Winston & Education

Dear Winston,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my thread on titled, “And You are Being Taxed To The Hilt For This.”

https://ironink.org/index.php?blog=1&cat=29

It is so seldom that a government school teacher responds to these types of quotes that I find it delightful to engage them when they do. I do wish, however, that you would have engaged more with the substance of the quotes, perhaps even explaining how it is that you viewed them as being deficient.

However, as your methodology was just to give a general repudiation of the quotes, I will answer your “insights” in a conversational manner below.

Once again I thank you for your willingness to converse.

Winston Fox writes,

Sure, a large part of the educational system is geared towards getting children to jump through hoops or conform, but let us not throw the baby out with the bath water. Public education could indeed be used as a method of endoctrination, so it is always important to be vigilant and suppliment a child’s education with parental guidance, but current educational systems in Canada and the United States are a far cry away from brainwashing. Schools can’t get students to stop drinking, having sex or doing drugs, let alone walking in lockstep with each other.

Our educational system is socialistic and it explicitly and implicitly teaches humanism in various ways. Many of the quotes I provided sweep up against that truth and yet your only response is that let’s not the baby out with the bathwater.” I guess the question that I return to you is; ‘Where is the baby (that which is good) in the bathwater that is your government schools? =

Certainly all can agree on the necessity of parental guidance but were parents taking seriously the necessity of parental guidance they wouldn’t put their children in government schools to begin with. Parental guidance would see that government schools aim at deconstructing children from the best of parents belief system and reconstructing them in the direction of a materialistic, atheistic, globalist world and life view.

Second, I would ask why is it the case when God has given a child to the parents that the parents are only to “supplement” the education the child is receiving from the government? I think we have to be honest and admit that teachers are (realizing there are always exceptions to the general rule) some of the most under-educated ill qualified people which staff a particular profession and calling. (See Thomas Sowell’s “Inside Public Education” for the hard statistics on this.) Now, no one doubts the good intentions of teachers but in terms of skill, intelligence and ability there is no way that they should be the ones with the primary input into the life of the child.

And in terms of brainwashing, well the results of the PEERS testing done by such organizations as “Wall-builders” indicates that you are just wrong on this matter. Students that graduate from government schools do, philosophically speaking, walk in lockstep.

Winston wrote,

There is a need for some order in schools and in society, unless you are for complete anarchy, but in some cases policy makers, the PTA and/or the schoolboards, go overboard with things like Zero Tolerance because they are unwilling to leave things like the use of utensils or tylenol up to a person’s individual judgement.

One way to bring order to government schools is by simply getting rid of them. In my estimation there is no need for order in our current government schools because there is no need for the government schools themselves. In my estimation order in society should come from the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the instruction by parents of their children in what it means to think as Christians. The public schools are a albatross around the neck of the intelligence of the American citizenry.

However, I must say, that I do not think that the disorder that would result in closing government schools could be any worse than the societal disorder that we currently have.

Really Winston, the things you mention in the above paragraph as problems are really the smallest of problems that the schools have. The real problems are not “zero tolerance” or the use of utensils or Tylenol. The problems are the pagan ideological pre-commitments of the teachers and administrators and the dynamics that arise when you congregate large numbers of adolescents in one place thus creating a “Lord of the flies” youth culture.

Winston, you simply are not seeing the whole picture. There are many books I might recommend to you on this subject but perhaps you could start with John Taylor Gatto’s “Underground History of American Education.”

“I can see where it is easy to lose faith in an education system where, after 12 years, they still do not think that a child is qualified to make a judgement about when to use a steak knife or take something for a headache. Even before “No Child Left Behind” forced teachers to teach to the (pardon the term) dumbest of the class (in order to improve test scores and get enough funding to hopefully keep their jobs), children who struggled were the main focus while those who grasped the subject easily were left to their own devices. I’m not opposed to the squeaky wheel getting the grease, raising the overall number of educated people is a good thing; even if it is inadequate, it is better than nothing. There does need to be more done for the children at the other end of the spectrum however, perhaps the one teacher per classroom model should be reexamined.”

I have not lost faith in the education system Winston. I have not lost faith because I never had any faith to begin with. Even if No Child Left Behind” had never been implemented the problems with the schools would remain. The primary problem is not holding the more intelligent back in order to accommodate the less intelligent. The primary problem is the schools teach from a pagan world and life view. They say that they are religiously neutral, but as religious neutrality is not possible they are teaching all of what they teach upon the foundation of humanism. Because they teach from this foundation they teach irrationality. In short, it is not the facts that are the problem in government schools so much as it is the philosophy of fact that they embrace.

I would go so far as to say Winston, that were I trying to devise a educational system that would most effectively lobotomize our citizenry, I would invent the precise government educational system that we have.

I pray, that it might be the case that the government schools continue to ignore our best and brightest in hopes that the best and brightest won’t be completely ruined by the time they graduate from school.

Winston wrote,

“If your gripe is with public over private, universities and colleges are more apt to turn out drones than an elementary school. If you believe that disseminating an idea is equivalent to endoctination, you should know that not everyone who learns their ABCs becomes a writer, or Newton’s laws a physicist. If your concern is that children may develop different beliefs or opinions than their parents, do not be such a hypocrite. The only way for children to grow into independent, autonomous people is to allow them to take what they have heard and make their own judgements about it. If children were completely dependent on their parents for every important decision, once the parents grew old and died, their children would be lost and unable to operate.”

You’ll be glad to know that I have no more use for our colleges and universities than I do the secondary schools.

Next you imply I’m a hypocrite for wanting my children to believe what their Father believed. My problem with what I generously call “your reasoning” is that government schools force feed ideological fecal matter to children and then turn around and insist that these same children must be allowed to make their own judgments. You can not draw out of children, in terms of judgments, what has not been first poured into children in terms of training. So, my concern, is that my children do not become idiot clones of their intellectually arid teachers.

Quite the contrary to your “wisdom” Winston, I would say that the only way for children to grow into independent, autonomous people is to train them in the way they should go and when they are old they will not depart from it. Once instructed and trained, only then can children make their own autonomous decisions about that which comes before them in life. Really, Winston, on this score it really comes down to your desire for the state to train the children so that the children can be little clones of the state and my desire for Christian parents to train the children so that the children can be little clones of Christ.

Winston wrote,

“Oh, and John Stuart Mill was a strong advocat of educating all women, despite the aforementioned perils of public education having the potential to be used as a tool for brainwashing. If you read the rest of On Liberty, I think you will find that Mill is in favor of an educated populace being able to hold its leaders in check.
If governments really wanted to endoctrinate us, they would stop wasting all that money on schools and just make proclamations to an uneducated and gullible public.”

You can’t be serious Winston.

Propaganda doesn’t work by just making pronouncements Winston. Propaganda, in order for it to work, as to be constant exposure beginning at the youngest of ages. I suggest that you give B. K. Eakman’s “The Cloning of the American Mind” a spin.

Why do you think the American citizenry keeps voting Republican and Democratic socialists into office? Because they are indoctrinated. Why do you think that the American citizenry has lost all interest in their civic responsibilities? Because they are brainwashed. Why do you think the average American almost never reads a book once graduating from High School? Because they are brainwashed. And the fact that you said what you said in this whole response suggests to me that you desperately need to take the red pill that Morpheus is offering you.

Winston,

“I have been a teacher, and I was educated in public schools, as I’m willing to bet you were too, as were millions of others who are not mere sheep. There is always going to be some level of cultural or political bias in everything because none of us has grown up in a vaccuum, but there are general things like civics, math, spelling, grammar, geography and other subjects that we can all form some general consensus about failing complete educational neutrality.”

No, I was not educated in state run schools. I spent 13 years in government schools but I can assure you that I was not educated. I daily thank God that I did not learn a blessed thing in government schools, because in not learning anything I had little need to unlearn later. I also lament that the first 18 years of my life were such a intellectual barren wasteland. I’ve tried to make up for those years since, but in the end one can never retrieve the years that the locust have eaten.

You say that there are millions of others who are not mere sheep. I would dearly love to meet these millions. In 50 years of life I think I’ve come across, at most, scores of people who are not sheep.

All of those subject matters that you mention could be just as easily mastered by a child being given a reading regimen starting at 5 and some Math tutorials. There is no need at all to take a child from their home at the tenderest of ages and throw him or her into the wolf pits that are government schools.

I have a great deal of commentary on Iron Ink Winston on government schooling. You can access more information that you desperately need just by clicking on the right on the topic titled “government schools.”