My Kids Deserve Better

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.

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.

Why have we put our children into educational prisons called public schools? What crimes have they committed? Why do we condemn almost 45 million innocent children to this punishment? Do I exaggerate by calling these schools “prisons?” Well, let’s compare prisons and public schools.

“Well, not with my child. I am hereby immediately withdrawing Mary from your school. I’ll teach her at home or send her to a private school, even if I have to work two jobs to pay for that private school. I’m also going to get a little more active on this issue. I am going to tell every parent I know about your public schools. Maybe I can shake things up a bit so more parents take their children out of public school, permanently.”

“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.”

The difference between government and free-market schools is this — when government schools are rotten, when they dumb-down our kids with nonsense education theories that fail, 45 million children can suffer for twelve years, without parents having any recourse. If and when an entrepreneur-owned free-market school is bad, only a handful of children suffer for a few months while parents shop for a better school — with parents having full recourse and freedom of choice.

Most of our Founding Fathers, including Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, like most average colonial Americans, spent few years, if any, in formal grammar schools of the day, yet they knew how to read and write well. Most voluntary local grammar schools expected parents to teach their children to read and write before they started school. Most colonial parents apparently had no trouble teaching their children these skills.

If parents have the natural right to nurture and educate their children, then any law that interferes with or violates that natural right is illegitimate. Any such law violates the basic liberties we all have as parents, human beings, and Americans. That means that all local and State compulsory attendence laws, compulsory school taxes, and the thousands of other local and State education regulations that prop up the public schools, are illigitimate and violate parents’ fundamental natural and constitutional rights.

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.

Moreover, if we agree that children have a right to an education because their parents are poor, then shouldn’t they also have a right to food, a bicycle, a nice house in the suburbs, and designer clothes? If poor kids (and all children) have an alleged right to an education, don’t they also have an alleged right to everything else that other kids have whose parents are well-off? Why not then say that anyone, poor, middle-class, or rich who has less money than his neighbor, has the “right” to steal from his neighbor? Where do we stop if some people can legally steal from others because they claim their kids need this or that?

Parents, do you have young children or teenagers who can’t read or write, are scared of math, and are falling behind and miserable in public school? Do you want your children to go to college and have a good life, or end up in low-paying dead-end jobs, courtesy of a public-school education? Do you want the best for your children, or is “good enough,” good enough for your children?

She took the revolver from behind her back and pointed it straight at Jimmy Greeves’s chest. The thug’s eyes opened wide with shock as he saw the pistol come up. She fired twice, point-blank, and Jimmy Greeves flew backwards from the impact of the bullets. He lay dead on the floor in front of Benny Doland, whose startled eyes were wide open. Benny looked down at his dead partner, then looked at the barrel of the smoking revolver in Jenny’s hand. What scared him most was the calm, merciless look on Jenny’s face. He panicked, and ran screaming out the front door. Jenny watched him run with a grim smile of satisfaction.

Most low-income families don’t need government education handouts anymore in the form of allegedly “free” public schools. Parents today can buy quality, low-cost food in a competitive, free-market food industry full of grocery stores and supermarkets. In the same way, parents today can give their kids a quality education using low-cost Internet private schools and homeschooling.

Downey said, “I don’t know what to do anymore, sir. No matter how many police we put on the streets, no matter how much we increase prison sentences, the crime rates keep going up. I don’t understand it, sir. I don’t know how to stop it.”

Home-schooled kids don’t have to read dumb-downed text-books, study subjects they hate, or endure meaningless classes six to eight hours a day. Home-schooled kids won’t be subject to drugs, bullies, violence, or peer pressure, as they are in public schools. Home-schooled children who are “different” in any way won’t have to endure cruel jokes and taunts from other children in their classes.

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.

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.

Home-schooling provides children with a superior education. Parents can quickly teach most kids the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic using excellent, creative, learn-to-read, or learn-math books, programs, or computer learning software. Once children become proficient readers, they can then study subjects they love in greater depth. If a child needs help on a special subject, parents can occasionally call in a tutor.

Home-schooling is a great success. That’s why many public-school authorities hate home-schooling parents.

The real question is this: Is good enough, good enough for your child? Your child is unique and precious. He or she is born with a love of learning and a unique potential. Your child’s love of learning, self-confidence, and potential can be squashed in the rigid atmosphere of public schools. Is a third-rate public-school education good enough for your child. If you could give your child a rich, fun, rewarding education that will make your child’s mind and future blossom, isn’t that worth the risk of trying?

In contrast, here’s 54 unique benefits homeschooling can give you and your kids, as written and explained by Laura B., a smart, wonderful wife, mother of three, homeschooler, and business owner who works from home and still focuses on her family!

Look for these 11 danger signals from your child that tell you they are having trouble with their public school studies.

The book Public Schools, Public Menace is the resource that you need. If you are a parent looking for a private school and want to know about costs, location, curricula, and teacher qualifications, this is where you will find all of that–and more. You don’t have to limit yourself to brick and mortar private schools. If you include internet private schools, your options increase and costs decrease significantly.

A good internet private school can cost less than $950 per year. Break that down monthly and then weekly. It’s $85 per month for the ten months of the school year, or $25 per week. A small adjustment in your grocery bill or eating out budget, and your children can get a top quality education.

The proof is in the pudding. Aspen Learning Systems, a subsidiary of Knowledge Universe company, recently opened Colorado’s first privately-run reading center in Denver. Yes, that’s right, a school that concentrates on teaching kids to read. Aspen’s reading center gives kids a nine-week reading course that emphasizes heavy phonics. The result? In the first quarter of 1999, students gained an average of two years and four months in reading ability after they completed the course. Only nine weeks. Compare that to the twelve years your kids have to suffer through in public school, and still graduate with poor reading skills.

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.

Success in school is predicated on a less regimented environment in which a child is nurtured and not sucked down to the level of the lowest common denominator.

It’s important to be able to choose what your child studies, as well as where and with whom. Public schools notoriously waste kids’ time with coursework they don’t need, don’t care about, and which don’t go at the right pace for them.. In “Public Schools, Public Menace,” you will learn how to find an affordable internet private school that will teach your child what he really needs and wants to know at a pace designed to keep him interested in and excited by learning. Don’t waste another year of your child’s life to find out about better school choices.

It seems that school authorities and public-school employees would rather protect an irreparably broken, failed system, than risk the security of their jobs by giving parents real school choice. We can certainly understand public-school employees wanting to keep their guaranteed job security. However, should we sacrifice our children’s education and future to keep failed public schools in business?

Today, many school authorities seem to have contempt for religion and traditional moral values. They force children to endure years of “values clarification” classes, which teach children that all moral values are subjective and meaningless. Many teacher-facilitators, as some now prefer to call themselves, teach kids that whatever feels good at the moment or whatever the group considers acceptable is a “good” value.

As we might expect, teacher quality is far more important than class size in determining how children do in school. William Sanders at the University of Tennessee studied this issue. He found that teacher quality is almost twenty times more important than class size in determining students’ academic achievement in class. As a result, reducing class sizes can lead to the contrary effect of hurting students’ education, rather than helping.

If government schools ruin children’s education and futures with their failed policies, why give them more billions of dollars? In fact, giving public schools more money to continue their education crimes against our kids would be criminal. It would be like giving more money to a drug addict so he could buy more cocaine and do more damage to his brain.

If teacher licensing produced competent teachers, why would public-school authorities fight so hard against merit pay? The answer seems obvious-is it possible that the public-school system produces teachers, principals, or administrators who might not “merit” their pay, and might lose their jobs under merit-pay rules?

“The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as reactionary, at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation, is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?”

Bad public schools don’t shut down, and the entire system is beyond repair, because this system rests on a foundation of naked government force. Take away compulsory-attendance laws and compulsory school taxes and it’s highly likely that most public schools would “go out of business” because parents would take their business elsewhere.

If the federal government truly wants to give parents more school choice, they should be working to remove local and state controls over education, not adding to those controls with the No Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is like trying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving him more arsenic. Naturally, government education officials can’t understand the fact that government control of education is not the solution, it is the problem.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is making the problem of cheating, low academic standards, and public schools lying to parents, even worse. Under this Act, the Department of Education now requires students to pass standardized tests. Failing schools will lose federal funding and other perks if their students consistently turn in a bad performance on these tests.

Parents, it might be wise to periodically ask your children if their teachers ask them personal questions about your family or how you discipline your children. Turning children into spies against their parents or making them afraid of their parents is not what parents pay school taxes for.

Compulsory attendance laws show contempt for parents’ rights because they are based on the notion that the state owns our children for twelve years, and that parents should have little say in the matter. 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?

Parents, it would not be wise to trust any claims by teachers or school authorities about your children’s alleged academic abilities, even in so-called “good” schools in suburban neighborhoods. To find out how your child is really doing, have an outside independent company test your child’s reading and math skills. If you find that your child’s academic skills are far below what your local public-school led you to believe, you might want to take your child out of public school and look for better education alternatives. There is a complete Resource section in “Public Schools, Public Menace” that explores many of these quality, low-cost education alternatives.