Let's start here. In 2016, as US News reports, "The Portland Public Schools Board on Tuesday decided to ban any classroom materials that cast doubt on climate change. The resolution passed unanimously and requires that textbooks and other material purchased by the district present climate change as a fact rather than theory. Material will also need to present human activity as one of the phenomenon's causes."
This is good news. Why? Because a school system has asserted how it wants education to be managed. This is how children will be taught. No tap-dancing around the issue. Here it is. Boom. Out in the open. If you don't like it, too bad.
If you don't like it as a parent, take your child out of the Portland system. Launch home schooling. Start your own private school. Move out of Portland to another public school district.
Let's go all the way back to the beginning of the American public-education system and Thomas Jefferson, who tried (and failed) to get a bill passed in the Virginia legislature. Jefferson:
"But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by...[any] general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience....No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to."
Jefferson's vision was hundreds of small wards within each state. Each ward would have its own public school, and the parents---not the government---would manage it and fund it.
If, in one school, the parents decide children will learn the moon is a painted illusion on the sky, so be it. If they decide that stones can speak or logic is a European plot against human reason, so be it. If they decide to assemble a list of a thousand banned books, which must be burned, so be it.
With this sort of vast decentralization, it wouldn't be long before disgruntled parents within a ward would break away and start their own school.
Federal mandates, funding, programs, curriculum
The opposite system is federal. Federal mandates, funding, programs, curriculum.
Education run by the individual states is hardly better. These governments are also huge and demanding.
I don't care what excuses parents come up with, in order to opt out of taking charge of education. It's their burden, whether through home-schooling, by creating and sustaining their own private schools for their children, or deciding which schools to send their kids to. The responsibility is theirs.
The usual caterwaul goes this way: "But many, many parents aren't equipped to understand what goes on in the classroom. We need government-run schools to make sure children receive a good education."
Baloney. Since when is it necessary to design an entire school system around the ignorance of parents?
Why not say most parents don't know how to raise their children, and therefore the state must take over that function, too?
Well, if you took a few hours to research the work of Child Protective Services bureaucracies around the US, you'd realize this is, in fact happening. The brutal overreach of these agencies, in many cases, amounts to kidnapping. On false pretexts, the State takes children and dumps them into foster care, where violent abuse and high-dose drugging with toxic psychiatric meds is endemic.
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Government loves parents who say they don't understand education, medical treatment, child-rearing---whatever responsibility parents are willing to abdicate
Face it, the government loves parents who say they don't understand education, medical treatment, child-rearing---whatever responsibility parents are willing to abdicate, it's a cause for celebration in government circles.
The State promotes a consensus of cluelessness and victimhood.
If I were a top federal bureaucrat, I'd sponsor a program (a few billion dollars ought to cover it) to investigate and discover the most ignorant set of parents in America, the mother and father who can't think their way out of a wet paper bag. I would profile those parents from head to toe, and based on the information gleaned, I would then form 1000 federal programs (adequately staffed) to assume all the child-rearing functions those parents can't perform AND IMPOSE THOSE FUNCTIONS ON ALL FAMILIES AND CHILDREN IN AMERICA.
"It takes a village." And this is the kind of village we're really talking about. Not some African tribal outpost. A federal ghetto.
So good work, Portland, in banning all books that question climate change. My only problem is you haven't gone far enough. You should have daily chanting sessions for all the children: CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, intoned for a half-hour after lunch. Perhaps you can attach electrodes to the children's heads and produce readouts of secretly dissenting young minds in the classroom, and shunt those kids off to a Chinese-style re-education facility and call it "enrichment."
Then, perhaps, more parents in your district would wake up and grab their kids and run for the hills and start their own schools, because they can't deny what you're doing any longer.
(To read about Jon's mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails hereor his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
