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.

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.

Most home-schooling parents spend about three to four hours a day homeschooling their kids. The key point to remember is that you have many options and a vast amount of educational resource material available to help you homeschool your children and quickly teach them the basics. When you take advantage of this material, home-schooling can be fairly easy and take much less time than you think.

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.

Government-controlled public schools will never give your kids the kind of joyous education they deserve, the kind your children can get in a homeschooling environment. At home, your kids can learn from Google, Yahoo, learning software, or hundreds of other low-cost education resources available to you right now.

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.

In January, 2003, a group of parents sued a Sacramento Unified School District because certain teachers at their local elementary school were aggressively, and secretly, teaching anthroposophy, a religion that combines traditional Western religion with astrology and New Age religion. Pacific Justice Institute lawyers representing the parents indicated that many other public schools in California are now adding New Age and Eastern religions, including Islam, to their curricula.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Parents, the solution is to stop hitting your head against the brick wall of arrogant public-school employees. Just walk around the wall and don’t look back. That is, consider taking your children out of public school, permanently.

. . . children spent on average only about 50 percent of their school day on core “academic” subjects. The rest of their time is spent on classes about sex-education, personal safety, family life, consumer affairs, AIDS and drug prevention, save-the-environment, multiculturalism studies, “cooperative-learning” projects, study halls, electives, homeroom, counseling, sports activities, or pep rallies (high school).

Besides creating millions of graduating illiterates, automatic promotion tells kids that mediocrity and laziness are acceptable. It tragically sets children up to fail later in life when reality smacks them in the face — when they apply for college or a job. These are not lessons that schools should be teaching our children.

Parents would not be wise to trust any claims by teachers or school authorities about their children’s alleged academic abilities, even in so-called “good” schools in suburban neighborhoods. Parents should have an outside independent company test their child’s reading and math skills to find out how their child is really doing.

Unlike private schools, public schools rarely go out of business, no matter how bad they are, because they get their “customers” and their money by force (compulsory school taxes).

If your child exhibits any of these danger signals, it may be time to seriously consider taking your child out of public school and looking for better education alternatives. “Public Schools, Public Menace” has a whole Resource Section devoted to these great education alternatives.