Posted on 01/15/2005 6:39:11 AM PST by wgeorge2001
The Education Liberator, Vol. 3, No. 2, February/March 1997
Twenty-one ways "public schools" harm your children by R. C. Hoiles, c1957
R. C. Hoiles was the publisher of the Santa Ana Register, now the Orange County Register, the flagship of media giant, Freedom Communications. We are commemorating the 40th anniversary of Mr. Hoiles publication of his great vituperation against "gun-run schools." It has been edited for length, a process newspaperman Hoiles would understand.
Now, what are the things that government schools dare not teach?
They dare not teach the spirit of the Constitution as set forth in the first official document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence. They dare not teach it because it says that all men, not just the majority, are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
A man isn't free to pursue happiness when the majority in any school district, state or nation can coerce him to pay for a school that he believes violates the principles upon which this government was formed.
The school teachers dare not emphasize this part of the Declaration of Independence. They dare not explain the true meaning of this statement. If they were successful in explaining and teaching the true meaning of these ideologies, there would be no gun-run schools.
Again, they dare not teach that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed. They have to completely repudiate the ideas of the American way of life. They have to teach the old-world philosophy of the divine right of governments, only now they call it the divine right of the majority rather than the divine right of kings.
They dare not teach in government schools the meaning of liberty. It is doubtful whether any teacher in gun-run schools dares define the kind of liberty the Founding Fathers mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to support. If the government schools successfully taught the meaning of the liberty our Founding Fathers had in mind, there would be no government schools that starve the intellects of our children.
The government schools dare not teach the meaning of the Golden Rule. If they were successful in getting their pupils to understand that they should not force other people to pay for something they did not want, then they could see that it was a violation of the Golden Rule to force others to pay for their schooling.
They, of course, dare not teach their pupils to believe that if it is wicked and a violation of the Golden Rule for one man to do a thing, it is still wicked and a violation of the Golden Rule if 49 per cent or 99 per cent of the people do the same thing. They, thus, dare not teach the youth that the ideal government, the only kind of government that can be of value to mankind, is one that is limited to the use of defensive force and never has a right, under any circumstances, to initiate force. I want to continue suggesting things that tax-run schools dare not teach.
They dare not teach the First Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me" because they are bowing down and worshipping the will of the majority rather than the eternal laws of God that no man made and no man can unmake.
They dare not teach "Thou shalt not covet," because they are violating the Coveting Commandment.
They believe they do not need to teach well enough that people will voluntarily pay their salaries. They get their pay by violence rather than by rendering service well enough so that those who pay them believe they are benefited by their employment.
They dare not teach discipline and self-reliance because they are not disciplining themselves enough to render such service that they can be paid voluntarily. The teachers take the shortcut and use a police club to get their money. That certainly is not discipline, nor is it self-reliance.
They dare not teach thrift and the harm that comes from getting into debt. They dare not do this because the government burdens every child and every person in the United States with a monstrous debt.
They dare not teach respect for individual initiative because government schools are based on lack of respect for other people's initiative. They are based on the theory that "We've got the power and the individual is helpless and we're going to make him pay for anything our agents think is education."
They dare not teach humility and meekness because the means used by government schools are the exact opposite of humility and meekness. Are believers in tax-run schools so sure they are right that they are willing to initiate force to make people support their ideas of education? They see themselves as so exalted that they have lost all humility and meekness. And remember, "He who exalts himself shall become abased."
They dare not teach children to reason. They have to teach them not to recognize a contradiction or a dilemma. If the pupils were taught to reason, they would recognize the tyranny that is bound to follow making people pay for things and ideas they abhor.
They dare not teach the harm that follows socialism, communism, collectivism and fascism for to do so would let pupils realize that aggressive force is part of socialism, communism, collectivism and fascism.
"Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still posses."
C.S. Lewis
They dare not teach that what man wants must be obtained on a voluntary basis. They dare not teach this because they get what they want on an involuntary basis.
They dare not teach the difference between socialism and private ownership of property. They dare not explain that under socialism the only way a man can benefit is by injuring another, as in the case in compelling people to pay for schools they think will destroy the country.
They dare not explain that in free enterprise, including free enterprise in education, the gain of one is the gain of all.
Tax-run schools dare not teach love and charity because they are using aggressive force. They seem to think that aggressive force is better than persuasion by love and charity.
They cannot teach patience because they are so impatient about getting what they seem to believe is an education that they dare not wait to persuade those who should employ them to pay their salaries.
They cannot teach peace and goodwill because they are an example of the opposite of peace and goodwill. They are an example of initiating force, of threatening to get from others by aggressive force what they think they should get.
They cannot teach that the government is a servant of individuals because they believe it should be supported by giving it a monopoly to use aggressive force to make people pay. They can only teach that it is a master of the individual.
They cannot teach justice because their method of supporting the schools is based on injustice — arbitrary, initiated force.
They cannot teach that each man is responsible for his own life because they deny that by using force to take part of man's energy against his will, and man cannot be responsible for his life unless he has the right to choose. There is nothing more important for parents than their duty to see that their children are treated fairly and have an opportunity to learn from schools that can teach these great moral principles and axioms. It is not the money we're wasting in our tax-run schools that is so important, but it is that our children are not being taught the moral laws that tax-less schools can teach.
It is because children can be taught what is right in tax-less schools and they cannot be so taught in tax-run schools that I am obliged to do what little I can to get parents to see that they are not doing their duty to their children by sending them to tax-run schools.
What we need above everything else is more people devoting more time to seeing that the youth of the land are instilled with belief in the great moral laws, the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence. Government schools cannot teach successfully the will to learn. The best way to teach anything is by example. But the superintendent and managers of the schools themselves are not enough interested in the will to learn to be willing to answer questions as they would before a court to determine whether what they are doing is in harmony with what they profess to believe. If there is anything a man of integrity should want to learn, it is whether what he is doing is in harmony and consistent with what he says.
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Bump!
Alas, I do agree with you! The overall system is a disgusting mess. Pockets of good schools, with good teachers, in good communities will naturally rise above the cluster*&*^ we call public education!
Ted Kennedy and the others like him are a poverty pimps.
Letting criminals out of jail further worsening the Ghetto neighborhoods and putting children in danger.
Yes, I agree. My children go to a public school and I'm pleased with the education they're receiving. The teachers do tend to keep their political opinions to themselves, although occasionally, there is one that just can't help it.
I would have to guess that public schools are getting more and more like most major colleges; liberal with an agenda. I am not shocked any more when I hear of public schools refusing to teach the declaration of independence while at the same time teaching "alternative" lifestyles and multiculturalism.
I believe you and glad you spoke up. Just believe us too; they're are not all good.
I went to school on Long Island. East Islip High School, recently graduated on '03.
Oh noooooooooooooooooooooooo
Relax. Every so often the Freep posts something like this to flush out all the loonies.
PS. The initials "RC" stand for "REAL CRAZY".
And still you'll hear and see written at FR,
"THAT isn't happening in MY pupblic school."
LOL!
One would think that I would have checked the link before linking right back to the same site.
My apologies to all.
"Relax. Every so often the Freep posts something like this to flush out all the loonies.
PS. The initials "RC" stand for "REAL CRAZY".
LOL!
"R. C. Hoiles was the publisher of the Santa Ana Register, now the Orange County Register, the flagship of media giant, Freedom Communications. We are commemorating the 40th anniversary of Mr. Hoiles publication of his great vituperation against "gun-run schools." It has been edited for length, a process newspaperman Hoiles would understand."
What's even more tragic are some of the parents out there. They can send them to the best schools and wonder why their kids are failures ... Duh - parents are the MOST influential, but nah, it's the schools fault - LOL! PARENTS are often the larger problem at home.
I will tell you one "basic" thing that differs from good/bad schools of the present/past: present emphasis = non-directive education = bad; past emphasis = sound and traditional methods = good.
If the method of education used is non-directive education [also called OBE (outcome based education) or affective education, and an ever-changing list of other "names"--you can guess why that's done], which is based on HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY, instead of sound and proven methods [i.e., the traditional methods of teaching by "rote" (memorization), phonics, memorizing math tables, spelling tests, etc.], then, as a general rule, the education received by the student is poor because the emphasis is no longer on learning.
Because of Humanistic Psychology, the teaching methods shifted from learning the basics to an emphasis on FEELINGS and self-esteem.
By the above standard, I received an excellent education at public school. There was no psychological manipulation on how I thought and felt. Instead, the focus was on learning grammar, spelling, memorizing multiplication tables, phonics (instead of the "whole language" approach--which is a proven failure with the majority of children and why California finally dumped the method, no longer allowing its exclusive use and went back to including phonics instruction), history, geography, music, etc.
When attending college as an adult (many years after high school), I was appalled at the poor education received by my "peers" (most noticeable with those who were 10 years + younger than me). Many were placed in remedial classes (including the one in which I was a teacher's assistant (English)), where I learned that most had no understanding whatsoever of grammar; didn't have a clue what a complete sentence was; had atrocious spelling; didn't know how to sound out new words using PHONICS.
The current "system" being used continues to be based on a failed system: non-directive education. And this approach is how new teachers are trained in the teachers' colleges, who, BTW, are products of "it" being used on them.
Not going to flame you, but you have to remenber that we all make that judgement based on what level we have set the bar at as far as standards go. If it worked for you, and satisfies your level of standards, then, yes, it was a good public school for you.
This does not mean I think you have low standards or am trying to say my standards are better than yours. They're different. I would say, that I too, had a fairly good experience with the public school system (I only attended PS for high school), but that was over 20 years ago and in a very small, rural school district. We still invited local pastors to lead prayer at graduation ceremonies then. Times have changed.
To give an example, public school is sometimes justified as the best and possibly the only way to ensure civic peace in a religiously diverse country like the United States. This rationale works like a bait and switch, because school is an engine of civic disorder far worse than the alternative where people live and **learn** in plain old freedom and religion is allowed to be religion, the organic backdrop that shapes the way we see the world.
One of school's most important effects is to ensure that most people never develop a working vocabulary of morals, liberty, and knowledge, because school preempts all these things in it's day-to-day operations, and it has to conceal that fact from the vast majority of people so that it can survive as an institution.
School has this threefold effect because while purporting to be a sort of publicly-driven "knowledge engine" it actually pushes religious knowledge to the side; it inflicts a long-lasting regimen of drill and compulsion on everybody; and it tries to put knowledge in a box, treating it like a museum specimen that no longer lives or breathes but can be patronizingly "admired" and clinically dissected from a distance. These qualities of school cannot be changed, because that would be the death knell of schooling. So I ask, is there truly a crisis that threatens the civic peace, that makes it necessary to subject people to thirteen years of drill instruction in amoral, ignorant servility?
PARENTS are usually products of public schools.
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