By Nathan Barton

As I’ve been concentrating on schools and education recently, I was pleased to find an article at the Foundation for Economic Education about an Arizona legislator who has called for the repeal of compulsory schooling.  The article is an excellent review of how we got into the mess. Of course, this legislator is unlikely to get this bill passed – at least right now.  But everything needs a start.

Most news on the “education” (indoctrination) front is not so good – as we see what Heartland Institute has published about “SEL.”

Teresa Mull, in “Parents, what you don’t know is hurting your kids” writes:

“Contrary to what you might hear from leftists in academia, the growth
of the Social-Emotional Learning movement is nothing less than
alarming. SEL is all about teaching children how to think and feel. Its
goal is to transfer power parents have had since the dawn of time — to
cultivate their own offspring into developmentally sound adults with a
strong moral fiber and outlook — to government, whose aim is to create
an unoriginal, unimaginative, cog-in-the-wheel mindset for our kids.
Government doesn’t want a bunch of little rebel-rousing free thinkers;
they want a society fixated on the good of the collective — and it’s
starting in 2nd grade.”

Mama notes: “So the long known “school” indoctrination now has a name… But it really starts in pre-school, I’m sure.” (She is right, and I’m watching some examples of it right now – in private pre-schools/child-care centers, to boot.)

Although we trace our “modern” school system back just to the Prussian system developed in the 1830s (or thereabouts), we can see its origins all the way back in Egypt and the Babylonian Empire, where the young of the “elite” of conquered lands were taught (indoctrinated) to serve their new empires.  Similar institutions were founded and operated in China, India, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, and others.  These techniques from Antiquity were found and honed to a more functional system, by the Prussians, by the educrats of New England, and then by the Marxist-Leninists and National Socialists of Russia, Italy, Germany, and Spain.

It is a dirty history, which should make us sick to our stomach.  For more than a century, the vast majority of American parents have voluntarily surrendered their precious children to this monstrous system, even while the system has steadily grown more powerful, more able to manipulate and mold those children into the beatniks of the Fifties, the hippies of the Sixties, and right on down to the AntiFa snowflakes and Social Justice Warriors of the 21st Century Teens.

And as Teresa Mull explains, it is NOT getting any better. New methods, new experiments, are developed, sent out and used on the very children they are supposed to be mentoring and teaching and protecting.  The entire process is not necessarily some centrally-directed effort, but rather, a cooperative and collective work done by tens of thousands of people who believe (sincerely, for the most part) that they know what is best for the world and the human race, and are indeed the elite who shall lead us all to utopia.  Although in recent decades, the development of the federal educational bureaucracy in the States and the gaining of more and more power by educrats in most nations (including our Fifty States) has created more of a central control system.

And the “public schools” are far from the only venue, whether on the PS-12 level or the higher education institutions.  Virtually all private universities are very well integrated into the total effort, increasingly being little different from the public colleges (except in the matter of how much the students (and their families) are charged for the privilege of being brainwashed).  Private PS-K schools are more and more similar to the government-run, tax-funded schools, except that again, where the money comes from and the addition of a few more subjects of study.  (That is mostly in the field of religion, but even that subject has been corrupted by the state and the educational elite, just as was done a century or more ago in the majority of religiously-centered universities.)

And just to hammer home the point, the field of home schooling is threatened through a combination of things. The development and availability of computer-based and on-line teaching is both a boon to parents and a threat to their liberty, subverting their efforts to teach their children what they want their children to learn.  And more and more efforts on the parts of school boards and legislatures (both in the States and abroad) to increase control of home schooling are seen each year.

But some of these same trends provide more and more opportunity to liberate families and their children from the leviathan of government- and academia-controlled education.  To limit the exposure of developing minds and intellects to the indoctrination and propaganda and toxic “learning environments” of the modern educational industry.

It takes more than just repealing laws.  More than just recognizing the problems.  And certainly more than just protesting and petitioning for changes.  It will take dedicated and sacrificial effort to do this.

And I don’t think that 95% of us in the States or elsewhere have the courage or willingness to do it.

More, later.

(PS:  Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA, more about them in the future) just published this bit of news, that Puerto Rico (now on course to become the 51st state) has declared home schooling to be a fundamental human right: “Puerto Rico is now the first among U.S. states and territories to recognize homeschooling as a fundamental right, thanks to a law signed by Governor Ricardo Rossello Nevares on June 7. In other states and territories, we have successfully argued that homeschooling is within the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children. This is in keeping with precedent established by the United States Supreme Court, which has recognized protection for parents’ educational choices arising from the liberty clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Of course, there are things to nitpick about this, but it may be a step in the right direction.  It still amounts to “what government gives, government can take away.”