievement gap between white children and black or Latino kids. “We” have to demand accountability from our public schools and teachers. “We” have to end the drugs and violence in our public schools. “We” have to improve our teaching methods so our children can read their own diplomas when they graduate high school. “We” have to teach our children environmental propaganda about saving the earth and global warming. “We” have to teach kids to “respect” other people’s lifestyles with classes about homosexuality in their sex-ed classes.

And on and on it goes. Every “we” pressure group is at each other’s throats about what “we” have to do to “improve” the congenitally-incompetent public schools and our children’s education.

Do you notice the one common factor in all these disastrous problems with our children’s education in public schools? Right you are — it’s the “we” part. Americans have been brainwashed into thinking education is a collective “we” enterprise that must be run by governments that “we” elect. Since “we” are all taxpayers, and our taxes pay for the public schools, all of us “we” have the right to input our demands, desires, complaints, and suggestions about how to “fix” the system. Hence the endless bickering, fighting, backstabbing, grab for “public” tax dollars, power plays, and government-induced incompetent education.

What’s the real solution to finally giving our kids a decent education? Get rid of the “we.” Education must be made a private concern of individual parents, NOT a collective “right” of education run by a government-education monopoly called public schools. Let each parent educate their own children in their own way, paying whatever they can afford, in a quality, low-cost, fiercely competitive, private/independent school system. Each parent should be responsible for their own children’s education in this free-market, private-school system, just as each parent is responsible for feeding their children with food they buy from private grocery stores and supermarkets.

The problem with public schools is that they are “public” and run by government. The problem is that these government-run public schools exist in the first place. Government is the PROBLEM, not the solution to our children’s education. Get government out of the education business, and the problem is solved quickly and permanently.

No more “we” taxpayers demanding a say in the collective, government-run education system called public schools. Make it illegal for any local, state, or Federal government to own, operate, or collect taxes for any school system.

Put an end to the ridiculous notion that “we” all have a “right” to an education, so “we” need tax-supported government schools to enforce that “right.” There is no such thing as a “right” to an education. Education doesn’t grow free on apple trees. Schools, books, and teacher salaries all have to be paid for by someone. That’s what tuition is all about in a private school — to pay for these expenses. To claim that your child has a “right” to an education, is to claim that you have the right to steal from your neighbor to pay for your child’s education, through school taxes imposed by your local government.

Ask yourself this. Do you have the right to put a gun to your neighbor’s head and demand money from him to pay for your child’s sneakers or Wheaties cereal? Do you have the right to steal money from your neighbor to pay for ANYTHING your child needs? If you have some moral sense and answered no, then you also don’t have the right to steal from your neighbor for your child’s education either, no matter how much you love your child, because it’s wrong to steal, and two wrongs don’t make a right.

Yet a public “we” school system requires that “we” all steal from each other to pay for our children’s education, courtesy of compulsory school taxes. But what about single people, married couples with no children, parents with children in private schools, homeschooling parents, and older-retired people with no children in school? All these people, your neighbors, have no need for public schools because they have no school-age children in public schools. Why do your neighbors with no school-age children have to pay school taxes so that your children go to public school?  What if they passed a law saying you have to pay taxes for public golf courses, yet you hate golf and would never set foot on a golf course?

Public schools need compulsory taxes to stay alive. These taxes let some parents with school-age children steal money from their neighbors who might not have school-age children. The “we” of the public-school system therefore requires massive collective looting on a grand scale, turning us into a nation of education thieves.

So how do we end this moral nightmare that creates congenitally incompetent government (public) schools? Put an end to the “we.” Get government out of the education business. Turn education over to parents and the life-giving fresh breath of a fiercely competitive free-market education system, where each parent has complete control ONLY over their own child’s education. Then this free-market of education will sharply raise the quality of our children’s education, and sharply lower the cost of this education for average parents. The best of both education worlds without having to pay a single dollar in school taxes. Wouldn’t that be great?

Tweet This Post

Yet, consider the following:

We may still have fundamental freedoms of speech and the press, but America is in a transition from liberty to despotism, a halfway house on the road to tyranny. We already have economic tyranny in America. If you add up all the taxes you pay, including income taxes, Social Security, sales, real estate, gasoline, telephone, and dozens of other hidden taxes, government loots over forty percent of your hard-earned income in taxes.

Yet, only a hundred years ago, the average worker paid no more than five percent of his income in taxes. In 1901, there was no income tax, Social Security tax, or most of the other taxes you pay today. In the Middle Ages, medieval rulers took about 20 percent of their serfs’ produce. Our government now taxes us worse than serfs. If government claims the right to forty percent of your income, it claims the right to forty percent of your labor, and forty percent of your life. In effect, the people we “elect” have put us on a chain gang until May 10th of every year, working for the bureaucrats.

Most parents may not see it this way, but local governments, in effect, kidnap your children through public-school compulsory-attendance laws. They force you to send your children to government (public) schools that waste twelve years of your children’s lives and turn them into illiterates. They then tax you to support these so-called “schools.”

“War on Drugs” government SWAT teams can break down your door in the middle of the night without a warrant, based on the drug tip of a malicious, anonymous informant, then threaten you in your own living room. Drug laws dictate what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. These laws tell us we do not have the right to smoke marijuana, even if we have cancer and the marijuana alleviates the nausea from chemotherapy drugs.

Government tells us we cannot commit suicide if we have terminal cancer with excruciating pain, nor can a doctor assist us to commit suicide. By these laws, government tells us it now owns our bodies. These laws deny our right of free choice for important personal decisions in our lives.

Try building a new home for yourself, and you will run into a hornet’s nest of building department inspectors, zoning commissions, environment impact statements, and local agencies who will tie you up in knots. Try starting a small business and you will need government licenses and approvals. Local, State and Federal tax authorities, like vultures, will then devour your profits with their ever-increasing taxes.

Taxes loot your hard-earned money to pay for dozens of “entitlement programs” such as Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, welfare programs, health care for illegal immigrants, and now a “welfare” program for the entire population of Iraq called the Iraq war. Your voluntary consent is not required for these programs. Government forces you to pay for them.

Federal, State, and local police agencies use asset-forfeiture laws to steal the cars, homes, businesses, and bank accounts of innocent people under the pretext of a War on Drugs. Victims of drug raids then have to prove their innocence and sue the agency to get their property back. Asset-forfeiture laws have turned too many local police departments into agencies for legalized looting.

Anti-gun politicians make thousands of gun laws that restrict a woman’s right to protect herself from a rapist, a homeowner’s right to protect himself from a robber in the middle of the night, or American citizens’ right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees our right to bear arms is under massive assault. It may be only a matter of time until we lose this right altogether.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations can control who an employer hires, fires, or promotes, how much he has to pay his employees (minimum wage), and what their “conditions of employment” must be. This same agency can sue an employer into bankruptcy for “discrimination” or other “infractions” of its regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can stop a home builder from building homes, a farmer from farming his land, a rancher from grazing his cattle, an oil company from drilling for desperately needed oil, or a logging company from cutting down trees to give us lumber for new homes. EPA regulations sharply jack up the price of oil and destroy property rights in America for a great and noble cause — to protect “endangered” species like the Alabama mud rat, mosquito-infested swamps called “wetlands,” and “delicate” frozen Arctic wastelands that look like the surface of the moon.

The Food and Drug Administration forces drug companies to spend over $500 million and seven years to get approval for a new drug. It puts pharmaceutical companies through a regulatory torture chamber that strangles the development of thousands of new, life-saving drugs. It has made SWAT-team raids on vitamin stores to “protect” us from Vitamin C and other dangers.

Federal agents can persecute a religious sect they don’t like, as the Feds did in Waco, Texas. They persecuted these people partly because the sect owned allegedly “illegal” firearms, firearms the 2nd Amendment says they had the right to own. After slaughtering innocent women and children in a ball of fire, none of the Federal agents were ever prosecuted or sent to prison for their actions.

Finally, in response to the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal government passed an “anti-terror” bill that created secret military tribunals. These tribunals will be like medieval star-chambers, where defendants’ legal rights will be ripped to pieces, and trial by jury will be denied.

These tribunals have set a terrible precedent. It is only a matter of time before government prosecutors expand the vague definition of “terrorism” to an ever-widening list of “crimes” that can be used against American citizens. Government judges and prosecutors will then be able to try and convict Americans without the “messy” need for juries, proof, evidence, or the presumption of innocence.

Does all this sound like “the land of the free?” Government in America is a growing tyranny. It is a government that would shock our Founding Fathers, a government they would consider a greater tyranny than the British monarchy they fought a revolutionary war against. Worse, whatever freedoms we have left are being taken from us at an ever-accelerating rate.

If you, my reader, do not see this, it is not your fault. Your liberty has been taken from you gradually, one new tax and regulation at a time. You have become accustomed to the taxes and regulations. You think they are “normal” and therefore nothing to complain about. You mistakenly believe that because you elect your representatives, and because they enact laws based on majority rule, that their laws, taxes, and regulations are moral and legitimate. It is like your wife or husband not noticing you have gained thirty pounds over the past five years because they see you every day, and the weight gain was gradual.

So it is with gradual tyranny. But if Americans living 150 years ago suddenly came back to life today, they would be shocked, for they would see the stark difference in their freedom.

President Bush and his Republican lemmings continue to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to protect the “freedom” of the Iraqi people. Well, how about first giving Americans back the freedom that is their birthright, the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers fought and died for?

Tweet This Post

In our daily lives, most of us believe we are free Americans. The average person can still go about his business, travel where he wants to go, and freely choose his goals, friends, and career. We still have freedom of speech, the press, trial by jury, and many other liberties our Founding Fathers wrote into the Bill of Rights and Constitution. We are still freer than any other people on Earth.

Yet, consider the following:

We may still have fundamental freedoms of speech and the press, but America is in a transition from liberty to despotism, a halfway house on the road to tyranny. We already have economic tyranny in America. If you add up all the taxes you pay, including income taxes, Social Security, sales, real estate, gasoline, telephone, and dozens of other hidden taxes, government loots over forty percent of your hard-earned income in taxes.

Yet, only a hundred years ago, the average worker paid no more than five percent of his income in taxes. In 1901, there was no income tax, Social Security tax, or most of the other taxes you pay today. In the Middle Ages, medieval rulers took about 20 percent of their serfs’ produce. Our government now taxes us worse than serfs. If government claims the right to forty percent of your income, it claims the right to forty percent of your labor, and forty percent of your life. In effect, the people we “elect” have put us on a chain gang until May 10th of every year, working for the bureaucrats.

Most parents may not see it this way, but local governments, in effect, kidnap your children through public-school compulsory-attendance laws. They force you to send your children to government (public) schools that waste twelve years of your children’s lives and turn them into illiterates. They then tax you to support these so-called “schools.”

“War on Drugs” government SWAT teams can break down your door in the middle of the night without a warrant, based on the drug tip of a malicious, anonymous informant, then threaten you in your own living room. Drug laws dictate what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. These laws tell us we do not have the right to smoke marijuana, even if we have cancer and the marijuana alleviates the nausea from chemotherapy drugs.

Government tells us we cannot commit suicide if we have terminal cancer with excruciating pain, nor can a doctor assist us to commit suicide. By these laws, government tells us it now owns our bodies. These laws deny our right of free choice for important personal decisions in our lives.

Try building a new home for yourself, and you will run into a hornet’s nest of building department inspectors, zoning commissions, environment impact statements, and local agencies who will tie you up in knots. Try starting a small business and you will need government licenses and approvals. Local, State and Federal tax authorities, like vultures, will then devour your profits with their ever-increasing taxes.

Taxes loot your hard-earned money to pay for dozens of “entitlement programs” such as Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, welfare programs, health care for illegal immigrants, and now a “welfare” program for the entire population of Iraq called the Iraq war. Your voluntary consent is not required for these programs. Government forces you to pay for them.

Federal, State, and local police agencies use asset-forfeiture laws to steal the cars, homes, businesses, and bank accounts of innocent people under the pretext of a War on Drugs. Victims of drug raids then have to prove their innocence and sue the agency to get their property back. Asset-forfeiture laws have turned too many local police departments into agencies for legalized looting.

Anti-gun politicians make thousands of gun laws that restrict a woman’s right to protect herself from a rapist, a homeowner’s right to protect himself from a robber in the middle of the night, or American citizens’ right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees our right to bear arms is under massive assault. It may be only a matter of time until we lose this right altogether.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations can control who an employer hires, fires, or promotes, how much he has to pay his employees (minimum wage), and what their “conditions of employment” must be. This same agency can sue an employer into bankruptcy for “discrimination” or other “infractions” of its regulations.

Because of the recent Supreme Court “Kelo” decision, your property rights have become null and void. Now any developer who wants to put up a new shopping center can get your local government to condemn your home, and your neighbors’ homes, through their power of “eminent domain.” Local government bureaucrats can now demolish your home, not for public use like a highway, but to let a private developer profit from your land and pay more taxes.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can stop a home builder from building homes, a farmer from farming his land, a rancher from grazing his cattle, an oil company from drilling for desperately needed oil, or a logging company from cutting down trees to give us lumber for new homes. EPA regulations sharply jack up the price of oil and destroy property rights in America for a great and noble cause — to protect “endangered” species like the Alabama mud rat, mosquito-infested swamps called “wetlands,” and “delicate” frozen Arctic wastelands that look like the surface of the moon.

The Food and Drug Administration forces drug companies to spend over $500 million and seven years to get approval for a new drug. It puts pharmaceutical companies through a regulatory torture chamber that strangles the development of thousands of new, life-saving drugs. It has made SWAT-team raids on vitamin stores to “protect” us from Vitamin C and other dangers.

Federal agents can persecute a religious sect they don’t like, as the Feds did in Waco, Texas. They persecuted these people partly because the sect owned allegedly “illegal” firearms, firearms the 2nd Amendment says they had the right to own. After slaughtering innocent women and children in a ball of fire, none of the Federal agents were ever prosecuted or sent to prison for their actions.

Finally, in response to the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal government passed an “anti-terror” bill that created secret military tribunals. These tribunals will be like medieval star-chambers, where defendants’ legal rights will be ripped to pieces, and trial by jury will be denied.

These tribunals have set a terrible precedent. It is only a matter of time before government prosecutors expand the vague definition of “terrorism” to an ever-widening list of “crimes” that can be used against American citizens. Government judges and prosecutors will then be able to try and convict Americans without the “messy” need for juries, proof, evidence, or the presumption of innocence.

Does all this sound like “the land of the free?” Government in America is a growing tyranny. It is a government that would shock our Founding Fathers, a government they would consider a greater tyranny than the British monarchy they fought a revolutionary war against. Worse, whatever freedoms we have left are being taken from us at an ever-accelerating rate.

If you, my reader, do not see this, it is not your fault. Your liberty has been taken from you gradually, one new tax and regulation at a time. You have become accustomed to the taxes and regulations. You think they are “normal” and therefore nothing to complain about. You mistakenly believe that because you elect your representatives, and because they enact laws based on majority rule, that their laws, taxes, and regulations are moral and legitimate. It is like your wife or husband not noticing you have gained thirty pounds over the past five years because they see you every day, and the weight gain was gradual.

So it is with gradual tyranny. But if Americans living 150 years ago suddenly came back to life today, they would be shocked, for they would see the stark difference in their freedom.

President Obama continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to protect the “freedom” of the Iraqi people. Well, how about first giving Americans back the freedom that is their birthright, the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers fought and died for?

Still think you’re living in the land of the free?

Tweet This Post

The human race is heading for ecological disaster because of its increasing and all-pervasive assaults on our air, water, and land. Pollution is everywhere. Our industrial civilization is heading toward environmental collapse, and mankind’s fate hangs in the balance.

Does this scare you out of your wits? It’s intended to do just that. This scenario from a second-rate horror movie is passed off as scientific fact by a new breed of doomsday prophets, the radical environmentalists. Read and take heed — the end is near. Here is an example of a typical environmentalist scare story:

“The present course of environmental degradation, if unchecked, threatens the survival of civilized man. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the way in which we now live on the earth is driving its thin, life-supporting skin, and ourselves with it, to destruction.”

Environmentalists’ doomsday predictions would be comical, if it wasn’t for the fact that these scare stories have frightened local, state, and federal legislators into creating a massive, poisonous layer of regulations. Environmental regulations violate our property rights, restrict our personal liberties, threaten our standard of living, and throw thousands of Americans out of work.

Environmentalists concoct end-of-the-world scenarios all the time. These predictions are calculated to scare us, and usually turn out to be pure fantasy, exaggerations, or deliberate distortions of the facts.

The mother of all doomsday stories, of course, is global warming. For over thirty years, environmentalists have scared us with this one. It seems that car exhausts, forest clearing, power plants, and other industrial activities increase carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Increased carbon dioxide will allegedly create a barrier in the atmosphere that traps the Earth’s heat, creating a “greenhouse effect” As a result, the Earth’s temperature will rise, causing glaciers to melt, seas to rise, worldwide flooding, and calamity to the human race.

As expected, there are many reputable scientists who think this theory is nonsense. Other scientists have their own theories that totally contradict global warming.

“Kenneth E.F. Watt, professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Davis, theorized that an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to global cooling, not warming. Watt argued that carbon dioxide will heat tropical oceans, leading to additional evaporation. This will produce denser and more widespread clouds at high elevations, which will decrease the amount of sunlight that penetrates the atmosphere. Some scientists believe that the Earth is warming, but attribute the change to causes other than carbon dioxide production. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested that solar activity may have caused global warming, and Reid Bryson, director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that dust and smoke are the primary causes of climate change.”

There are also many scientists who question whether the Earth has gotten warmer over the last hundred years.

“Temperature measurements may be biased by the effects of urbanization; weather stations are located in urban areas, where heat-absorbing buildings and pavement can raise the readings one to two degrees above the surrounding atmosphere. After correcting for the “urban” effect, a study by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that there was no statistically significant evidence of warming in the United States [italics added]. Andrew R. Solow, a statistician at Woods Hole, pointed out that because monitoring stations tend to be located on land rather than oceans and more are in the Northern than in the Southern Hemisphere, temperature readouts are not really global at all. Ten years of weather satellite data have also shown no evidence of global warming [italics added].”

There’s little valid evidence of global warming. Instead, there’s solid evidence that the Earth has not been warming. Since 1978, a temperature-measuring satellite called Tiros II has been orbiting the Earth 24-hours a day. Guess what? The satellite’s measurements showed no significant increase or decrease in the Earth’s temperature. Scientific temperature measurements from Tiros II show no global warming trend in the last fifteen years. In other words, global warming is a myth.

Many eminent scientists agree that global warming and other environmental scare stories are just unproven theories. Prior to the Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, scientists from around the world issued the Heidelberg Appeal. In the Appeal, scientists asked government leaders at the summit to be careful. They asked the leaders not to make serious environmental decisions based on pseudoscientific arguments or false and non-relevant data. More than 250 scientists, including 27 Nobel prize winners, issued the Appeal on June 1, 1992. Today, 2,300 scientists from 79 countries, including 65 Nobel prize winners, have signed the Appeal .

Former governor of Washington state and former chairwoman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, also thought that global warming is nonsense. In her wonderful 1993 book, “Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened To Common Sense?,” she said that it was unlikely that carbon dioxide would cause any significant changes in worldwide temperatures. Jeffrey Salmon is executive director of the Washington-based George C. Marshall Institute. In the July 1993 issue of Commentary, he flatly stated that he found no valid scientific evidence to prove that man-made gases are causing the Earth to warm from a greenhouse effect.

In short, we are being conned. Government takes billions of tax dollars out of our pocket to enforce massive environmental regulations that, in most cases, protect you from nothing.

I could describe many other eco-scare stories, but I think I’ve made my point. These doomsday prophesies are either distortions or exaggerations of unproven facts. Unfortunately, radical environmentalists and the liberal media spout this eco-nonsense so often that we start to believe them. That’s the problem and the danger. Panicked, short-sighted Congressmen believe the scare stories and then pass environmental regulations that strangle our economy and destroy our property rights.

It is time that we see these environmental scare stories for what they are — a tactic by left-leaning environmental radicals to destroy the thing they hate most. What they hate most is our liberty, property rights, and the free-market that can make life for human beings on this planet a joy instead of a brutal struggle for existence.

Tweet This Post

“Mayor, we’ve got a big problem on our hands,” said Police Chief Bud Anderson to Mike Branden, mayor of Palm City, Florida, a small city of 200,000 old-fashioned Americans, sitting in the middle of the Florida panhandle. It was a beautiful spring day in April.

Bud Anderson was a handsome man, in his thirties, dark brown hair, blue eyes, a wide, easy mouth. He wore a light-blue short-sleeve shirt and jeans. Mayor Mike Branden, also dressed casually, was in his forties, tall, and well-built. He used to be an orange-grower, his family going back generations in Palm City. He had a weather-beaten face, strong mouth, and calloused hands the size of mitts. He had just been elected mayor in November and won the election on his promise to clean up crime in the city.

Over the last five years, the city had become a little Silicon Valley, with computer companies moving in by the droves because there were no corporate taxes in Florida or in Palm City. The city was prospering, and the newly-rich computer millionaires and their employees with stock options were all building big, fancy houses by the river. The money and big houses had attracted the thieves. The city crime rate had been exploding, especially home burglaries and rapes. All the women in the city were scared and up in arms over the crime spree, and wanted something done. Mayor Branden promised to do something about it.

“Bud, tell me what you think the problem is,” Mike Branden said. “Tell me what you think we can do.”

“Well, Mike,” Bud Anderson said, “I think the thieves and rapists have it too easy. They’re smart. They case the mark’s house carefully before they break in. They only break in when they know the wife is home alone. But that’s not the real problem, Mike.”

“The real problem is that the women are defenseless. You may not know this, being so new as Mayor, but about five years ago the previous Mayor passed gun laws that made it illegal to have a gun in the house, and illegal to use one against a burglar. He also made it illegal for anyone to carry a concealed gun outside the house. That’s when our troubles started, Mayor.”

Mike Branden grew up with guns ever since he was a boy. He belonged to the National Rifle Association. He loved skeet shooting, and bought his kids their first rifles when they were eight years old. He taught them how to shoot straight and how to use a gun safely. His wife also owned a rifle and handgun, shared his love for skeet shooting, and was a crack shot. Mayor Mike Branden was not a college graduate, but he had guts, common sense, and imagination. He immediately saw the problem, and the solution.

“Well, I think we’ll change those gun laws, Bud. Thieves and rapists have it too easy around here. They know they can rob houses and rape women with no risk.

Let’s put the risk back. Let’s see what happens when they get shot if they break into a house or bother one of our women. I’m sick to death of all the gun laws in this country, so let’s try a little experiment. I’ll convince the City Council to revoke our gun-control laws. Next, I’ll convince them to pass a new law requiring every man and woman in Palm City to own a handgun or shotgun, and know how to use them safely. I want a pistol and shotgun in every home. I want every woman walking around town with a concealed gun in her purse or under her dress. Let’s see what happens when we change the laws. Let’s see what happens when we give the victims a way to defend themselves.

I also want you to put a series of ads in the Palm City Gazette and Daily Press that announces the new laws, so everyone knows that every Palm City resident will soon be armed. I want you to set up gun safety and training courses on the local firing ranges, so we know that every woman in this town will be dead shot.”

Bud Anderson’s eyes lit up with admiration for his new Mayor. He had been wanting to revoke those gun laws for the last five years, but never dreamed of the daring plan the new Mayor now wanted to put into action.

“That’s a damned fantastic idea, Mike. You’re going to make a hell of a Mayor. I think the citizens in this town are going to love you. They’re going to have a great time learning how to use a gun again, especially the women. I know the women will form gun clubs. They’ll probably want to buy designer guns with pretty colors. Hell, I might even buy a pearl-handled 45 myself.”

Mike Branden laughed out loud at his Police Chief’s boyish enthusiasm. He said, “I think the new laws should be in place in about a month, Bud. Let’s meet again in about three months and you can tell me whether we’ve had any success with the plan.” Bud Anderson gave a mock salute to his Mayor, said “yes, sir,” and walked out the door into the Spring sunshine.

THREE MONTHS LATER:

It’s a hot July day in the Mayor’s office, and Police Chief Anderson and Mike Branden are having an enthusiastic conversation.

“Mike, mother-of-god did your plan work! The crime rate has dropped like a rock in Palm City. Burglaries are down 80 percent. Rapes are down 90 percent. I’ve never seen anything like it. It all started about two months ago, Mike. There was a burglary gang that had been hitting most of the houses. Well, about ten of them have been shot, three killed in the last two months. As soon as the burglar alarm goes off, the women took their guns from their purses and started shooting. I’ve interrogated some of the thieves we caught. They’re pretty stupid and don’t read much, so they weren’t aware of the new gun laws. They thought we were still operating under the old laws. You should have seen the shock on their faces. They were mad as hell. They never expected pretty young housewives to be spraying them with semi-automatic fire. They were mad as hell at you.”

“Then there were the rapists who didn’t know about the new gun laws either, the ones who prayed on women at night in the shopping-mall parking lots. Did they get the shock of their lives! About twenty of them have been shot already, five killed. They just came up to the women, brazen like, thinking they could get away with anything like they used to. Then the girls suddenly pulled out their pretty pistols and started firing away. You should hear how the women laughed with glee and pride when they told me their stories. They told me how thankful they were to have their guns. I think all the women in this town love you now, Mike. It’s a good thing you’re already married.”

“I think the bad guys are getting the picture, Mike. Burglars and rapists are getting scarce in Palm City. Matter of fact, I just got a call from Ben Radley, Police Chief at Hampton Bay. They still have the same idiotic gun-control laws we had here. Seems they’ve been getting a sharp rise in house burglaries and rapes there. Looks like our bad guys are moving on to easier ground in Hampton Bay. I sure feel sorry for the people in that town right now. Ben Radley wants to talk to you real bad. He wants to know how you got crime down so fast in Palm City. Who knows, Mike, maybe what you did here will spread all over the country. I hope so.”

“One other thing, Mike. Every teacher and principal in every public school in this town now carries a concealed gun. Every one of the kids know this, and they now feel real safe in the schools. They’re not worrying anymore about one of their deranged teen-age friends suddenly going on a shooting spree, like what happened at Columbine High School. If anything happens, they know they don’t have to wait an hour for the cops to show up. They know the teachers and principal can protect them. Did you know math and reading scores are going up at the schools, too? It’s the damndest thing.”

“Mike, I think you’re going to be Mayor in this town for as long as you like. I hope you stay on forever, because Palm City folks are really grateful to you. At first they were a little skeptical about your plans. But now, after they’ve seen the results, you couldn’t get them to give up their guns anymore. We’re even getting calls from newspapers, magazines, and TV stations all over the country. CNN wants to interview you, did you know that? They called me this morning. You’re becoming a celebrity, by god!”

Mike Branden laughed out loud. “Me, an orange grower, a celebrity? Forget the interviews Bud. How about we go fishing this afternoon after work? It’s getting kind of quiet around here, just the way I like it.”

Bud Anderson, grinning, stuck out his hand to shake Mike’s big, calloused hand, for he now counted Mike Branden as a good friend. That afternoon, they caught a dozen trout at Briar Creek lake. It was a fine afternoon.

Tweet This Post

It may seem obvious to many people why literacy is so important in our technologically advanced society. However, many parents may not fully realize the emotional pain and life-long damage illiteracy can cause their children. Literacy, the ability to read well, is the foundation of children’s education. If children can’t read well, every subject they try to learn will frustrate them. If they can’t read math, history, or science textbooks, if they stumble over the words, they will soon give up reading out of frustration. Asking children who are poor readers to study these subjects is like asking them to climb a rope with one arm.

Kids learn to read in their most formative years, which is why reading can profoundly affect their self-esteem. When children learn to read, they also start learning how to think abstractly, because words convey ideas and relationships between ideas. How well they read therefore affects children’s feelings about their ability to learn. This in turn affects how kids feel about themselves generally whether a child thinks he or she is stupid or bright. Children who struggle with reading often blame themselves and feel ashamed of themselves.

As Donald L. Nathanson, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College noted: First reading itself, and then the whole education process, becomes so imbued with, stuffed with, amplified, magnified by shame that children can develop an aversion to everything that is education.

Often, poor readers will struggle just to graduate from high school. They can lose general confidence in themselves, and therefore the confidence to try for college or pursue a career. Their job opportunities can dry up. Their poor reading skills and low self-confidence can strangle their ability to earn money. They can struggle financially their whole lives. If they marry and have children, they can struggle even more.

Life for illiterate adults can easily degenerate into misery, poverty, failure, and hopelessness. According to a 1992 study by the National Institute for Literacy, “43 % of Americans with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty and 70 % have no job or a part-time job. Only 5% of Americans with strong literacy skills live in poverty.” As Dr. Grover Whitehurst, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said, “Reading is absolutely fundamental. It’s almost trite to say that. But in our society, the inability to be fluent consigns children to failure in school and consigns adults to the lowest strata of job and life opportunities.”

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. By 1850, literacy rates in Massachusetts and other New England States, for both men and women, was close to 97 percent. This was before Massachusetts created the first compulsory public-school system in America in 1852. What is literacy like in our public schools today?

In 1995, 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?

In 2002, the New York State Education Department’s annual report on the latest reading and math scores for public school students found:

· 90 percent of middle schools failed to meet New York State minimum standards for math and English exam scores.

· 65 percent of elementary schools flunked the minimum standards.

· 84 percent of high schools failed to meet the minimum state standards.

· More than half of New York City’s black and hispanic elementary school students failed the state’s English and math exams. About 30 percent of white and asian-american students failed to achieve the minimum English test scores.

· The results for eighth grade students were even worse. Here, 75 percent of black and hispanic students flunked both the English and the math tests. About 50 percent of white and Asian-American eighth graders failed the tests. These illiteracy rates are now common in public schools across America, not just in New York City.

In short,as shown by the New York State Education Department’s annual report and other studies, student illiteracy rates in many public schools range from 30 to 75 percent. This is an education horror story.

That is what illiteracy can mean, what it does mean for millions of public-school children who can barely read. Does any parent want this kind of future for his or her children? I argue in Public Schools, Public Menace that our public school system is the primary cause of this tragic illiteracy, and one reason why these schools are a menace to our children.

A great movie to see that shows the tragic consequences of illiteracy is “Stanley and Iris” with Robert DeNiro and Jane Fonda. After you see this movie, you might think twice about keeping your children in public school. There are wonderful, new, low-cost private schools that are alternatives to public school, that parents can take advantage of right now.

Read more information about “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

Tweet This Post

To most of us, driving a car seems effortlessness. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving when we were young. Remember back to your father’s driving lessons? He taught you how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, those of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive “automatically” and with skill.

The same process applies to another skill—reading. Read a book or a newspaper and it seems effortless. Yet such skill comes from constant use, from constant practice of basic skills learned at an early age.

What are these skills? To read, you have to recognize words on a printed page, yet there are millions of them. Enter the wonder of the alphabet and phonics. It is by recognizing letters and their sounds that a child puts letter-sounds together to form words. Since all words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task becomes greatly simplified. The child need not memorize the word, only sound it out, read it, and find its meaning in a dictionary.

As in driving a car, reading is difficult at first. But, once learned, the skill becomes automatic, unconscious, effortless, and we read quickly without sounding-out every letter of every word. In the end, with practice, we read effortlessly, and all the knowledge of the world is open to us. Without learning the basic skills, however, reading is not possible.

Enter educrat “experts” who think otherwise. “Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word,” they ask ? “So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be “joyful” if literature becomes drills?,” they say. “Why wound children’s self-esteem and self-expression with tests and standards and high expectations?”

“If we have children memorize whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds, all this pain is gone,” they chime. “Do not teach them to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the whole word looks like—teach them word-pictures, teach them hieroglyphics, so they “recognize” the word in a book. Have the child read “Dick and Jane” learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so the child comes to “recognize” it. Do this for each word.”

“If the child can’t grasp a new word because he cannot sound it out, teach him “pre-reading” strategies,” they expound. “These “strategies” will help him “guess” what the word is. Have him look at the title of the story. Have the child look at pictures, look for “clues,” look for “patterns” in the story that make sense. Or skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Or finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher. Anything,” say the learned educrats, “except actually sounding out and reading the word.”

This, the educrats say, is the “centered,” “self-esteem-enhancing” way to teach reading. Meaning and context—not basics. Group discussions—not letters, sounds, drills, and independence.

This is your whole-language method (now called “balanced literacy” or some other deceptive name). This is the hieroglyphics of Egypt transported to your children’s classroom. This is our educrats’ pet “reading” theory, foisted on 45 million public-school children-victims across the country.

The results were inevitable—half the nation’s high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule. Businesses lose $40 billion a year for remedial reading classes for new employees fresh from high school. Thirty percent of Americans functionally illiterate. The child who is taught phonics is able to read thousands of words in a few semesters. The “whole-word” child-victim is able to “recognize” only a few hundred words. Thus we have the crash in reading skills, the dumbing-down of our kids, the millions of frustrated teens who drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can’t get a decent job.

Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, the educrats turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. In the face of reality — massive denial and rationalization.

Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and the educrats have many.

Educrats think phonics believers are extremist Christian Rightists or educational simpletons unable to understand the “complexity” of the educrats’ so-called learning theories. Yet, let reality be the judge. The children who learn phonics read far quicker and better than the “whole-word” readers. And the “complexity” educrats proclaim is a self-serving fantasy of their making, designed to ward off competition. Educrats think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don’t know how to teach phonics to your kids any longer, or don’t want to bother.

Educrats claim that phonics and rules will turn kids off to the joy of reading. Just the opposite is true — when a “whole-language” victim-child tries to read the many words he was not taught to “recognize,” he will give up in frustration. His frustration will end his reading and his ‘joy” in reading. The phonics-trained child can read any word and any book, and the joy of reading follows from his skills

This learning of basic skills need not be a struggle. What turns kids off? The insufferable boredom, the mediocrity of the educrats’ teaching methods, unchanged for 50 years.

Children learn the alphabet and letter sounds with delight at home. Sesame Street, “Hooked on Phonics,” the Internet, learning channels on cable TV, creative reading books especially made for kids by learning entrepreneurs can make learning letters and sounds a delight.

Phonics and drills are a drudge in government schools because educrats don’t have the time, skill, desire, or imagination to make them otherwise. Rather than blame themselves or their government-run system for failure, they blame everyone else. They now claim it is the child’s fault (he has attention-deficit disorder!), the parents’ fault (they don’t get “involved!”), or “society’s” fault (racism or “not enough money for the schools!”).

Educrats also say that drills and basics, tests and standards, are “unfair” to kids, cause them stress, and threaten their self-esteem. Just the opposite is true—real self-esteem comes from achievement, not from a teacher’s hot-air, feel-good compliments. Achievement needs tasks, content, ever-increasing complex skills children learn with guided effort. Joy, not stress, is the result of achievement. And what is more important than for children to learn that rewards come from effort and perseverence? Educrats hate phonics and true reading skills because their teacher colleges don’t train them in the phonics method. Teachers who are not taught the phonics method will naturally feel inadequate to teach phonics to children. It is not the teachers’ fault. Rather, the fault lies with educrats, teacher colleges, and educational theorists who have contempt for phonics.

Phonics and drills requires a “teacher-centered” approach in the classroom. This approach requires greater effort and responsibility on teachers and schools to create lesson plans that show real progress in reading skills. The teacher-centered approach requires teachers and educrats to constantly test and evaluate both students and themselves.

The “whole-language” reading method, in contrast, is allegedly “student-centered,” meaning that kids get to sit around in circles and talk about their feelings rather than learn to actually read. With “whole-language” reading, educrats can claim there are no standards, no way to test reading skills and achievement. There are few rigorous tests, low standards, and no failing grades.

“Whole-language” reading therefore achieves the educrats’ ultimate goal — if there are no standards or objectivity, no one can blame them, no one can question them, no one can hold them accountable for their failure to teach our children to read. The educrats don’t want to grade their students’ performance because it allegedly hurts the kids “self-esteem.” I believe this attitude is merely a projection of the educrat’s primal fears—they do not want parents judging their performance and holding them accountable for teaching their kids to read. The educrats don’t want their fragile self-esteem threatened by angry parents who expect public schools to do one simple thing—teach their kids to read.

Government schools are designed to assuage the educrats’ terror at being judged by parents, and being forced to compete in a free-market education system. Government (public) schools’ ultimate purpose is to be a full-employment program for educrats—to give them guaranteed jobs without accountability to parents. It is to placate these fearful educrats that our government schools dumb-down our children and turn them into illiterates with bleak futures.

So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by government and their educrats, they will never change. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I tell parents about wonderful new education alternatives to public schools, such as accredited, low-cost internet private schools. Parents, I urge you to look into these alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, “reading” instruction.

Tweet This Post

From the time the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 until the 1850s, most parents taught their children to read at home or sent their children to small private or religious grammar schools. Education was voluntary and local governments did not force parents to send their children to state-controlled schools. Yet, literacy rates in colonial America were far higher than they are today.

In 1765, John Adams wrote that “a native of America, especially of New England, who cannot read and write is as rare a Phenomenon as a Comet.” Jacob Duche, the chaplain of Congress in 1772, said of his countrymen, “Almost every man is a reader.” Daniel Webster confirmed that the product of home education was near-universal literacy when he stated, “a youth of fifteen, of either sex, who cannot read and write, is very seldom to be found.”

After the Revolutionary War, literacy rates continued to rise in all the colonies. There were many affordable, innovative local schools parents could send their children to. Literacy data from that early period show that from 1650 to 1795, the literacy rate among white men rose from 60 to 90 percent. Literacy among women went from 30 to 45 percent.

In the early 1800s, Pierre Samuel Dupont, an influential French citizen who helped Thomas Jefferson negotiate for the Louisiana Purchase, came to America and surveyed education here. He found that most young Americans could read, write, and “cipher” (do arithmetic), and that Americans of all ages could and did read the Bible. He estimated that fewer than four Americans in a thousand were unable to write neatly and legibly. [5]

From 1800 to 1840, literacy rates in the North increased from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South, the white literacy rate grew from about 50 to 60 percent, to 81 percent (it was illegal to teach blacks to read). By 1850, literacy rates in Massachusetts and other New England states, for both men and women, was close to 97 percent. This was before Massachusetts created the first compulsory public-school system in America in 1852. (Of course, these literacy numbers did not apply to black slaves since many colonies had laws that forbid teaching slaves to read).

Ever since the first public schools were established in Massachusetts in 1852, and made compulsory in most of the states by the 1890′s, literacy among adults and children has been deteriorating. As I noted in a previous article, today the literacy rate for students in our public schools ranges from 30 percent to 70 percent. Compare that literacy horror statistic to the over 90 percent literacy rate for the average child, man, and woman by 1852.

The question to naturally ask is this: if our kids learned to read far better when we had an education free-market before public schools came along, why on Earth do we need public schools now? The answer is, we don’t. Parents should take advantage of the quality, low-cost, free-market education alternatives they have right now that I explore in my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.”

Tweet This Post

Public-school true believers often fall into this category – for over a hundred years, education “experts” have been tormenting our children with public schools, allegedly for the children’s benefit. Like all true believers, these people believe that they know what is best for our children and society, and seek to enforce their beliefs on parents.

From the 1850s to the 1920s, public-school activists such as Horace Mann and John Dewey worked to create a public-school system like the one they admired in Prussia (Germany). Mann and Dewey considered public education a religion, with a holy mission to mold children and society. Simply teaching children to read, write, and do math was too commonplace a goal for them. Mann and Dewey wanted the schools to have total control over children’s lives. This meant removing parents’ influence over their children. Mann put it this way: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”

Dewey also had a utopian vision for America and he wanted the common schools to achieve his vision. To create a socialist America, public schools had to mold generations of children into the habit of obedience. In his Pedagogic Creed of 1897, Dewey wrote, “Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. . .”

Public Schools Expand Their Control Over Our Children

By the early twentieth century, public schools had expanded their functions into areas undreamed of in the 1850s. Schools took on the role of social agencies, with nurses, social centers, playgrounds, school showers, kindergartens, and “Americanization” programs for immigrants. Public schools became a major agency for social control.

Unfortunately, today’s public schools are fulfilling Mann’s and Dewey’s socialist vision with a vengeance. There is hardly any area of children’s lives that school authorities don’t push to control or manipulate. Politicians and public-school apologists in many states are now pushing programs that would make kindergarten compulsory. Public schools also now spend billions of dollars for psychological counseling, school-lunch programs, parent welfare-outreach programs, special-education classes, bilingual classes, early-childhood programs, drug and sex education classes, as well as programs for millions of “at-risk” or “special-needs” children.

This government-knows-best philosophy is the deepest reason why public schools get away with educational murder and can never be fixed. Many public-school apologists believe that your children’s education must be dictated by local governments and school authorities. By implication, they believe that parents are an annoyance at best, and at worst a danger to their children’s proper education. That is why public-school true believers will never voluntarily give up control over our children. They see themselves as noble idealists who know what is best for our children. That is why these “idealists” have contempt for parent’s rights.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post