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      Families Losing Faith in Government Schools

      When two of the establishment’s leading propaganda organs run screeds attacking critics of government schools in as many months, you know something is going on. On the heels of a recent piece in the New York Timestrying to smear public school critics comes a new piece in The Atlantic worrying that public support for government-controlled education is imploding. And it is.

      The establishment is right to be concerned. Government education has been the most crucial weapon in furthering the agenda to “fundamentally transform” America, as Obama put it, away from a constitutional republic based on Judeo-Christian values toward a collectivist global society. But now, the American people are starting to wake up, as evidenced by the surging number of homeschool students. Whether it is too late remains to be seen.

      The Atlantic article, written by Erika Christakis and appearing in the October 2017 issue, argues, correctly, that Americans are increasingly hostile to and disillusioned with government education. The headline offers a good summary of the piece: “Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake.” The subhead reads: “The current debate over public education underestimates its value—and forgets its purpose.”

      While there is some interesting insight in the article, unfortunately, it mostly tackles strawman arguments instead of addressing the real issues and the real reasons why Americans are rejecting government schools. For instance, never once does the piece address one of the chief concerns expressed by countless critics of government schools: the deliberate indoctrination and dumbing down of children.

      The only allusion to this problem by Christakis serves only to obfuscate the real issues. “Some liberals have come to see instruction in American values — such as freedom of speech and religion, and the idea of a ‘melting pot’—as reactionary,” Christakis says, presumably referring to the most lunatic fringe of the ultra-far-left. “Some conservatives, meanwhile, have complained of a progressive bias in civics education.”

      Ironically, Christakis goes on to provide evidence of the dumbing down and indoctrination, but, incredibly, tries to use it as an argument in favor of government schools. “Three-quarters of Americans can’t identify the three branches of government,” the piece states. “Public-opinion polls, meanwhile, show a new tolerance for authoritarianism.” Of course, all of that is by design, and all of it was made possible by government control of education.

      The author, a certified government-school teacher, provides another perfect example of the problem. “The Founding Fathers understood the educational prerequisites on which our democracy was based,” the article says. In reality, of course, the founders loathed democracy as a terrible and unstable form of government, with the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, noting that democracies are “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Instead, they very deliberately decided to establish a republic in which God-given rights would be guaranteed by law — regardless of what the mob might think.

      The Atlantic author makes another absurd claim illustrating either extreme ignorance of civics, or an effort to mislead, claiming there is a “constitutional right” to attend a government school. In fact, education is not mentioned anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, and the Tenth Amendment specifically prohibits any federal role in schools whatsoever. And yet, in government schools today, this is the precisely the sort of idiocy or outright lie that is often taught as fact.

      The proposed solutions, as always with government-school apologists, include more tax money for the schools. Yet the data shows this to be a failure. Many of the school districts with the highest spending per pupil have among the worst scores. Baltimore, for example, which spends more per pupil than virtually any other large district in America, is among the worst-performing, with at least a half-dozen schools that cannot produce one single student proficient in reading or math.

      The fact that establishment propaganda organs are worried about the collapse of trust in government schools is a good sign for those who value education and liberty. Now, Americans must be on guard against false “solutions” to the crisis.

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