So, we’re all supposed to “love” North Carolina government apparatchiks … er, I mean, public school teachers … who headed to Raleigh last week, demanding more money for an utterly failing institution. Forget the fact that K-12 funding is nearly 40% of the state budget, making it NC taxpayers’ largest expenditure. Let’s not mention that teachers are already on the path to getting another raise, making it their fifth consecutive pay increase (6.2% at an average of $4,412).
I have a degree in journalism from a prestigious university, and if I ever made $50k+, I would’ve had to have become an overworked, married-to-her-job newsroom editor (and by “work,” I mean all 12 months of the year). My husband is a highly accomplished software developer and feels extremely blessed to get a 3% cost-of-living raise annually, of which his politically correct company did not bestow upon rank-and-file employees this year.
Yep, these are the same activists who have the backing of supposedly limited-government Republicans. I mean, public schools are an idol of worship. It’s why teachers are constantly pulling on heart strings. Such selfless public servants!
We’re giving “so much of ourselves for your children (yet) being paid next to nothing,” wrote one hysterical teacher in a viral Facebook post. He then complains in fanatic form about the trials he incurred due to a busted air conditioner and a kid with a broke arm. Boo-freakin-hoo.
“We call this life,” he said. But “the difference is that I am working a job that most see as a valuable resource of utmost importance, and I cannot pay for anything.” The self-proclaimed #MeToo-styled victims known as sniveling public-school teachers don’t know how good they have it … or do they?
The drama queens not only get good pay for 9 months of work, they reap the benefits of being part of the NC retirement system plan in which employers contribute 17.3% and employees contribute of 6%. These “hurting” teachers are also eligible for highfalutin medical, vision, dentals, workman’s comp, disability, and life insurance plans.
What’s love got to do with it?
Yet, they want more, and want to attain it through the same tactics used by the globalists and their infantile March For Our Lives” dupes. Ditch school. Have families pick up the slack. Rant and bully. Wallow in the nauseating lauding of their cause. Well, that doesn’t sound much like love to me. Sounds more like bureaucratic privilege.
Interestingly, NC’s not even at the top of the “Nation’s Report Card” – a ranking of each state’s public-school achievements, otherwise known as “educational fraud,” according to economist Walter E. Williams. When parsing the data in the recently released 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, he writes, “It’s not a pretty story. Only 37% of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25% did so in math.”
“Among black students, only 17% tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7% reached at least a proficient level in math.” And NC finds itself ranked only 13th on this pathetic list. Where’s the “value” in that?
Admittedly, the metrics used in deciding such a paltry pecking order is no doubt arbitrary, counter intuitive, and more about non-essentials than it is having anything to do with the essence of true education, but still, c’mon. It’s a scam, y’all.
Show me the money
How dumb can we plebs be to keep funding the madness which makes young people intolerably stupid? We’re supposed to believe that the $8,687 that was spent per NC pupil wasn’t enough to produce competent individuals? Man, if I had that money for each of my three children, I’d have $26,061 of my own dollars back in my pocket to use for their real education.
Of course, I’d never be that imprudent with my family’s earnings, nor could I ever spend that much money on books, curriculum, learning apps, co-ops, field trips, school supplies, supplementary camps, enrichment courses, online learning memberships, sports, music lessons, etc. Homeschoolers are frugal because it makes practical sense.
We buy and sell at used-curriculum sales, and on curriculum-sharing boards on social media and on eBay. We barter. We loan out and borrow. We give away. Waste, inefficiency, and spending beyond our means are not options when the heavy hand of government’s not your sugar daddy. We have a financial incentive to be responsible with our money, maximize value, and avoid debt; the state does not, which is why they always ask for more.
And even with increased salaries, benefits, and pensions for school teachers, there’s no pay off. If there was, we’d see tangible results.
Still leftist governor Roy Cooper’s proposed budget aims to double-down on the coercive “taxation” (otherwise known as theft) and abysmal stewardship of the NC taxpayers’ labor by $1.5 billion, including an average raise of “over 8% for teachers and instructional support personnel, with no educator receiving less than a 5% salary” spike. Must feed the insatiable beast!
Forget NAXALT, focus on the big picture
Well, what if the teacher isn’t worthy of a raise? In the private sector, the under-performing employee would not only not get additional pay, she may be demoted or fired. Hey, maybe the bad teachers should just throw themselves into those second and third jobs we keep hearing so much about in pro-public-school sob stories veiled as hard-hitting journalism.
I know, I know. There are indeed top-notch, passionate public school teachers. But from what I hear, they’re overworked and hamstrung in actually educating kids.
They have to waste precious time pulling up the slack created by negligent, lazy, and ineffectual teachers, tenured educrats, and inept administrators, teaching to the test, and dealing with PC advocacy foisted into the classroom. No wonder so many quality teachers experience burnout and flee for the private sector.
I’m not castigating the NAXALT (“not all X are like that”) anecdotes: the good apples within the festering, rotten, corrupted cart. What I’m saying is that they’re fighting a leviathan that was by design. It doesn’t deliver on its educational promises not because of lacking funds or meanies like me. It’s that what folks think of as the academic promises are, in fact, a myth.
Prussia, pedagogy, & progressivism
The highly centralized system is a manifestation of the Prussian model of schooling, which was implemented in Massachusetts in 1852 at the behest of influential “education” reformer Horace Mann. This was the birth of modern compulsory education as we know it, in which attendance was mandated and kindergarten was introduced.
Also borne out of this progressive movement were teacher colleges (known as “normal schools”), national standardized tests, national curriculum, including heavily secularized instruction, salaries via taxation for the professionalization of teaching as a public service, teacher certification, and funding to build schools. Whatever it takes to have “Free education for all children in public schools,” as the 10th plank of The Communist Manifesto states.
The above image is from The Prussian Elementary Schools, written in 1918 by Vermont-born “educator” Thomas Alexander. “The elementary schools of Prussia have been fashioned so as to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of the lower classes,” he continued.
So the school system “must impress upon the youth how Prussian kings have continually taken pains to better the conditions of the working class from the time of the legal reforms of Frederick the Great down until today.” Just trick people into loving their own oppression, and maybe one day they’ll even view it as a “human right.”
Tyrants, tutors, & talents
People had to be convinced that the “reform” was benevolent, a paternalistic social good, an “an external form of liberty,” as Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy In America. It could be accomplished if only citizens came to think of their “tyrants” as “tutors,” the French philosopher said when warning of the great risks of embracing democracy. It reduces citizens “to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Sadly, this sounds all too familiar (minus the industriousness part). But this mindset was a radical departure from traditional American education, which had produced virtuous fruits before the schooling of mass dependency. “America was literate beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and not merely book-literate,” explained John Taylor Gatto, former public-school teacher in his book, Weapons of Mass Instruction.
“Americans were broadly proficient in the formidable ‘active literacies’ of writing, argumentation, and public speaking; things which had actually been a crime to teach ordinary people under British colonial rule.” People were smart, self-reliant, and quite capable of handling the responsibilities of liberty.
Foreigners like Tocqueville, who visited America in the 1830s, “were surprised and impressed with what the new [republic] demonstrated in action about the talents of ordinary men and women – abilities customarily suppressed in Europe among the common classes,” Gatto continued. This included virtual across-the-board literacy for women born around 1810, remarked Rutgers professor Jack Lynch.
From the Founding and through the early 19th century, education in America was mostly voluntary and private, and was working splendidly without “free common schools.” It was “decentralized, entrepreneurial, and driven by the demands of individual parents and local communities, not school districts or states,” commented Neal McCluskey, education policy analyst for the Cato Institute.
A putrid petri dish
That is, until the end of the War Between the States. This is when Mann’s New England model – which had already been adopted in various forms throughout the North – was forced upon the South and then spread like a disease across the across the country, leaving a path of socialist decay in its wake.
“The transformation of school from a place of modest ambitions centering around reading, writing, arithmetic, and decency into a behavioral training laboratory ordered up by ‘certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process’ (as Harvard president James Bryant Conant wrote), has acted to poison
the American experiment,” explained Gatto.
The Union’s aim was realized: finally moving away from an “entrepreneurial economy to a mass production economy, which … wrenched the country from its freedom-loving course and placed it along the path toward industrial capitalism – with its need for visible underclasses and a large, rootless proletariat to make it work.”
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
— H.L. Mencken
Gone was the bottom-up methodology and classical content of traditional community-based and family-controlled education. Goodbye one-room schoolhouses. Hello putrid petri dish of social engineering pushed as Puritan work ethic. And this racket would eventually catapult the government and its “education” experts to a superior position over children than that of the God-given rights of the parents.
A Yankee coup
This takeover was a well-financed idea backed by the wealthy progressive modernizers and reformers, the Peabody family of New England. In fact, Alexander was a professor at the George Peabody College for Teachers when he published his dissertation turned book. And Mann just so happened to be married to Mary Tyler Peabody.
New York’s Rockefellers were supporters of the Prussian schooling model over authentic education. And Scotsman-turned-Yankee Andrew Carnegie also believed that public schools should divorce the masses from those pesky notions of seeking knowledge, wisdom, and truth.
“Educational schooling, said Carnegie, gave working people bad attitudes,” wrote Gatto. “It taught what was useless, it imbued the future workforce with ‘false ideas’ that gave it ‘a distaste for practical life.’” You know, useless ideas like freedom.
Elitist pedagogue William Torrey Harris served as U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. The Connecticut politician used Christianity to push for coercive schooling for American Indians in order to boost industry. “We must establish compulsory education for the good of the lower race.” Aw, aren’t progressives so sweet?
We’ve “institutionalized non-learning.”
— Andrew Pudewa, home-educator & founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing
Similar to Karl Marx, Harris was a disciple of Prussian philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Harris “was intensely radical, regarding children as the absolute property of the political state, and he was a personal friend of Andrew Carnegie – the steel man who nourished a hope that all work could be yoked to cradle-to-grave schooling,” Gatto said.
And let’s not forget another Vermonter, John Dewey, who “asserted that an individual’s mind was essentially property of the larger society,” explained Brett Veinotte, founder of the School Sucks Project. Dewey “came along roughly two generations after the system’s implementation … (and) seemed to understand that the schools were a profound power for indoctrination. He wanted to use this power for an even ‘greater good’: the inculcation of collectivism.”
Be the 5%
It’s okay to fess up that you don’t love public schools either. Even if you’re one of the folks who likes to say “I’m a product of the public schools, but …” before bashing the government-schooling monopoly, you must stop giving the state any credit for your God-glorifying attributes, career success, healthy and responsible life choices, critical-thinking skills, or talents.
You attained those in spite of public schools. My guess is you, just like me, possess those character traits due to your familial upbringing, faith, personal research, continued lifelong learning, and real-world experience.
Admit it. You wanna be part of the 5% who refuse to be “subservient to the ruling house.” The statists will say you’re “anti-education,” “anti-child,” perpetuating “privilege,” and guilty of an attack or an assault,and that your displeasure with the status quo is akin to war and it’s brutal. They’ll claim you’re racist or even white-supremacist. So what?
If you’re part of the 95% who are so bound in the chains of “servitude” that you think the rest of us are the unreasonable ones, well, we 5-percenters should call you out. We know the power elites believe that “Education has too much potential a control tool to be left to individuals, families, and markets,” said Veinotte, and that evil must be resisted.
Let’s take “education” back from the state and reduce the threat of violent force against property owners and all children. Let’s spur a movement which stands against a government system that’s doing exactly what it intended: miseducating and indoctrinating citizens with the poison of progressivism. No more “reform.” Let’s topple the unlovable.
Be sure to check out my forthcoming blog, unpacking both the psychological and physical dangers of government schooling.
Source: Dissident Mama – I don’t love public schools
