Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Disability Racket

How schools cash in on false diagnoses and a bounty system.

“Thousands of children are suffering from being placed in LD classes, and the labeling of children at an early age becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children learn to see themselves as disabled in some way and they act out the part.” – Terry Endsley, The Myth of Learning Disabilities

I have several blind spots. I had them in school and still have them. For example: Algebra, Latin, History, Chemistry, Physics, Literature. In some cases, it was the teachers who made the information seem uninteresting. My response was to create minor disturbances like fidgeting in my seat or throwing spitballs. In others, I simply was bored and not learning anything except how to avoid doing the work, and that was most of the time.

Today, a child's disinterest in school subjects is viewed by the schools as a "disability" --a kind of disease. And, sure enough, the schoolers have all sorts of ways to "prove" that a child has a disability -- even a brain disorder -- when s/he is merely bored or unhappy or rebellious at being cooped up in an ugly classroom.

Parents who are not well informed can easily be frightened by the "diagnoses" that come from teachers and school psychologists. They are often intimidated by the school "experts" who claim that their child is "learning disabled" or "mentally disordered," when no such problem exists. Many children are labeled and stigmatized for life by “diagnoses” that are often wrongly made to benefit only the school, not the children.

Yet, this is how schools take the focus off their programs and place it upon the child's alleged "disability." How convenient for the schools. It provides the excuse to never examine themselves or their own activities to see if those might be causing the symptoms of unhappiness (boredom, stress, fear) and rebellion among the children.

Making matters worse is an incentive for the schools to make such a huge mistake. It's called the "Bounty System." For every child who is "diagnosed" with a so-called Learning Disorder, there is a large cash reward from the state (around $4K in CT). Thus, every diagnosis of a disability means more money for the school employees. It is no wonder that the schoolers have invented a multitude of "diagnoses" that enable them to collect the bounty. The second stage of this racket is that the children are then placed in "special" classes that pretend to help the children with their false diagnoses of disabilities. It's no surprise that along with the many spurious diagnoses has come a huge increase in school employment in this new area. It has been major cause of higher school budgets, but it has little, if any, success to show.

Why don't the schools look to their own instruction methods or programs for the source of children's problems? Because they would then probably have to admit that they use bad methods of instruction and would need to change, but mostly it is because there is no financial incentive. The bounty system only pays for diagnoses of children's disabilities (true or not); it doesn't pay for finding fault in the schools themselves.

Schools have been turned into psychological clinics where amateur psychiatrists roam the halls in search of children they might be able to garner as "clients" for their "therapies.” Teachers are supposed to teach; playing amateur psychologist is against the law. Besides, education is a separate field from therapy. School students should never be treated as "patients," and yet, that what the disability racket is all about.

If a school has diagnosed your child, be sure to get a second opinion from an independent source because chances are good that the school wants to use your child to gain a financial bounty while increasing its payroll at taxpayers’ expense.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Real Education Is Free; Public School is Expensive

Want to learn something? It’s free!
Education is free, except when it’s run by government.

Here are a few expert opinions:
"The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control." -- Frank Chodorov, Why Free Schools Are Not Free

“A common reason for the creation of a government school system is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.” -- Marshall Fritz, Founder of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State

"Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists." -- National Education Association, "Education for the '70s," Today's Education, January 1969

Public school is free in only one limited sense: the families who use it do not pay directly for it. In that sense, it is socialized schooling which, in fact, is incredibly expensive and the cost burdens everyone. The trick is that it spends "other people's money."

Instead, I refer to the fact that true education -- learning of all sorts -- is available to all of us without cost, all the time. That has always been so. It means that anyone who charges others for teaching basic skills and knowledge is a fraud, simply because the knowledge is all around us and free for the asking.

Consider how most of us like to share our opinions with others. It’s a sign of how we wish to share our knowledge.

We come to think of public schools as places that offer basic instruction to all children at no cost to their families. How nice, how noble, that schools have been arranged that do not charge for what they offer. Indeed, today we know that they charge the maximum possible amount – far more than needed – and often do not even offer what we expect them to provide.

The public schools are called “Free and Compulsory” and yet who takes responsibility for the results? No one. To whom can a parent complain when his child fails to learn or even be instructed in basic skills? How “free” is that? In the public schools, no one is responsible for any child’s learning – not teachers, not administrators, not the school board, nobody. And if a child fails, they blame the child, not themselves.

MIT has just announced that all of its courses are now available on the internet. Yale has made many of its lecture courses available on tape and those are now distributed at no charge. The largest University in the US (in terms of number of students) is the U of Phoenix. The on line registration is huge, and the cost is relatively low. Go to “College Degrees on Line” and you will find 63 million links with information.

No frills, real degrees, useful info, at your own pace, start any time. Convenient, no hassles. no intrusive questions, cheap.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Public Schools Have No Accountability

Today's public schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions, but what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. It is not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. There is no accountability in the system.

The law (in CT) says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, it's the child's fault, never the school's, even though it is often the case that the school did not provide proper instruction.

In the real world of competition and free trade, both sides -- sellers and buyers -- benefit from all transactions. With each purchase, both parties increase their worth. When a business does not serve its customers by offering high quality products or services at reasonable prices, it loses patronage, lays off its employees and goes out of business. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve.

But when a government agency -- say, the public school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected to provide, what happens? Nothing. In fact, it often is given more money without penalty. The school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only does it not go out of business, it is rewarded more and more each year for its failure.

Failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, loudly, "We are not achieving our goals because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools. In fact, public schools spend about twice the amount that successful private schools charge per student.

According to international and US Dept of Ed. reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year for their failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. Years ago, John Holt wrote that the purposes of public school are, 1. Custody (babysitting), 2. Labeling children for employment (meatstamping), and 3. Jobs for adults (an employment empire at public expense).

Maybe those reasons are what the schools like to call "socialization."

Monday, February 18, 2008

The Freedom Connection

To me, the most beautiful thing in the world is the US Declaration of Independence. Just reading the title makes me shiver. I believe that Thomas Jefferson's document is meaningful to all Americans, even if they are not aware of it, because it is what makes our country unique and so truly great. It distinguishes this country from all those that ever existed before, by acknowledging that freedom is the birthright of every person. To be an American is to believe in what it says.

No country before had ever acknowledged to individuals the dignity and respect that ours does -- sovereignty over their own lives, the natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." No country had ever dedicated itself to the idea of protecting all its citizens, instead of exploiting them.

We Americans have the right to do anything we want. There is only one condition: that we do not interfere with the same right of ALL others. That statement is a political Golden Rule. It humbles me to remember that I was lucky to be born here, where freedom and liberty are not just the privilege of a few but a right guaranteed to all.

With little knowledge of politics, I was elected to the City Council of Aspen, Colorado in 1970. I served one term. That experience combined with the social and political turmoil of the Vietnam War era made me realize that our government, despite our constitutional protections, dominates the personal lives of citizens in many ways -- too many. I did not like being manipulated by "big brother" Therefore, I became a member of the Libertarian Party, a supporter of freedom and limited government, and am no longer politically homeless.

From the libertarian perspective, it is easy to see that the government uses its schools to control citizens' lives to a startling degree. In his book, Is Public Education Necessary?, Samuel Blumenfeld wrote, "The American public educator is quite willing to do whatever the government bids him or her to do -- today in favor of racial integration, tomorrow in favor of something else. This does not bode well for American freedom, but we ought not be surprised, since totalitarian governments have long considered public education as their most important tool for indoctrinating and controlling the young." In the same vein, Cathy Duffy writes in her book, Government Nannies, "My concern and purpose...is to stimulate more people to value their freedom and autonomy enough to stand against the encroachment of benevolent government-nanny programs that would keep us all as perpetual children."

While our government seems to be doing everything it can to deny us our natural right to freedom, privacy and property, I still believe in our founding principles and as long as those documents exist. I know we can, and should, continue to seek and defend a life of self-determination with individual liberty and personal responsibility.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

My Son, the Homeschooler

In 1979, soon after my youngest son was born at our ranch in Colorado, my wife, Luz, informed me that she wanted to try homeschooling. What? Hold on! I had been a private school teacher; she was a certified public school teacher. I was disturbed, even shocked by her intentions. I had never heard of homeschooling and, like many people, I could not imagine a child growing up without going to school. She knew better.

Luz handed me two books by John Holt, and I soon learned that she was right. Holt showed me that if there is one thing that holds children back as they mature and often turns them against learning, it's schooling -- sitting in unfriendly, often uncaring schools where children’s intelligence and interests are ignored.

For their first several years, children do not need schooling, but nurturing -- the natural care and feeding that most parents provide. As Cass reached “school-age” we remained inspired by Holt's words: “Children do not need to be made to learn, or shown how. They want to and they know how.” We decided that Cassidy would determine what, when, where, how much and with whom he would learn. We never used school books or taught lessons. We answered his questions when he asked and helped him gain access to the real world when he wanted it. We called it unschooling -- no school books, no curriculum, no teaching (unless he asked for it), no testing, none of it. Today, unschooling is surprisingly popular, with magazines and egroups devoted to it.

Unschooling did not mean un-education. It simply meant that we would be aware and supportive of our son's interests and would be paying close attention to his desires for information as well as his gains in essential knowledge. I carried Cass on my shoulders around our town, reading the signs, talking to the shopkeepers, bank clerks and others. He soon was speaking in long sentences and, at four, he could read virtually any book. He proved Holt right; he did not need urging in order to learn. He once told a librarian, "I'm interested in everything."

We did not believe, as schools claim, that it is more important to "feel good about yourself" than to know how to read, write and calculate. The reason is simple: if you can do those things well, you will feel good about yourself, no matter what others tell you.


All through his growing years, people observed that Cass was bright, confident and capable. They remarked, "He must be incredibly smart to have learned so much so young." I could only answer, "Children are born smart. It's just that nobody is dumbing him down." I truly believed that because we didn’t send him to school, he was able to easily acquire all the essentials while he avoided the many negative lessons that schools teach. Our job was to encourage his curiosity and to help him gain access to the world. His life was the polar opposite of sitting in boring classes and being told that his interests are not important.

Cassidy liked responsibility. He earned his own money with jobs he found. He became an expert in dinosaurs and fossils, so much so that the Peabody Museum used him as its Information Officer in the Great Hall of Dinosaurs when he was eleven. He also became a teacher at the Eli Whitney Museum, once giving an “enrichment” class to public school teachers when he was fourteen. He became world class at origami. He took the SAT, and scored higher than half the valedictorians in the state of CT, without ever looking at a school book.

Cass got himself into the college he chose, Hunter College, because it was in the middle of his favorite place, NYC. He lived in his own apartment downtown and took the subway to school. His friends told Luz and me that he always seemed to know the right thing to do. That was when we knew that our experiment was a success, because he had always chosen his own path, instead of being directed by others.

He breezed through – always in the top one percent of his class. He held jobs both in and out of the college; was president of the film society, and graduated Magna Cum Laude. For this one young man, school was not just unnecessary, but irrelevant and, we believe, would have been damaging to his mind and spirit.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Who's to Blame? Teacher Unions

It is ironic that the biggest obstacle in the path to better schools is the teachers' unions. How outrageous of them to work their diabolical magic against the very people whom they should benefit: the students and the community. But no, the unions have created a situation that has now reached a point at which the schools cannot be fixed.

Before about the year 1960, the NEA was an association of teachers who worked in the public schools. But that year, it became a labor union instead. Its purpose changed from trying to do a good job to trying to take the maximum money from the community. Since then, while teachers' pay has risen sharply, the biggest winners have been the negotiators and union staff who work behind the scenes, jacking up the price of everything the schools do, while having zero interest in the quality of education that results. Unions want one thing: more money for less work. In public schools, they are performing flawlessly.

For example: the unions have arranged for the inability of schools to fire the worst teachers while preventing the creation of incentives for decent teachers to improve their skills and knowledge, and thus their pay. The result of those twin measures is that the schools are moving steadily in what has been called, "The race to the bottom." The bad teachers stay while the best ones routinely quit, resulting in the steady decline in the quality of the public schools.

The micromanaging of teachers' days, the insistence on "certification," the constant pressing for more and more counter-productive rules, stonewalling all reforms, and more drive up the costs of public schooling. To prove my point, the CT NEA printed its list of one hundred seventy-four demands that its negotiators had ready as they went into teacher-pay negotiations with local school districts. The local school boards have literally no chance in negotiations with union pros when their meager requests (such as "will the teachers accept a little accountability for their work, please?") are met with such force.

Julia Steiny, a columnist for the Providence Journal (RI), shed much light on the problem this week. She noted that the roots of the problem go back to the early days when teacher unions asked the advice of automotive industry unions. She wrote, "In an unfortunate accident of history, the labor contracts that won decent pay for teachers also cemented into place a factory-model design for schooling. Blue-collar labor contracts spell out and limit a worker's obligations on the factory floor, or in this case a classroom, as if teachers were as interchangeable as die-press operators."

Little has changed. Steiny quotes a former superintendent in RI: "The unions...are running the whole country into the ground because they can't get it through their heads that the reason for our financial problems is at least in part due to us trying to keep up with their demands." She concludes, "The whole negotiating process, using a model designed for blue-collar jobs, is painfully obsolete, seriously impeding academic improvement and, most important, stealing resources from the kids."

It just might be time to start over in education.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The ADD Connection

What follows is from EducationRevolutionNews: www. www.educationrevolution.org Used with permission. I am a friend of the owner, Jerry Mintz.

I remember when one of our children was not doing well in school and he was 12, 13 years old, something like it. First year of middle school as I recall. And the teachers were all freaking out, and all, you know, all, you know how it goes. And it was that ADD thing, right? Put him on medication! And we actually tried that for a short while. Didn't seem to do much good.

And so we decided to go looking for a school for him, a better school, you know, a better educational environment. Let's find a place where he can flourish and there are a bunch of schools in Atlanta in the phone book advertising that they specialize in kids with Attention Deficit Disorder or learning disabilities, and so Louise and I went shopping. And what we found was that most people were of the opinion that because these kids were impulsive and distractible and not particularly well structured and organized, they "needed lots of discipline and structure. Let's just slap it into 'em." The schools that were purporting to be good places for ADHD kids were like variations on military academies.

So we finally had given up on all the ADD specialty schools, and we found this school in downtown Atlanta called the Horizon School which was a leftover remnant of the Summerhill experiment in some ways. Part of the alternative school movement. "Summerhill" was a book by A. S. Neill published back in the 1960s as I recall in which they created a school where the kids ran the school. And this school was actually run by the student council in everything except academics. The teachers had final say in academics but the kids had a student council and they ran the school, and they made all kinds of rules for themselves, it was quite remarkable.

So then I went out and walked around the school and I remember walking into a classroom. This was seventh graders as I recall, seventh or eighth graders. And it looked like absolute chaos. Kids were not sitting at their desk. They were standing up, they were walking around, one kid was sitting on his desk. There was a kid sitting on the teacher's desk. Kids were running up and marking things on the blackboard. The teacher was having a knock down drag out argument with the kids. And I'm standing at the back of the room and you know, keep in mind, a decade earlier, I'd been the executive director of a program for abused kids that had a school! And I'm standing in the back of the room, you know, with my arms folded across my chest, thinking, "This is a classroom out of control." This would never happen in a school I ran.

And you know how sometimes when you just listen for a few minutes more, all of a sudden you hear something that completely turns your world upside down, that completely changes the way that you view things. And as I stood there, in this very kind of critical, judging posture, I started listening to what the kids and the teacher were arguing about.

What these kids were arguing with this teacher about was that Einstein had suggested in his theory of relativity e=mc2 that you can't exceed the speed of light. That if you exceed the speed of light, you can get to .999% of the speed of light, but if the value of the speed of light becomes one or one point anything, once you hit or exceed the speed of light, then time becomes infinite and mass collapses to zero. Or is it the other way around? Time collapses to zero and mass becomes infinite. I forget which it was. I used to have memorized the time and mass dilation theories but that was when I was a teenager. Anyway, and therefore it's impossible in the physical universe to exceed the speed of light. You can approach it but you can't exceed it. And if that's the case, these kids were saying, then why is it that Einstein in his own theory of relativity, his oh most famous theory, said e (energy) equals mass times the speed of light squared? e=mc2 (c is the speed of light). How can you square something that can't even have as a value of one? How is that possible? How can you square something you can't exceed? They are pulling out Einstein's General and Specific theory of relativity and they're talking about his story about being in the train going away from the clock tower in downtown Austria and as the train approaches the speed of light the hands start to slow down and all this stuff.

And all of a sudden, I got it. That all my life, I had thought that education was about pouring things into kids. Yeats's quote. The filling of a bucket. And that what they understood at that school was that education was about lighting a fire. And so we put our son in that school and not only did he do well, but he was doing work two grade levels above his grade level. He was getting As in senior physics as a freshman or a sophomore. He all of a sudden just caught on fire, he fell in love with learning, and all of this with no drugs, which leads us to the question.

You got a person who has a psychiatric illness in a public school that requires medication from a multibillion-dollar industry, but when you put him into an alternative school environment, not only does he not require the medication, but the disease seems to vanish and he does very well. The question is, then, where is the disease? And I have firmly, solidly come to the conclusion that the disease is in our schools. It's not in our kids. END OF ARTICLE

Homeschooling has seen similar results from kids diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, "learning disability" and the rest of the excuses that public schools use to cover their own incompetence and insensitivity.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Galloway breaks Down, Part 2

Tony Galloway's outburst was a defining moment in the thirteen years I spent at that college prep day school in the comfortable shaded suburbs of Philadelphia. There were other similar eruptions -- crying fits, corridor fights, swearing and throwing tantrums, but this threat of suicide in a blind rage was the topper. And yet, it made complete sense. During the several minutes Bergstrom was out of the room collaring our classmate, we children decided that while Tony's reaction was overcooked, it was justified. We all knew what he meant and we all felt some of his outrage at our situation and treatment. We agreed that Bergstrom should have been more sensitive to the boy's limits, and should never have pushed them.

No one else in that class would have threatened to kill himself over one more incomplete homework assignment or reprimand or insulting comment by a teacher. Tony was, we agreed, strung a little tighter than the rest of us. He was odd, eccentric, focused on things we couldn't know about. He was not self-absorbed, but preoccupied and content with another set of ideas that he could not share easily with us.
Galloway had been chased into the office for a tense conference and the inevitable phone call and silent ride home. We never saw him again, but heard that he might have been sent to a military school for further torture.

We were all repressed children. Our school was not enlightened about children or learning beyond the neanderthal techniques of government schools. After all, they get their rationales from the same sources. We were trained to obey, to believe in an established order, not to question authority, not to think for ourselves, not to make our own decisions. In fact, our school did all the things to us boys that its literature would say it did not do, that it would never do or even intend. Its founders and leaders were blind to the contrast between what the school said and what it did. This, despite its motto: ESSE QUAM VIDERE - Be rather than seem to be.

Moral: Most, if not all, of what fifth grade children do in school and what teachers do in order to coerce them to do it, is a boring waste of everyone's time, if not intentional cruelty.

Back to the future:
Nothing has changed. School is as hellish now as then. All the children feel its torture in varying degrees, but only a few boil over in rage. Today, the reactions are more forceful. Kids have weapons.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Galloway Breaks Down

(I wrote the following eleven years ago while rambling around in my memory)

Starting in fifth grade, the inhumanity and pointless tedium of school began to show. As I think back, most of us kids felt it, but we couldn't define it, and even if we had recognized it for what it was, we were powerless.

It was a private school. We were good boys from middle class two-parent homes where managerial and professional careers were common and where much was provided for, and expected from, the children. I collected cans, bottle tops and tin foil for the war effort. Many families, including ours, had "victory gardens." We didn't know about rebellion. That our parents were well-off, privileged, influential and often arrogant and bigoted was not our business. Our job was school.

On a Friday in February, Tony Galloway broke. He had shown cracks and signs of discontent for months, but on this day, when our home-room teacher called him down for one small infraction -- one more deviation from an imaginary norm -- Tony blew. He got up from his desk, flailing his arms and yelling, "I hate this place and I hate you," and added the equivalent of today's, "I'm up to here with your shit, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

Tony ran up to Mr. Bergstrom's big oak desk and kicked it hard on his way over to one of the large windows. Still bellowing his objections to the whole school experience, he flung up the sash and prepared to throw himself out.

Our classroom was on the second story of a tall-ceilinged converted victorian mansion. The ground was far below, maybe twenty feet. Tony, still complaining, was alternately crouching inside and lunging his body halfway out the open window, as if practicing for the final suicidal head-first leap.

We were all dumbstruck, and for most of this display, so was Bergstrom. Outbursts like this were simply unheard of in private day schools full of "proper" boys from socially prominent families. We were all relieved when Bergstrom at last had the presence to move quickly on our classmate, grab him wih one hand and close the window with the other. In a moment though, Tony squirmed away and, still yelling, threw the door open, ran out into the hall and down the creaking wooden staircase with Bergstrom running and calling after him.

That's all for today. I'll finish the story tomorrow or when I can, after dental surgery.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

If Parents Ran the Schools...

"I do not believe in a child world. It is a fantasy world. I believe the child should be taught from the very first that the whole world is his world, and adult and child share one world, that all generations are needed."
--Pearl Buck, in To My Daughters, with Love, 1963


No community would ever do to its children what the government does to them in the name of education. If parents ran the schools, would we, for example, insist that all children learn the same things at the same time?

Would we create a bleak and artificial environment, separated from real life, and lock our kids up in it for twelve years, knowing that most of what is taught there is unnecessary, unwanted and even wrong? Would we allow them to use poorly written texts to dumb down our kids?
Would we use school for indoctrination to government ideologies and approved attitudes and mass opinions? Would we assign a large part of every school day to non-academic social and psychological conditioning and political correctness instruction?

Would we allow our property to be confiscated if we didn’t pay the ever rising tax bill each year? Would we hire unionized teachers with binding arbitration and tenure and let them vote on their own wage increases, whether deserved or not?

Would we use policies such as social promotion and grade inflation in order to deceive each other about our children’s achievement? Would we use Whole Language which causes reading problems, instead of Phonics which is the only logical method for teaching reading? Would we ever teach "fuzzy math" as public schools do?

Would we let schools give mind-altering drugs, such as Ritalin and Prozac, to our own children in order to control their behavior, as insane asylums (and public schools) do?

Would we hire uniformed, armed, police to roam the halls, acting as agents of force?

Would we allow our children’s and our own lives to be so dominated by school’s synthetic experience that there’s no time left for real life? Would we administer standardized tests that have little educational value and that can even be damaging, and then hide the results from each other?

Would we use school as a government jobs program, both for hiring people and for training students? Would we hire twice as many administrators as are needed? Would we claim that self-esteem is more important than skills and knowledge? Would we use certified staff when private schools avoid using such state-trained people? Would we create rules that make it almost impossible to fire bad teachers? Would we allow teachers NOT to be accountable for our children’s learning?

Would we allow the state to dictate who can administrate our schools? Would we let teachers use our kids as shills for their pay raises and social concerns? Would we pay twice what private schools charge and get half the learning?

The answers are all no. Government school is a fraud. The educationists have learned to hustle us, shake us down in a shell game for control of money and our children’s lives. Public school is a state monopoly that can neither educate our children effectively nor inform the public honestly.

To become responsive and accountable, education needs to be separated entirely from government. Otherwise, it will continue to serve only itself and we will remain its slaves.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

It's great to be appreciated!

Judy Aron, author of the blog, Consent of the Governed, has presented the Excellent Blog award to School Is Hell.
For more about this, and for fine commentary on our too-intrusive, too-expensive too big government, check out Judy's blog at www.yedies.blogspot.com
I am pleased to add that I have been a friend of Judy Aron and her family for many years.