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I find that if I criticize the public schools to people who work there, they get very upset. They know they are doing the best they can given the circumstances...

But if I just shut up and let them talk, they start telling me stuff that makes my hair stand up. However bad I think it is, its really worse. But they cannot imagine an alternative.

You can't have a free society without an educated populace, an uneducated population requires government by an elite. So the stakes are enormous. But the current system is so bad that the risks of changing it are far less than the risk of not changing it.

Privatizing education will not help if a federal bureau dictates the curriculum, and obligates them to the same social work that the public schools are currently doing. Step one, public education must be returned to local control. Step two, we need to institute school vouchers. Private schoola are not the holy grail, but will offer a variety of competing approaches, and it is this variety that we need to encourage if we are going to find something that works. But if government supervises private education too closely, we will have gained little.

Most people are worried that we will lose our country to open borders, as people come pouring in who have no idea what this country is about, and what it takes to make it work. I have a different fear. I fear the barbarians who leave the public school system, not knowing what this country is about, and what it takes to make it work.

When we turn our kids over to people who mock our values, we commit a kind of suicide. Our gene pool lives on, but the spirit is stunted or choked off.

Educating our people to be technically competent and to have a grasp of the (small "r") republican virtues is the battlefield where we are currently losing our country. We either get control of our schools or we will lose it all.