By Nathan Barton

A comment on a recent column “Get your children out …” points out that it may take a “catastrophic extinction event” to rid ourselves of the odious institution of government-run, theft-funded “public” schools in the United States.

Is this what it takes to get rid of “public” schools and their evil in today’s world?

It certainly seems that way.  We’ve been seeing the steady “progress” that GRTF schools have made over the past half-century in “producing docile cogs” (to quote another commentator), dumb down education, destroy civility, and promote irresponsibility and wildness.  And immorality by nearly any standard.

So we ask ourselves, “what if… this goes on?”

Surely, if something short of catastrophe were going to change the course of these insititutions, it would have happened.  No?

But again, entire institutions can collapse relatively quickly without a single, notable catastrophic event. Consider the decline and fall of small-town downtowns, over decades. Or the more rapid collapse of the department store sector. (Remember Montgomery Wards? Gibsons? Woolworths? JC Penneys? And who will remember Sears & Roebuck or K-Mart in a few decades?) Or the collapse of video rental stores: Hollywood Video and Blockbuster and many smaller ones?

Of course, these are not state-owned, state-operated, monopolies.  (Or near monopolies: according to FedGov statistics, private schools have about 5 million or 50 million K-12 students, or 10%.  Many people claim this is actually inflated.  Homeschool students are estimated at 1.6 million, or about 3%. The government doesn’t track that all over, but homeschool supporters do. If you have 6 out of 7 students, you effectively have a monopoly.)  And these firms were not (for the most part) supported directly by tax dollars extorted from people and businesses – including their competitors. (And people who privately or home-schooled their children STILL were robbed by taxes to support the “public schools.)

(From a2zhomeschooling.com with thanks, link above).

But keep in mind many other sudden changes.  Who believed, say in 1984, that the Soviet Union wouldn’t last another decade? (It collapsed, along with its Eastern European and Near-Asian empire, in 1991.)  Who would have believed in 1914 that just four years later, four of the European-based world empires would have collapsed: Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottomans. Or that in less than 40 years, three of the four remaining empires would also be gone or going quickly? (Guess who is left?)

Admittedly, we can argue that the Great War (WW1) and the Great Pacific War and the Great Patriotic War (two major parts of WW2) were nearly “catastrophic extinction events.”  But the fall of the Soviets, the reunion of Germany, and the break-up of Czechoslovakia were amazingly peaceful and orderly (relatively). (Unlike the collapses of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria since.)

And every one of those governments, those super-states, claimed a monopoly on armed force and the right to steal anything and everything from their subjects and anyone else not armed and able to fend them off. They were indeed the “powers that be.”

And today, we also see other institutions which are collapsing as we watch, or which seem on the verge of doing so.  Consider the Roman Catholic Church, facing perhaps its greatest internal threat since the Reformation, just over 500 years ago.  Consider the print media, a giant for well over two centuries of publication. And a century ago, let us look at the horse raising farm industry.

What do almost all of these have in common?  They brought it on themselves, in very large part. The institutions (businesses, governments, societies, etc.) may not have been the immediate cause or even the major cause of their demise.  But the actions and attitudes of these organizations weakened them and led them to the point where they failed.

And so it is with the GRTF schools.  The seeds of their destruction, whether catastrophic (and rapid) or not, are planted daily by the teachers, the administrators, and their erstwhile masters in public office. Planted in the hearts of the children they abuse. Planted in the communities that they serve up to the greed for control and power of the people whose interests they really serve.

Indeed, they shall reap what they sow.

But until they do, please, get your children out of these evil institutions.  Homeschool, privately school, cooperate with other parents to teach them not just truth, but spirit: responsibility and compassion and faith and tolerance and the need to stand up for what is right.

If you try to teach children liberty and freedom by confining them for thousands of hours a year in what is essentially a jail, you may regret what they actually turn out to be.