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Sunday, November 09, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'They'll break into your house ... '
Last week, I was discussing a government-school teacher I encountered at a UNLV adult education class. She was asserting that without government schooling, the children would be illiterate. Of course, this flies in the face of the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville found this the most literate nation on earth when he visited in the 1820s -- 30 years before Horace Mann & Co. erected their first tax-funded mandatory government schools on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in the 1850s. It also fails to explain the fact that black literacy peaked in the 1940s in America, and has been dropping ever since -- even as we have poured vastly more billions into the ever larger and more thoroughly unionized government youth internment camps (statistic courtesy of the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as cited by New York state [government] teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto in his fine book "The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling"). This argument also closely mimics the piteous mewlings of the Soviets -- 70-year captives of a classically dysfunctional system of socialist impoverishment -- who used to whine, "But if we allowed greedy capitalists to take over the food distribution system, they'd be able to charge any prices they liked, and the poor people would starve! Groceries are far too crucial a commodity to be handled by anyone but the wise, redistributionist state." Guess what? Private supermarkets now prevail in the former Soviet Union, with the result that there is more and better food more readily available for all -- just as there is no starvation to speak of in the United States, despite the fact that food distribution here is almost entirely handled by the free market. (Pardon me, by the "greedy capitalists.") Why doesn't Kroger starve the poor by raising prices to line its own pockets? Because the company has to undersell Stop & Shop, of course. It's called "competition" -- and it's precisely what our teacher's monstrously expensive government day-care monopoly lacks.
But what I find most offensive in the schoolmarm's predictable bleating was the recurrent and thinly disguised attempt at extortion: If you won't pay to educate other people's kids, they'll break into your house and steal your stuff. Jeanne and I grew up in suburban eastern Connecticut in the 1950s. The way Jeanne's mom paid the milkman and the insurance agent was to leave cash in an envelope on the refrigerator door, labeled "Milkman," or "Insurance man." These fellows were instructed to come in the unlocked back door when no one was home and take their payments. It worked. No one even thought about locking their back doors. Everyone did it this way, yet no neighborhood kid walked in and stole that money, over a period of decades. Here in the West, even during the rowdiest days of drunken cowboy brawling in Tombstone, no one locked their doors, and women were widely reported to feel safe on the streets at night. De Tocqueville reported unescorted women could travel the whole length of the Mississippi River without fear of an unwelcome advance. What has changed? The answer is that our modern welfare/police state has created the very sociopathologies -- born of boredom, hopelessness, organized coercion and theft on a massive scale, the undercutting of parental authority and discretion, programmed illiteracy and innumeracy and mass dopings for "attention deficit disorder" -- which they now threaten to set loose on us unless we continue paying our "protection money"! But I think the most pathetic thing about the very predictability of this repetitive catechism of outrage is that these schoolmarms never seem to have the slightest interest in constructing a substantial rebuttal based on fact, research and logical argument -- probably for the same reason they avoided the "harder" disciplines and took their degrees in schoolteaching in the first place. I held up John Taylor Gatto's slim and inexpensive book "Dumbing Us Down" during my talk at UNLV, offering copies for sale. (Gatto's books are good reads, though they can make one very sad, parents writing in about "my once happy child constantly in tears ... bit by bit she was becoming silent and fearful." Pulling her 8-year-old out of the government schools, a parent in Santa Barbara writes, "Now she laughs again. I have my laughing girl back.") I had no takers. I've never heard back from a single one of these schoolmarms to the effect that, "I went and read those books by Gatto and de Tocqueville that you talked about. I still don't agree with all your conclusions but they were very interesting ..."
Instead, from the other side, the cry seems to be, "My beautiful euphemisms are melting, melting ... ." And the debate pretty much limited to, "The way we're doing things now makes me feel good, and listening to you talk makes me feel bad, so please shut up."
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."
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