Let us have a look at the battlefield. From colonial times on education was a local concern and it conformed to the culture of the locality. America was a Protestant nation up until yesterday when it was announced that it no longer is so. When the Catholics came they wanted the imprint of their own religion on their children so they created parochial schools. Jews did so as well in their turn, but to a lesser extent preferring after school Hebrew studies and preparation for bar mitzvah. Soon, we will expect an aggressive Muslim subpopulation to energize their own schools and to attempt to imprint Islam on children in the public schools.
Beginning with the Warren court, a radical interpretation of the First Amendment was imposed on local education from the federal level. This interpretation required a distorted view of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and over time evolved into an active hostility to religion, especially Christian religion.
A little later under the guise of trying to improve a failing education system in a world which was clearly surpassing our young scholars in every test, we greatly federalized education. Since the federal government has the source of funds generated through the income tax and the borrowing power which up until now has been almost infinite, the feds increasingly began to regulate education as they have pushed to control virtually every other aspect of American life with carrots and with sticks.
When education was a local affair, conducted in a one room schoolhouse by a schoolmarm who was well known to the community and whose values and morals were above reproach, parents could count on the kids getting their traditional Judeo-Christian values imprinted along with the 3Rs. Today, they get no values and they get no Rs.
We must consider that the children are draftees forced into this battlefield. Unless parents have the financial wherewithal to send their kids to private or parochial school, or the time and talent to homeschool, the kids are virtual chickens in a Skinner box for hours every day, five days a week. It is the federal government with its money to give or withhold, the federal courts with their power to forbid and enjoin, and the National Education Association and other teachers unions with their power to buy politicians and brainwash children who are now in almost exclusive control of the battlefield. This is a battlefield dominated not by generals but by union bosses, school administrators, and psychologist humbugs. Any child who plays hooky is liable to experience a court-martial in the sense that he and his parents will be prosecuted for "truancy" which means that they will have absented themselves without leave from sessions of indoctrination.
I see no way to victory for conservatism in this fray. We really did not lose this battle when we lost the Supreme Court, we lost this battle when we lost control of demographics. It had always been assumed that schools would teach shared values but what of a culture in which some percentage of the electorate wants the schools to teach sharia? What if some percentage of voters want the children indoctrinated into the belief that America is a racist and colonial nation which should pay reparations for slavery and segregation and appease terrorists and opportunists abroad? How can one rely on the schools to "socialize" (a bit of jargon from liberals who oppose homeschooling and want to homogenize along liberal lines our children's educational experience) children into loyal Americans if there is no agreement on basic values?
Many conservative Americans and many reasonable a–political Americans have ignored the problem by taking refuge in the suburbs where the schools are relatively good and leaving the inner-city schools to fester. Out of sight, out of mind. White flight has been as predominant and perhaps more so in the North as has been in South and signals the real depth of the problem which heretofore has been largely papered over.
Many conservatives, myself included, have advocated a voucher systems for a number of reasons one of which is to directly address the problems we see so often cropping up on these threads and which have been described above. If you want your child to pray in school, salute the flag, wear a uniform, and mix with like-minded kids, you may do so simply by turning in this voucher. Presto, these problems have been solved because the government is not involved except as the piggy bank and to act as some sort of control agent for the ultimate quality but not the content of the education beyond the 3Rs. If you do not want your child exposed to the Lord's prayer, send him to a competing school and pay for it with your voucher.
We conservatives who advocate this position must understand that if we are going to fund private Christian schools with vouchers equally will we be funding madrassas which certainly will not be educating to our liking.
And this is perhaps more important and him and it is certainly a major reason why vouchers have not been adopted by white upper class suburbanites, it threatens the de facto integration of white suburban schools which heretofore had been segregated by virtue of municipal boundary lines rather than by out right classification of students according to race. If vouchers are good anywhere in the state one can expect black parents to be eager to withdraw their children from ghetto cesspools masquerading as schools and send them to suburban citadels of learning and decorum.
So we have done nothing as we watch our educational system deteriorate in an age when education is everything and our foreign competitors are already light years ahead of us. We have done nothing, that is, except throw money at the problem or more precisely at the teachers' unions. We have squandered it just as we have squandered the trillions of the stimulus package by giving it the crony capitalists of the Democrat party. We already spend more money on education per child than virtually any other country with almost nothing to show for the extra funding. As the government takes more more control and funnels more more money into the vortex, we should look at this and say, does this smell like Obama care?
We may win this battle of the Texas school books this year, but there is no 30 year lock in solution. We are in a cultural war for the survival of democracy and capitalism and what we are seeing in Texas is but one skirmish. But just as generals tell the amateurs, wars are not won by tactics but by logistics, so this war will be won or lost on demographics.
