04-30-2009, 07:19 PM
The Decline and Fall of Private Education
by Chuck Norris
by Chuck Norris
Quote:...Of course, government officials won't admit to a blatant usurpation of our rights, but they will say their educational reform is seeking to help your children. They will say it is necessary to establish common educational standards. They will say that we need to leave education to the experts and not to parents. And I fear that too many of us simply will give in to the whims of the nanny state.
As I wrote in my new best-selling book, "Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America": "The reason that government is cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than assuring educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated: control future generations and you control the future. So rather than letting parents be the primary educators of their children -- either directly or by educating their children in the private schools of their choice -- (government) want(s) to deny parental rights, establish an educational monopoly run by the state, and limit private education options. It is so simple any socialist can understand it. As Joseph Stalin once stated, 'Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.'"...
What's amazing, too, is how hypocritical it is for Congress to make this decision. The Heritage Foundation's report also conveys that 44 percent of current United States senators and 36 percent of current members of the U.S. House of Representatives have "at one time sent their children to private schools." While the foundation found that 11 percent of American students attend private schools, 20 percent of the members of the 111th Congress attended private high schools. And they want to remove the voucher option for private school education?
...Our Founders' educational philosophy seems to me to be the charter of a true American system of education. But as we know, our nation's public schools, especially our nation's colleges and universities, are the seedbeds of politically correct and leftist indoctrination. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. It's a travesty that we have come to the point that we have to protect our children from the public school systems by looking to alternative methods.
If you have a good public school, congratulations. Stay active in the PTA, and attend school board meetings to keep it that way. For many parents, the only responsible choice is to send their children to private, parochial or Christian schools or to home-school their children. My wife and I home-school our 8-year-old twins.
...Parents deserve educational choices; choice is what this country was founded upon. Government's controlling and monopolizing education is just another avenue for usurping power and control on the slippery slope to socialism. And it's unbecoming for our republic, whose Founders created a system of freedom, choice and minimal government intervention.
Is it merely coincidental that the private choice of home schooling was outlawed by the Soviet state in 1919, by Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1938, and by Communist China in 1949?
Is America next?