printThe centralization of education has allowed public “intellectuals” and “experts” to mold and manacle young minds. Start a conversation with almost anyone on the street. Provided he speaks English, you’ll hear within a whisker the same opinions repeated on capitalism (plain evil or a necessary evil), the environment (near destruction) and racism (rife). This uniformity of opinion is almost scarier than its uninformed nature.
(From “NEEDED: A LEAVE THE CHILDREN BEHIND ACT!”)
At EPJ, the best libertarian site on the WWW, John Whitehead, author of “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” warns about the latest federal ploy to “transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade”:
… there are several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen. Or you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught.
Those who founded America believed that an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights was the surest means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold true: that the surest way for a government to maintain its power and keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them ignorant of their rights and unable to think for themselves.
When viewed in light of the government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical.
Essentially, these standards, which were developed through a partnership between big government and corporations, in the absence of any real input from parents or educators with practical, hands-on classroom experience, and are being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal citizens. …
This is an essential read for parents. It also helps explain, for those of us who notice, why most youth are so mindlessly monolithic in thinking. READ IT in its entirety. While you’re at it my latest column is now on EPJ.
UPDATE I: Parent Arrested For Questioning Pedagogues.
…46-year-old Robert Small, found himself “pulled out of the meeting, arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer” simply for daring to voice his discontent with the standards during a Q&A session with the superintendent.
Even calling this event a forum is disingenuous, given that attendees were not allowed to stand and ask questions. Instead, attendees were instructed to write their questions on a piece of paper, which the superintendent would then read and members of a panel would answer. In other words, there would be no time or room for debate, just a one-sided discussion. And this is what life in our so-called republic of the United States has been reduced to, a one-sided monologue by government officials who neither care about what “we the people” have to say, nor are they inclined to hear us out, just so long as we pay their taxes and abide by their laws.
“Don’t stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle,” shouted Robert Small to his fellow attendees as he was being dragged out of the “forum” on the Common Core standards. “Is this America?” No, Mr. Small, this is no longer America.
UPDATE II (9/24): SERVANTS OF THE POLITICAL CLASS. Former polster Pat Caddell is able to get to the crux of the arrest and attempted prosecution of a parent for questioning the pedagogues.
“What we saw here is bigger than just this. The people are the slaves to the office-holders: superintendents who won’t take questions, the EPA that goes to Alaska on to conduct a … raid, SWAT converging with guns on a gold-mining operation in a little town; the things that government does now to oppress people; the laws that we have, the NSA, the fear people have of the state spying on them and imposing on them–this is a kind of soft despotism, whereby if you get out of line, we’ll get you. We work for them. Public servants are the masters; we are the servants of the political class.”