Ideas Rising

I haven’t written here for a couple of weeks. I’ve been busy, working on the platform. At our precinct conventions on March 5, a few days after the March 1 Primary Election, one of the things we did was put forth resolutions for the platform. As I explained recently, the wording can have some “whereas” statements, explaining the background reasoning, and then end with a “therefore” statement. The whole thing gets sent in. Sometimes the only thing we get is the statement of an idea, as best as someone could figure out how to spit it out, maybe even just handwritten.

In my senatorial district, over 600 resolutions were submitted. These included a number of duplicates—exactly the same sent in by different precincts. And there were also a number of duplicate ideas—sent in with their own wording, but essentially saying the same thing. And then there were ideas sent in singularly.

Some resolutions contained multiple ideas—ideas that seemed related, to those who sent them in, but that actually identified multiple separate ideas, usually related to the same section of the platform, but not always.

So, we scanned all the resolutions the day of the Precinct Conventions (I helped do that). Then they got categorized and placed in a huge spreadsheet. And that got divided up among the various subcommittees of the Resolutions Committee in my senatorial district. And then the subcommittees placed them near similar ideas in existing platform planks, so we could begin working on wording.

I was on Education and Health & Human Services subcommittees; I led the Education subcommittee. I didn’t realize ahead of time what that was going to entail. It turns out, Education is where there is a whole lot of interest this biennium. Of those 600+ resolutions we received, around 230 of them, so more than 30%, were for Education. I also have been handling the platform document that our resolutions turn into. So, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been working long hours just about every day. Our Senatorial District Conventions in Harris County were held this past Saturday, so my intention is to catch up on sleep now. And then grocery shopping. And maybe then some house cleaning.

The SD7 2022 Resolutions (Platform) Committee;
at the SD7 Convention March 26, 2022. That's me on the right.

There were fifteen on the committee, according to rules, plus a few extras who also worked hard but didn’t get to vote on issues. My Education subcommittee attracted all the women on the Committee. We worked well together. I love them all as friends now. We began each meeting with prayer, and I often felt God’s Spirit confirming to me His approval and help in the work we were doing. I mean that quite literally. That sense that we were working together for God's glory was present in all the committee meetings I was in. What a joy to work with such good people, who also happen to be bright and well-informed, and dedicated to preserving our freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Today, then, I’ll share some of what we—and the people who submitted all those resolutions—came up with. What I’m showing here is what we suggest as changes to the 2020 Republican Party of Texas Platform. We’re not actually causing these changes yet; we’re passing them on up to the state committee. (A little more on that below, near the end.)

If there is a theme, it is that we want our freedoms back. We’re not willing to take tyranny any longer, and we’re trying to find solutions.

In Education, many of the ideas were specific. And oddly they weren’t as strong as what was in the existing platform. They were clearly not asking for a weaker platform; they just were thinking, “What can we do?” and coming up with ideas. So, be assured we didn’t weaken things.

In short, what parents want is to take back their power. The schools have had too much power over our kids, and they have proved untrustworthy.

As you’ve been seeing around the country, people are upset about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools—and, yes, it is being taught, even here in Texas, no matter how many times they say, “No, that’s some theory taught in graduate schools; we don’t teach that.” They are teaching that America is flawed, and our founders were evil; they are not teaching the Constitution, and how the founders identified principles of freedom, overcoming millennia of other traditions. They divide children by race—to compensate for what they’re calling “systemic racism,” even though our children don’t treat each other differently by race—until they’re taught to. Parents don’t want their children to be told, “You’re either an oppressor or a victim, and no matter what you do, that’s what you are because of the skin you’re born with.” This “anti-racism” concept, which is part of CRT, is very racist.

Connected to racism is intersectionality—gaining power according to your various grievance claims. These can be race, sex, sexual orientation, transgenderism. So a black transgender would have more intersectional power than a black woman. A black woman would have more than a Hispanic or Asian woman. A white woman would have more than a white male—who is at the bottom. It’s a power scoring system based on happenstance rather than accomplishment or character—exactly the opposite of MLK’s dream.

And because of the power generated by being homosexual or transgender, that LGBTQ agenda is promoted—even to the very young. And to that, parents are saying, “No! Now you’ve gone too far.”

So that’s what we are seeing. Other issues related to wanting more transparency, and of course more choice. People want the money to follow the child—without government strings attached.

We can go into this another day, about how education isn’t actually a proper role of government. That’s why the federal Department of Education is about nothing but control. It does not help educate, period. But in the states, including here in Texas, the government sees education as its responsibility, in fact it’s main responsibility. That’s unfortunate, because you can’t even bring up choice without major outcry reaching the ears of legislators, accusing them of hating kids, and failing them by threatening to take money away.

That’s a mindset we need to get out of. People “believe” in public schools as if it is a religion. They actually say, “I believe in public schools.” Well, I believe they exist. But I don’t believe they are “the way” to educate the next generation to be productive good citizens. Public schools tend to do that more poorly than every other option. But they suck up all the taxpayer dollars, and hold onto those dollars with clenched fists.

So what did we come up with?

We addressed the CRT issue, probably in multiple places. We kept the existing Basic Standards plank (added Texas history to the list). And then we pointed out that schools are there to provide academic education, not to mold students in some way. Schools are not families; they have no business dealing with things like Social Emotional Learning (SEL is a way of indoctrinating wokeness), mental health evaluations, sex ed, anything related to gender identity, and of course CRT and any other socialist/Marxist ideology. Schools don’t have a say in the care and upbringing of children; that right is retained by the parents. (Red means we added that.) 

134.Basic Standards: The educational system should focus on basic standards, which include, but are not limited to, a curriculum of reading (with an emphasis on phonics); spelling; writing; civics (must pass the US Citizenship and Immigration Services test); the arts; music; literature; mathematics (including personal finance); science; geography; economics; and Texas, United States, and world history. We encourage teaching critical thinking skills, including logic, rhetoric, and analytical sciences within these subjects. We advocate the value of vocational training programs.

134A.  Schools Are Not Families: Schools are hired to provide academic education, while parents retain every right to the child’s care and upbringing. Therefore, we insist on the elimination in school of any Social Emotional Learning (SEL), mental health evaluations, sexuality education, gender-identity ideology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), socialism, Marxism, and other social indoctrination. Schools must be limited to teaching the Basic Standards as listed in the Basic Standards plank. All school districts, individual schools, or charter schools are prohibited from contracting with or making any payment to any third party for material concerning any of the above prohibited topics.

 

We already had a plank saying we want no sex ed taught in schools—at any level—because schools have failed in that assignment abysmally. So the multiple requests to teach abstinence 75% of the time weren’t ignored; they just weren’t added. 100% > 75%. But we strengthened the existing Sexual Education plank an added this new one related to the Obscenity Exemption plank:

145A. No Sexualization of Children: Because the fraudulent research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey has been used to allow children access to harmful, explicit pornographic materials and to be induced into sexual performance, we support repeal of the obscenity exemption [Texas Penal Code 43.24(c)], which allows children access to harmful, explicit, or pornographic materials under the guise of education [see Obscenity Exemption plank above]. We require criminal penalties from a misdemeanor to a felony charge for each count of breaking the law by showing obscene materials to a student. An educator—including teachers, administrators, board members, or personnel, as well as guest speakers—so charged must be immediately suspended, and upon conviction must be dismissed for immoral and unprofessional conduct.

 

We have a disagreement among those who want school choice—because of some fears and some misunderstandings. The typical understanding is that families can choose from four types of schools: public, private, charter, or homeschool. But that limits the possibilities. If we had, say, an education savings account sort of plan, those four options would be available, but so would a mix-and-match version of any or all, plus online programs, plus private lessons and tutoring, plus therapies (for example, equine therapy or speech therapy). If the parents could choose the options, they would be limited only by the amount in the account plus whatever additional they might want to pay. It would work similar to a health savings account: you can use the money in an HSA for any qualifying medical service or product. In an ESA, that would be true of any qualifying educational service or product.

But the fear is in the “qualifying.” In general, it would be up to the parents to decide. But it would have to be something related to their child’s education. For example, a museum pass might qualify, but a new skateboard would not. The money simply can’t be used for a nonqualifying purchase.

The fear crowd tends to be homeschoolers or private schoolers worried about intrusion by government into what they’re doing. But they do not have to take any taxpayer money. I believe their fears should not be preventing choices from happening for all the other parents—including homeschooling parents who prefer to be vigilant against government intrusion while exploring multiple options.

Anyway, we rewrote the previous School Options plank to be two planks: Education Mission Includes All Children, which explains why the money should follow the child, rather than be held in the public school monopoly; and Free Market Is Solution to Education, which reminds us that the free market is the way to higher quality at lower costs. Imagine the innovation that would be spurred in the market if parents held the purse strings and intentionally chose the customized combination of materials and approaches that would work best for their child.

141. School Options: Texas families should be empowered to choose from public, private, charter, or homeschool options for their children’s education, using tax credits or exemptions without government restraints or intrusion.

141.Education Mission Includes All Children: The state of Texas has a mission to educate the next generation to become productive good citizens, and it collects taxes for this purpose. Public school is only one tool parents can choose for accomplishing this mission, but public school is not the mission itself. The state must never create roadblocks for families for whom that tool does not meet their goals for their children. Taxing families on top of what they pay out of pocket for another choice does not further the mission. Monies allotted to education must follow the child without government restraints or intrusion.

141A. Free Market Is Solution to Education: We know that the free market leads to higher quality and lower costs. If Texans want higher quality education and would enjoy getting that for lower cost, Texas must incorporate the free market into every aspect of pre-K-12 education. This would lead to greater satisfaction for parents and teachers, could eliminate indoctrination problems, and would lead to generally improved outcomes at lower costs than what we have seen with government monopoly.

 

Beyond education, the big outcry from the public was for freedom from government overreach, and a reassertion of our God-given rights. Two years ago we were writing the 2020 Platform near the beginning of the pandemic. So we had a plank last time about Healthcare Decisions. We extended that with a new Medical Freedom plank, to get rid of those mandates of all kinds that we’ve suffered.

250A. Medical Freedom: We call for an addition to the Texas Bill of Rights that explicitly states that Texans have the natural right to refuse vaccination or other medical treatment. Therefore, the following are expressly forbidden even in an emergency or a pandemic:

a.     Any attempt to mandate, force, or coerce any medical test, procedure, or product, including vaccines or masks.

b.     Any attempt to use a citizen's health, infection recovery, or vaccination status as a condition to maintain or obtain housing or employment or employee benefits, attend school or childcare, or access state services.

c.      Any mandates by public, private, government, or medical entities for treatment, vaccination, vaccine passports, mask requirements, health insurance surcharges, or use of controlled substances of any kind.

d.     Any involuntary isolation or quarantine of anyone not experiencing an active contagious infection.

e.     Any prevention of visitation to the ill when risks are acknowledged and mitigated according to patient and visitor choice.

f.     Any Nuremberg Code violations—including but not limited to the requirement that use of experimental use medications must provide full knowledgeable consent and be free from any form of coercion or inducement.

 

That was in Health & Human Services. In addition, we altered and added a couple of specific planks up in Business, Commerce & Transportation:

58.    Mask Mandates: Government should not be able permitted to force businesses or governmental workers (including election workers and school personnel) to require face coverings.

58A.  Vaccine Mandates: The Republican Party opposes vaccine mandates, opposes any effort to impose such mandates through emergency declaration, legislation, or regulatory action, and supports legislative efforts to allow consumers and patrons to freely conduct business without regard to vaccination status.

 

There are other intrusions into our freedoms as well. I like this addition:

234A. One World: The United States is a sovereign nation founded on the principles of freedom.  We call on the dissolution of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, New World Order, One World Government, The Great Reset, and other groups who have taken on the role of a government entity and act as such to control freedom of thought, speech, religion, and trade.

We find that these things coming at us from multiple directions, so people are trying to list every iteration and prevent any new ones.

Speaking of which, concerns of mine, which I put forth as resolutions that were accepted, were to stop ESG scoring and DEI programs—both by governments and by businesses, which are being recruited to take away our freedoms at the behest of governments when the governments know they can’t get away with that sort of tyranny outright:

21A. Values Scoring: The Republican Party opposes the use by financial institutions, social media companies, businesses, or any level of government, of any social credit system (such as used by the Chinese Communist Party), ESG (Environmental, Social & corporate Governance) scoring system, or similar system or method designed to discriminate against a person’s beliefs, values, medical decisions or lawful behaviors. The use of such systems prevents citizens from exercising their constitutional rights, including the rights of free speech, assembly, and religion, and further prevents citizens from the full enjoyment of the unalienable rights of our Republic. The Republican Party calls for federal and state legislation banning governmental use of such systems and protecting the rights and liberties of citizens from the use of such systems by businesses.

21C. No Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policies: When Diversity means no diversity of thought; when Equity means equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities; and when Inclusion means exclusion of anyone not fitting the DEI orthodoxy; then DEI is an abominable forced bigotry and must be made illegal in public and private businesses, government at all levels, schools and universities, and financial institutions.

 

We had a fairly strong Abolish Abortion plank last time. But we’re strengthening that.

325. Abolish Abortion: Since life begins at conception, we urge the Texas Legislature to enact legislation to abolish abortion by immediately securing through enacting legislation that would immediately secure the rights to life and equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization and by ignoring and refusing and would ignore or refuse to enforce any and all federal statutes, regulations, orders, and court rulings that would deny these rights, and to oppose legislation that discriminates against any preborn children and violates the US Constitution by denying such persons the equal protection of the laws.

 

Of course we’re asking for some additional safeguards for the election system. We added to the existing Fair Election Procedures plank, and added a new plank detailing what would trigger a full forensic audit:

210. Fair Election Procedures: We support the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot in each election once but oppose illegal voting, illegal assistance, or ineligible persons registering. We support:

a.     Vigorous enforcement of all our election laws as written and oppose any laws, lawsuits, and judicial decisions that make voter fraud very difficult to deter, detect, or prosecute.

b.     Voter Photo ID.

c.      Prohibition of Internet voting for public office and any ballot measure.

d.     Sequentially numbered and signed paper ballots to deter counterfeiting.

e.     No private funding of the election process.

210A. Forensic Audit: For races contested by the candidates, Certification must be postponed, and a full forensic audit of preserved paper ballots and voter records must be performed, including a hand recount of paper ballots, if any of the following is detected:

a.   Statistical anomalies and/or impossibilities.

b.   Voter turnout is more than voter registrations.

c.   Missing audit logs.

d.   Dropping signature verifications for mail-in ballots.

e.   Astronomical numbers of error events in vote tabulators.

f.         Extremely low rejection rates for mail in ballots.

g.   Suspiciously high adjudication or participation rates.

h.   Accepting votes that "scanned" faster than the scanner could physically scan.

i.        Any tabulation error, such as "votes exceeds ballots cast", which must be investigated, allowing no override.

j.        Counting ballots after the Election Night Deadline if the resulting numbers significantly change the outcome.

 

We don’t do a lot of asking for programs—more often we ask to get rid of them. But a resolution came in asking for the restoration of an education program for families. Those of you familiar with “The Family: AProclamation to the World” might recognize the call for citizens and governments “to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.” So we were able to echo some of that proclamation in this plank:

240A. Healthy Family Formation: We call upon the Texas Legislature, in conjunction with responsible citizens, to promote measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society. Toward this end we recommend reintroducing a Healthy Family Formation program, providing messages on risk avoidance and abstinence outside of marriage, complete fidelity within marriage, and equipping parents to share in the responsibilities of rearing children in a nurturing atmosphere of love and mutual respect and providing the necessities of life and protection for the family.

 

In all, we’re suggesting an additional 41 planks, with changes to many existing planks. The process from here is for us to submit these to the Republican State Platform Committee. So ours get assessed along with suggestions from around the state’s 31 senatorial districts. And the state committee will be comprised of a representative from each of them.

It’s more formal at that level. In subcommittees there is a fairly open exchange of ideas, but when the Committee of the Whole meets, members address the Chairman, not each other, and parliamentary rules are strictly followed.

It looks like I will be editing for the State Platform Committee again this year (3^rd time). It’s an interesting thing to do, and I feel like I’m contributing, using my skills. But at that level I get very little say in how things are worded, and no input on what should be said. So my opportunity to do that was at the senatorial district level. I forget how many times I’ve done this level, but I think I started in 2014; if that is so, then this is my fifth time. As contributions to the party go, this is my wheelhouse.

What new people on our committee commented on was how much respect we show to every resolution that comes in. We’ve always paid attention to each one, but this time we tracked on a spreadsheet what we did related to each resolution, so those who submitted could actually see whether and where their ideas were included.

The system is designed to grow the platform, which explains why it’s so long. I wish that weren’t so. And yet, most of what was in there from last time was worth keeping, at least in some form. We added far more ideas than we took out.

Each of those ideas started out in someone’s head, and they got written down and submitted at the precinct level. We have now handled them at the district level. And they will make their way up to the state level, where they will direct our grassroots work—and the work of our elected officials—for the next two years.

This system is designed to hear what the grassroots are saying. Those are the ideas that are rising up. People are figuratively shouting, “We want our freedoms back!” We want to run our own lives, including our own medical decisions. And we don’t want governments or anyone else telling us how to raise our children, or what we are supposed to believe.

The question now is, will our voices be heard? People with power—the ones who have usurped that power from the people—don’t willingly give it up. But in the end they can only rule by the consent of the governed. And that’s those of us who are speaking up.

 

 

Another Education and Homeschooling Post

This will be a part II of an education post. In the last post, I offered the first part of my presentation, on  homeschooling, but making the point that, when you look at the entire 6000 years of the history of education, homeschooling is what has been traditional—because it works. And the public school experiment, using a factory model, has only been underway for about a century. And it’s a failing experiment.

On Saturday we had a presentation on the structure of education first. The presenter, Colleen Vera, a retired teacher, has spent years as a watchdog on school issues. One of her specialties is the HarrisCounty Department of Education (which we agree should not exist), and we count on her to attend their meetings, let us know what’s going on, and let us know when we need to take action.

She provided us with this flow chart of the parts of government that make decisions over education. Down at the bottom, with the least influence, are teachers in the classroom and their students.

The summary flowchart of Texas government in education,
from Colleen Vera's presentation
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019

One fascinating example was her seating chart. Teachers have requirements for seating children based on various rules placed on them. Well under half of the seats are for regular kids. GT (gifted and talented) are used to help the teacher, not the GT student. They’re seated next to the struggling to help them out. Which means the gifted students are placed with the slowest, holding them back, rather than challenging them to move ahead at a rate suited for them.

assigned seating chart based on government requirements
from Colleen Vera's presentation 
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019 

Note that in middle and high schools, this seating chart is set up for one period; the teacher has to sort through the students like this for every hour of the day. Why? To avoid lawsuits. Not to get better educational outcomes.

As Colleen went through the history of educational initiatives that—as she pointed out before I had a chance—the federal government was not empowered to do by the Constitution, I’m reminded that the federal Department of Education was non-existent until 1979. I went through my entire public school experience without any federal oversight. Somehow we muddled through better than we’ve done since its inception.

SAT scores under Department of Education, begun 1979
from Colleen Vera's presentation
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019

Colleen offered this chart, showing average SAT scores over the years. The * in 1996 indicates the year they changed the way they scored—in other words, in order to cover the data that showed results were going steadily downward, they cheated. So you can’t measure apples to apples.

Still, there’s a downturn from the beginning of the Department of Education until 1996. And, depending on your state, nothing better than mixed improvement or standing still since 1996.

Why did they institute a federal Department of Education in the first place? Because there was a crisis in education. At first that excuse was for “national defense and social responsibility.” That’s kind of a stretch—past the point of elasticity—of the actual Constitution. But now it’s worse. The new excuse is, “to fix society’s ills.”

She ended her presentation with some suggestions of actions we citizens can take—along with the warning that you can’t single-handedly do it all, so you might want to figure out where your interests lie and focus there. So, here are the actions:

·         Volunteer in public schools (VIPs)

·         Join PTA/PTO

·         Volunteer for Texas Book Review

·         Apply to be on local committees (school growth, bonds, etc.)

·         Apply to local councils (ex: School Health Advisory Council)

·         Start local conservative education PAC

·         Educate yourself on ONE specific area of concern:

o   Research

o   Advocate local school board

o   Advocate State Board of Education

o   Advocate Texas Legislature

o   Advocate Congress

·         Become a Watch Dog

As citizens, we’re in a difficult place. We know the public schools are failing in their mission. We know the federal government has no business involved in education at all. But we’re up against a monopoly. You can’t get out of paying your tax dollars for public schools—even if they do not serve your children, and in fact you have to pay elsewhere for their actual education.

It’s like Canadian health care. You get what you get under the national system. Or you make financial sacrifices to come to America for care. 

We can go to private schools and homeschools—if we’re desperate enough and have the resources over and above what we pay toward schools with our taxes. Education is, by the way, 35% of the Texas budget for 2020.

So the question comes up—and isn’t often answered the way I would prefer—do we leave it alone and let the schools fail, or do we work tirelessly to change any little bit we can affect?

Maybe the answer is, first of all, meet our own children’s needs; then work to have education money spent more wisely. And, if there’s energy left, create a revolution toward free market + philanthrophy solutions.

That isn’t as outlandish as you might think. There’s a portion of my presentation where I compared costs. I toted up what I estimated that we spent. I’m sure I missed some things, but I got most of it. This was our cost breakdown for 3 students for 10 years (only our youngest was homeschooled for the full 10 years):

• Elementary Math: $350

• Secondary Math through Algebra 2 $450

• History and general: about $300

• Lonestar tuition: maybe $1000?

• Kaplan ACT prep (used for progress evaluation): $35

• Museum memberships: $80/year, 7 years = $600

• THSC and homeschool group memberships: $600?

• Driving to homeschool events/activities: unknown

• Books: Who knows? We’d have bought them anyway.

• Loss of income: unknown and unimportant

• Estimated total for 10 years, entire family: $3,335

• Average per year: $333.50

Compare that to the average cost for the State of Texas to educate a child. Stats weren’t all consistent. According to the NEA, Texas spent $10,456 per student for the 2017-18 school year—about $2,300 below the national average. The Census Bureau puts the cost at $8,861 per student per year—still $2,531 under the national average. 

The contrast is significant. My results are anecdotal, but it worked out for us. A sacrifice we were willing to make.

It’s actually getting cheaper.

For example, the $350 elementary math we used, CSMP. Our boys had used it in the gifted magnet school they attended before we moved to Texas, so when I started homeschooling, I called up those teachers and got the information to get it. I got a teacher’s edition, which you only need one of per classroom. There’s also a set of consumable booklets for each student, of which I just got one. We’d been told that program was only used for gifted students, because it was so expensive. But you buy the teacher’s book one time per decade or so (math doesn’t really change). So you’re only buying the consumables. And maybe there’s a better way. But it didn't seem to me that costly per student.

Anyway, that whole thing, 3rd grade through 5th grade, cost me $350 in 2000. It’s now free online. The distributor decided not to continue printing and selling the program, so some enterprising parent asked permission to post everything online and combined with Buffalo State to preserve it. It’s all there now, for free—all years, not just those I had needed.

I compiled a list some years ago on free and very low cost online learning, which I’ve added to a bit here. I’m sure there are many opportunities I’m missing. You could easily accomplish a high school and possibly college education online, where the only thing you’re not getting is the social experience and the debt—oh, and the diploma. So, if we let go of the diploma and other locked doors into the middle and upper class, we’d have much cheaper—and often better by every measure—advanced education. Here’s the list:

•       Hillsdale College Online Courses 

•       PragerU videos 

•       MIT (MIT OpenCourseware)

•       Harvard (Harvard@home)

•       Berkeley (webcastBerkeley)

•       AbeBooks.com 

•       Alibris.com

•       OpenCulture.com 

•       ITunes U 

•       Lynda.com

•       Udemy.com

•       AcademicEarth.org 

•       YouTube EDU

•       VideoLectures.Net 

•       TedTalks 

•       WebMD 

•       BBC video language 

•       GreatCourses.com (about $100 per college level course)

One thing the free market does really well is bring more and better products and services at lower prices. In technology there’s a formula, called Moore’s Law, relevant mainly to transistor size and power, for how technology keeps getting better and cheaper. There’s something like that going on with information. It’s getting more widely available at less cost.

In short, when we’re dealing with the public school system, we need to stand firm on the knowledge that the system is not indispensable. There are alternatives. And when we truly want good educational outcomes for our children, we’ll do what it takes to use those alternatives. 

The more we go to the alternatives, the more the market will follow with even better—and less expensive—solutions.

We'll be doing another Tea Party meeting on education next month, hearing from a couple of conservative members of the State Board of Education. I expect we'll learn even more.

The Purpose of Education

I’ve been putting together a presentation for this coming Saturday. At our Tea Party, we’re spending two consecutive meetings on education issues. My part will be on homeschooling. The beginning segment is about the purpose of education, and some history of education. Since that’s where my thoughts are today, I might as well give a preview here.

The purpose of education, according to Aristotle, is to produce a great soul.

Joe Harless, in his book The Eden Conspiracy, says education should be about producing an accomplished citizen. It should teach the knowledge, skills, and information relevant to becoming accomplished members of society.

What should an accomplished member of society be accomplished at doing—regardless of how the person makes a living?

·         Obedience to the law.

·         Informed voting decisions.

·         Contributions to stability.

·         Resolution of interpersonal conflict.

·         Contributions to community improvement.

The Northwest Ordinance, one of our lesser known founding documents, written in 1787, the same year as our Constitution, says “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall ever be encouraged.”

So the purpose of education, then, is to teach religion, morality, and knowledge so that we can have good government and happiness.

Note that encouraging schools and the means of education did not mean government provided it, only that it would offer a gift of land—after surveying, one 16^th of the land would be sold to private owners, and the proceeds would be used “within that township” to help with the building of schools. No state or national oversight. No ongoing support. Simply a one-time grant to encourage building schools.

So far we’re using different words, but we’re pretty much in agreement about what we want schools to do.

According to Oliver Van DeMille, in A Thomas Jefferson Education, there are three types of

education, each with its particular purpose:

·         Public education

·         Professional education

·         Leadership education

We’ll take these in turn.

First, public education. It’s intended to prepare a person for a job, or for servant labor. It teaches what to think. It is implemented in cultures to give opportunities to the poor, to lift them from being a burden on society. The downside—everywhere it had previously been tried—is the deterioration of other education, which can’t complete with “free.”

Second, profession education. It’s intended to prepare for trade, often through apprenticeship, for skilled artisan work, and for law, medical, MBA, or other professional training. It teaches when to think, or under what circumstances to use their specialized training. So, the purpose is to create expertise. It meets this goal, but it is not a substitute for leadership training.

Third, leadership education. It’s intended to produce leaders in home and communities, entrepreneurs in business, statesmen in government. It teaches how to think. So it trains thinkers. It develops character, competence, and capacity to do the right thing—and to do it well—in business, government, church, school, family, and other organizations. It perpetuates freedom.

Historically, for thousands of years, those with resources provided home tutoring, often followed by trade apprenticeship and professional training. Meanwhile the poor got whatever minimum was necessary to make them useful—usually emphasizing physical labor over brain labor.

Public education—that first type, for preparing the poor for service labor—was first tried in America during a time when many immigrants were working in factories, and their children were left to wander the streets. This coincided with the industrial revolution.

In comes Horace Mann, an atheist “progressive.” He said,

What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…. The common schools… shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men (quoted in Christopher Klicka, The Right Choice—Home Schooling, p. 32).

Within two generations, Mann's ideas flooded the nation. There was the problem of large numbers of poor students from uneducated families. He offered the factory model. Subjects were separated, rather than integrated. Timing was determined by ringing bells, just like in the factories. Schools were top-down authoritarian. Uniformity was paramount.

Then along came John Dewey—of Dewey Decimal System fame. In 1916 he published Democracy in Education. He’s more or less the father of “progressive” education. He had plans to “revolutionize” child training. “Self-realization” became the goal instead of “learning.” He gave no more than a casual nod to teaching English grammar, ancient history, US history, geography, classics of Western civilization, or science.

He looked upon the schools as a wonderful opportunity to indoctrinate America’s youth in the “virtues” of a glorious age where private property, the free market, open competition, and profits would all be eliminated.

What was his background? He got his PhD from Johns Hopkins, studying under G. Stanley Hall—a disciple of German socialist Wilhelm Wundt. Dewey visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He failed to recognize the revolutionary desolation and widespread destruction of human values, and instead described it as “a popular culture impregnated with esthetic quality.”

According to W. Cleon Skousen, in The Freeman’s Digest, May 1984, “Today we are reaping the tragic results of the pedagogical misery that America inherited from Dewey’s misadventure in experimental education.” As he explained Dewey’s history before that Soviet visit,

Long before, in 1904, he had joined the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University. He had then teamed up with James Earl Russell, the dean of the Teachers College, who was also a student of Wilhelm Wundt, and together they had worked for a quarter of a century diligently building this branch of Columbia University into the largest institution in the world for the training of teachers. By 1953, about one-third of all the presidents and deans of teacher training schools in America were graduates of Columbia’s Teachers College.

One of his contemporaries, Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, saw through the scheme to its logical consequences:

The disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view, education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone (Great Western Books, vol. 1, preface; pp. xii-xiii).

I may have told this story elsewhere, but there’s a segment of To Kill a Mockingbird, where the young protagonist, Scout, describes her disappointment with school. Her description of the first day of first grade (no kindergarten back then) is worth retelling.

Scout’s teacher discovers that she not only knew the alphabet, but she could read all the readers and The Mobile Register (newspaper), which she had learned naturally just by sitting with her father and reading together in the evenings. The teacher says,

“You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage—”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers (p. 22 of my copy).

Apparently John Dewey was to blame. She goes on:

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem [her brother] called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus [her father] and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teacher thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me (p. 37).

Maybe it’s time we re-think what is normal.

In six thousand years of human history, children have been brought up and taught by their parents. Turning that responsibility over to the state is a social experiment—an undeniably failing experiment—begun only about a century ago.

While we homeschoolers may look radical to the people around us who don’t know anything different from government institutional factory-like schools they grew up with, we are the ones following the traditional pattern.

We homeschoolers are the ones doing leadership education. We’re the ones teaching how to think.

And insofar as we do well in teaching the knowledge, skills, and information relevant to becoming accomplished members of society, we’re producing great souls.

My kids were worth it.