If you’ve done as much study of the Founding Fathers as I have, one fact starts to stick out time and again: none was the product of public education. That’s right, the greatest men of American history were all schooled either in the rooms of a private institution or by the best teacher in the world: real life.
Had they known in a couple centuries the hopes for representative government rested on the votes of brainwashed drones, educated by the state on the high value of Rooseveltism, laziness and sexual deviancy, would they have proceeded how they did?
In the always witty words of Thomas Jefferson, “Not on the life of a poore cooper’s wife.”
Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the curricula forced upon schools by the Florida Department of Education. Civics classes don’t require a single mention of Ronald Reagan, Herbert Hoover or John Tyler, rated by scholars as the three best presidents in history. Inconveniently for the state, they just happen to be the president who pushed to dismantle the Department of Education, the president who was solving the Great Depression the market-based way only to have FDR plunge us back into record unemployment and the president who accepted Texas into the union. I wonder why the Department of Education passes them over.
Instead, requirements include entries like “Socialism — discuss benefits and shortcomings.” Shortcomings? I’m not sure the people of Soviet Russia would have used that weak of a word, although they would probably admit that they were “coming up short” on essentials like food and televisions.
It’s not just the explicit curriculum; it’s also what they’re implicitly teaching us. It’s clear, to intelligent people at least, having free education breeds dependence on the government. Every time a cut in Bright Futures is discussed, students whine in a collective fear of less beer money and (gasp!) a summer job. Contrast that with Constitution signer Nicholas Gilman, who, from age seven, worked on his father’s farm eight months a year and had to work in the school’s kitchen to pay for his four months of tuition the rest of the year. And although his IQ tested at 165 as an adult, this was only average for the raised-on-work Founding Fathers.
It’s no wonder George W. Bush preferred hiring from schools like Patrick Henry College for his administration. Not only are the students learning in a government-free, Christian environment, as the Founding Fathers did, but 85 percent of the student body was homeschooled for K-12. They are hard working, moral, honest and won’t be able to tell you one good thing about socialism. It is from schools like these we will see another George Washington — not the government-doled Harvard or Yale.
The good news is the 2010 elections are shaping up to put Republicans back in charge of the Senate and the House.
We’ve fallen into dead last in education as a recent study showed the majority of eighth graders in this country couldn’t find the United States on a map.
In even better news, future-Speaker Boehner has hinted at plans to overhaul the school system in innovative ways. No more federal scholarships. No more biased accreditation system. Strings attached to federal block grants will require cuts to local school funding. While Obama is sure to veto it (so much for change), when 2012 rolls around with Republican President Haley Barbour, we’ll be on the start of a path to fix education.
And it couldn’t come soon enough. We’re so dishonoring the Founding Fathers, I suggest a radical move: exhume all the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, attach magnets to their incorrupted bodies, wrap their coffins in wire and re-enter them. The power generated by the spinning in their graves over education will be enough for the country to become energy independent. But that’s another column.
Brian Amos political science Ph.D student
