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.