A huge portion of the popular reaction against “public” schools arises from clashes over values: i.e., moral and ethical principles for living that undergird all other decisions. All education of any kind must be founded upon some set of values, because literally everything involved in human life is founded thus. It’s literally impossible to teach without reference to some set of moral-ethical principles.
It started when state education bureaucrats decided to force “hygiene” into the high-school classroom. The rationale was, of course, venereal disease, how it’s transmitted, how to avoid contracting it, and what to do if you do. It didn’t take long for “hygiene” to morph into the broader subject of “sex education,” and for the “education” to permeate ever lower grades. Today “sex education” curricula embrace the ever-expanding realm of “alternative lifestyles,” because after all, it’s vital for fifth-graders to have comprehensive knowledge of polyamory, homosexuality, bisexuality, bestiality, S&M, pedophilia, paraphilia, “puppy” and “pony” play, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam.
These “subjects” cannot be “taught” without reference to moral and ethical principles. And many parents are horrified at the principles that accompany them.
Before we can make sense of the development, we must address another subject of even greater importance: the secularization of American life. Today, even though about three-quarters of Americans describe themselves as Christians of some denomination, the application of Christian principles to daily life is at an all-time low. The Ten Commandments still receive lip service, but little more – and to mention them, or to make any reference to the teachings of Christ in a “public” school classroom, is to invite discipline, dismissal, and lawsuits both civil and criminal.
But one cannot remove the dominant set of principles from an educational system and leave a vacuum. Another set will flow in within an eyeblink. This is what has occurred.
“Public” schooling, once rationalized as an Americanization mechanism for the children of immigrant families, has become the transmission medium for the principles of the dominant religious creed of our time: hedonism. Its doctrines are reinforced by the messages from the entertainment media. And American parents, inhibited by social pressures and heavily burdened by economic factors, often find themselves unable to counter it.
Yes, I mean the above exactly as it seems: “public” schools now practice religious indoctrination, though in a form that pretends to be “objective” and “nonjudgmental.” They promulgate a creed our great-grandparents would not recognize. Which calls to mind this passage from Isabel Paterson’s masterwork The God of the Machine:
There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure. If this principle really is not understood, let any parent holding a positive religious faith consider how it would seem to him if his children were taken by force and taught an opposite creed. Would he not recognize tyranny naked?
Indeed. Keep this in mind as the educrats strive to forbid homeschooling de facto through the imposition of curricular requirements and regulations.
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And yet we send our children to “public” schools knowing (in todays educational environment) that reading, writing and arithmetic are the least stressed courses.
Evil Franklin