 |
| Author |
Message |
Goober_JIL
Site Admin
Joined: 12 Feb 2006
Posts: 2143
Location: Seattle, WA - USA |
|
 The Empire Strikes Back |
 |
 | |
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
Lee Duigon
April 19, 2006
The very title [The Messianic Character of American Education] signifies that the author [R.J. Rushdoony] understood exactly the heretical challenge that public education posed to an essentially Christian nation, for the educators, imbued with behavioral psychology and evolution, not only rejected Christ as the Messiah, but pretended to be themselves messiahs offering their own seductive and poisonous brand of salvation through the institution of secular humanist education.
—Samuel L. Blumenfeld (forward to the 1995 edition of Rushdoony’s The Messianic Character of American Education, Ross House Books, Vallecito, CA)
It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of Atheism which the world has ever seen.
—R.J. Rushdoony (p. 335)
When Rushdoony wrote those words in 1963, he planted the seeds of an all-out war of ideas against a public education establishment that until then had pushed its plans forward without any opposition.
Rushdoony’s sides bore fruit: there’s opposition now, and plenty of it. Battered by constant criticism, embarrassed by adverse news reports (WorldNetDaily, for example, keeps a running tally of teacher-student gender scandals), and threatened by a presidential administration openly supportive of educational alternatives, public education’s supporters have begun to hit back.
ABC-TV’s John Stossel poured fuel on the fire in January when his documentary “Stupid in America” aired on 20/20 (see
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
To refute him and other critics, public education’s supporters have trotted out a new report that they say proves that public schools actually outperform charter, private, and religious schools.
“Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data,” by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, University of Illinois, can be read in its entirety at
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
In this article, the first of a series, we’ll examine the escalating controversy over public education in America, and the role to be played in it by the Lubienskis’ report.
Stossel: Not Impressed
John Stossel has read the report, he told Chalcedon, and he’s not impressed.
Stossel said the authors had to “torture the data” and subject it to “improper analysis” to get the result they wanted: an affirmation of the public schools.
“Government monopolies fail,” he said, “and public education is a government monopoly. There’s no competition, no incentive to do better. Sure, the kids seem to be doing okay in the eighth grade; but the longer they’re in our school system, the farther they fall behind the rest of the world.”
Stossel criticized the Lubienskis for focusing solely on mathematics test scores.
“It’s only the math?” he said. “What happened to reading, writing, history, and everything else?”
After his documentary aired, teachers’ union members staged protests outside his office. He then received a challenge from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to teach in a New York City public school for a week, but the day before he spoke to Chalcedon, the union withdrew its invitation (see his April 5 column,
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
“I’ll probably do a follow-up to the documentary,” he said. “The controversy just won’t die down.”
“Based on Lies”
Among those complaining about Stossel and the rest of public education’s critics is “Talk to Action” (http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/3/31/13544/0640), a self-avowed pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality weblog of the Religious Left.
Says “Talk to Action” writer Bruce Wilson, “ongoing criticism of America’s public schools is baseless and partisan,” and Stossel’s “skewed” documentary “included a series of misleading claims, a lack of balance in reporting and interviews, and video clips created primarily for entertainment to argue for expanding ‘school choice’ initiatives such as vouchers and charter schools.”
Wilson decries “the ongoing assault on America’s public schools” and “the strategy to destroy America’s public schools.” But his language is mild, compared to that found on teachers’ union websites.
The American Federation of Teachers (see
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
denounces “The collection of think tankers, politicians, and commentators who, using funds from a handful of far-right contributors, promote privatization in education. Undeterred by research demonstrating that privatization harms students, the voucher blob [sic] generates pseudoscholarship and op-eds that bash public schools. They have succeeded in creating an echo chamber for anti-public school messages that bounce around think tanks, foundation Web sites and fringe media outlets. Too often, these messages, based on lies, slip into the mainstream media and become accepted as fact.”
By “privatization” that “harms students,” the AFT means any and all alternatives to government schools staffed by teachers’ unions — including, of course, homeschooling. By its standards, you are reading this article on a “foundation Web site” that is part of the “fringe media.”
To defend the public schools, and present them as efficient and effective, “Talk to Action” and the AFT have turned to the study by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski.
Who’s Spinning the Report?
Chalcedon asked Christopher Lubienski if his research justifies the position that criticisms of the public schools are lies and partisanship.
“Our report is what it is: a research analysis of academic performance using NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress],” he said. “Since you’ve read the report, you can see where we were willing to draw conclusions from the data, and where we felt certain conclusions — including some that many might see as supportive of their particular agendas — would be inappropriate based on this type of data and analysis. As I am sure you know, once this type of thing has been made public, authors cannot control how other people interpret the work or otherwise use it to support any pre-existing positions.
“I don’t know the group you mention [Talk to Action]. Their conclusions cannot be supported solely by our paper; our report simply does not address such issues … However, I do know that people who are interested in these things have referred to research such as ours as evidence that there often appears to be a disconnect between reform rhetoric and research evidence.”
Lubienski granted that the debate over public education, and the use of his findings to support one side or another, has become political.
“I agree that this debate has now — for better, or, more likely, for worse — become extremely political,” he said.
The Lubienskis’ project was funded by a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education — evidence, say public school advocates, that the government supports their position.
But that’s not so, department officials told Chalcedon.
“The study was funded by us, but it was done independently from us,” said Mike Bowler of the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. “We don’t take positions on what the test scores mean. We’re in the middle of evaluating charter schools. Many of these programs are supported by this [presidential] administration, so we couldn’t take positions on them.”
In a nutshell, the Lubienskis’ report says that demographic factors — such as students’ race or socioeconomic backgrounds, their parents’ educational backgrounds, where they live, etc. — account for the higher test scores so often achieved by students in private schools, compared to those in public schools. If those factors are “controlled for” statistically, the report says, then public school students seem to score higher than private school students. The Lubienskis looked only at mathematics test scores compiled by the government in 2003 from a very broad sample base, and applied different statistical models in an effort to rule out the influence of demographics.
Their work will be examined more closely in the next article in this series. Meanwhile, the Department of Education does not concur with the Lubienskis’ analysis — and certainly not with the Left’s interpretation of it.
“That is not our position,” said Elaine Quisenberry of the department’s Communications and Outreach office. “The differences between public and private schools [test scores] are not based on demographics, but also on other variables.” Other researchers, she said, are studying these other variables.
Conclusion
If the Lubienskis’ report is to be taken as evidence that the public schools are fine and their critics are liars, neither the Lubienskis themselves, nor their government sponsors, stand behind that assertion. The Religious Left and the teachers’ unions have put the research to a use that is disavowed by its author and its sponsors.
Chalcedon has always opposed government schools and has been a leader in the homeschool movement — one might even say a co-founder of it. Although we have not supported charter schools and voucher plans, we have learned from experience that the public school establishment has always and will always try either to abolish homeschooling or impose secularist standards on it (see “A Quiet Threat to Homeschooling,”
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
For the time being, charter schools and vouchers are the primary targets of those who seek to curb the school choice movement. If they make progress on that front, they will turn their attentions to homeschooling.
R.J. Rushdoony devoted much of his life to the defense of all Christian education, whether done in the home, church, nonprofit, or profit. He defended and promoted the freedom of all non-government options for education. As a Christian education champion, he appeared as an expert witness in court cases throughout the country. The note of increasing hysteria in both the tactics and the rhetoric of today’s public school establishment are proof that he did not labor in vain.
Next: A Closer Look at the Lubienski Report |
_________________
God understands me. why don't you?! |
|
| Thu Jun 15, 2006 9:51 am |
  |
|
Goober_JIL
Site Admin
Joined: 12 Feb 2006
Posts: 2143
Location: Seattle, WA - USA |
|
| |
|
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
Lee Duigon
April 25, 2006
[John] Dewey’s influence on contemporary life and human thought has been extensive in religion, philosophy, and other areas, but chiefly in education and jurisprudence … It is questionable whether liberty can long survive under a continued onslaught of Deweyism.
—R.J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education, (Ross House Books, Vallecito, CA: 1963), p. 161.
Early this year, Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, University of Illinois, published a statistical study that seems to indicate that public schools are better academically than charter, private, and religious schools. Their paper, “Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data,” may be viewed at Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
As we saw in the first article in this series, this report has been hailed by the Religious Left and teachers’ unions as “evidence” that all criticism of the public schools is a pack of politically motivated lies. We also saw that this is not the position of Christopher Lubienski, the report’s co-author, nor is it the position of the U.S. Department of Education, the sponsor of the study.
In this article we’ll take a closer look at the study itself and some of the criticisms of it. But first it will be necessary to understand why these findings are so controversial.
What’s at Stake?
R.J. Rushdoony, Chalcedon’s founder, taught that public education, as developed by Dewey and others, is ultimately a campaign to replace Christianity by secularism as the dominant belief system in America. Among Rushdoony’s many writings on this subject, The Messianic Character of American Education is perhaps the most comprehensive, and will be quoted here.
Philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) often wrote of public education in utopian terms, using religious-sounding language. Rushdoony cites an example from Dewey’s book My Pedagogic Creed:
I BELIEVE THAT
— the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.
— every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling: that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
— in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God. (Rushdoony, p. 155)
An avowed atheist, Dewey wrote of “Education as Religion” (p. 315). Rushdoony commented, “Dewey is plain-spoken here: there is no morality beyond the state and its social interests” (p. 156).
For Dewey and his disciples — the men and women who built America’s current public education system — there was no god but the state, and no higher purpose than the state’s.
This is why the controversy over public versus private education is so hot. Even apart from control of the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent every year on public education, it is a battle over who shall be supreme in the land — the state, or the individual under God. In such a battle, no prisoners will be taken.
The NAEP Data
“Common wisdom and past research holds that private schools achieve better academic results,” the Lubienskis wrote. “… However, new results from a study of a large, comprehensive dataset on US student achievement seriously challenge assumptions of private school superiority overall … Based on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics exam, this analysis compares achievement in public, charter, and different types of private schools” (p. 2).
“NAEP is often referred to as ‘The Nation’s Report Card,’” the Lubienskis explained, “due to being the only nationally representative, ongoing assessment of US academic achievement in various subject areas. The 2003 sample is over ten times larger than in any previous NAEP administration, making it possible to closely examine school characteristics and achievement” (pp. 6–7).
Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of its Koret Task Force on Education,[i] agreed that the NAEP is a valuable and reliable database, but questioned the Lubienskis’ interpretation of it.
“The tests they [the NAEP] do, in my opinion, are very good,” he said. “The question is, what do you do with the tests, and how good is the analysis?”
But Lawrence Stedman, associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Binghamton, has been a persistent critic of the NAEP itself. Although unavailable to comment personally, his views can be seen in his review of The Manufactured Crisis (http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n1.html).
Over time, Stedman wrote, NAEP test scores for the public schools have declined in many areas, including civics, science, reading, writing, history, and geography. He confirmed John Stossel’s claims that American students are falling behind students in other countries academically.
Stedman found that public school students in the 1980s and ’90s had a poor grasp of “simple problems involving fractions, decimals, and percents,” scored poorly on writing tests (“Only about a third wrote adequate papers”), reading, history, and literature — all according to the NAEP test results. “A majority did not recognize classics by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Conrad, and Whitman,” he wrote.
Stedman in 1996 thought the NAEP math tests were too easy. “This is junior high general math, yet 17-year-olds have trouble with it!” he wrote. “In 1990, for example, only around half the 17-year-olds could convert a decimal to a fraction.”
“Student achievement may be even worse than these findings suggest,” Stedman wrote. “The NAEP data do not include dropouts who presumably would score lower. To reach a given NAEP level, students only have to answer correctly 65–80% of its problems. The burden on students is light.”
Finally, he said, the NAEP tests are a poor tool for measuring the depth of students’ understanding in any subject area.
It’s the Demographics?
In their study, the Lubienskis said they employed “advanced statistical techniques (hierarchical linear modeling) to study the relationship between school type and mathematics achievement while controlling for demographic differences in the populations served by the schools” (p. 2, emphasis added).
“Controlling for demographics” means to rule out factors other than the schools themselves that might influence the students’ test scores. In various computer models, the Lubienskis controlled for students’ race and ethnicity (although no notice was taken of Asian-American students, who generally score very high academically), learning and language disabilities, eligibility for free lunch (as a socioeconomic indicator), “home resources” (books, newspapers, computer, encyclopedia, etc.), geographical region, type of community (urban, rural, or small town), and the size of the school.
When all these factors were ruled out statistically, the Lubienskis concluded: “Specifically, when controlling for differences in student populations, public school achievement is roughly equal to or higher than that of other school types” (p. 8).
“Indeed,” they wrote, “the findings from this study, which suggest that higher private school mathematics achievement is more than accounted for when demographic differences are controlled, call into question a basic premise of such [education] reforms. There are many reasons one could support school choice, but evidence of inherently higher student achievement in private and independent schools may not be among them” (p. 39).
But Is It Valid?
Professor Moe sharply criticized the Lubienskis’ methodology. Ironically, one of his papers is referred to in their report as a source (p. 9).
“It’s simply not true that the demographics account for the differences in the test scores of public and private school students,” he said. “Statistically, it’s not true.
“Are you going to control for the students’ backgrounds? There are many different data sets you could use. They controlled for things that shouldn’t be controlled for, like the size of the school, the free lunch, etc.
“In education, the private sector is very diverse. It’s well documented, for instance, that Catholic schools are better than public schools at promoting academic achievement. Many conservative Christian schools, on the other hand, are very new, and should get better as they gain experience.
“There’s an enormous literature that argues against the findings of this study,” Moe said. “The rest of the literature just doesn’t agree with them [the Lubienskis].”
The Lubienskis, he added, belong to “a group of people who don’t like school choice. Their conclusions about education are totally predictable. They’re always coming out with a report like this, and this is another one of them.”
Conclusion
If the real world were a statistical model created by a computer, life would be a great deal simpler.
The decision to remove a child from public school, and either send him to private school or homeschool him, already implies a strong commitment by the child’s parents. No one denies that most students do well when their parents are strongly committed to their education. To “control” this commitment out of the picture borders on intellectual dishonesty.
NAEP scores have limitations. For instance, they don’t constitute “longitudinal studies” focused on the same student over a long period of time, a factor acknowledged by the Lubienskis. Given parents’ interest in removing their children from an environment that sometimes includes crime, violence, drugs, adolescent gender, and a toxic, anti-Christian worldview, NAEP scores should hardly be a decisive factor in anyone’s education decisions.
School choice is not primarily about academics. The Lubienskis granted: “Of course, there are many other reasons that parents may choose conservative Christian schools — from religious-based curricula to proximity. However, inasmuch as that is true it undercuts the argument that parents will choose schools primarily based on academic quality” (p. 40).
Although there is abundant evidence for high academic achievement in homeschooling and private schooling, for Chalcedon, education has never been about academics alone. Children must also be taught about their relationship to God and their responsibilities to Him — an all-important factor that the secular public schools have entirely ruled out.
In the next article in this series, we’ll take a closer look at some of the partisan hysteria following in the wake of the Lubienskis’ report and consider its implications for the educational choice most favored by Chalcedon — homeschooling.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] “The Koret Task Force on K–12 Education includes some of the most highly regarded and well-known education scholars in the nation. Most are professors at some of the leading universities in the country and many have served in various administrative and advisory roles for federal, state, and local governments” Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
_________________
God understands me. why don't you?! |
|
| Thu Jun 15, 2006 9:53 am |
|
|
Goober_JIL
Site Admin
Joined: 12 Feb 2006
Posts: 2143
Location: Seattle, WA - USA |
|
| |
|
| |
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
Lee Duigon
May 1, 2006
Most prevalent in the modern age is the myth that man has no constant nature. This view of the plastic nature of man means that man can be molded at will by whatever state or agency controls man. The school has for the humanist been the great agency whereby man is to be remade at will in order to be prepared for the future. The state plans to create through the school a new man for its new order of the ages.
—R.J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity, (Ross House Books, Vallecito, CA: 1977, 1987), p. 1.
Political partisans of the Religious Right have hatched a plot to destroy public education by telling baseless lies about our really quite excellent public schools — or so say the schools’ defenders.
When one side in a debate is reduced to yelling “Liar, liar!” at the other, it’s usually a sign of desperation. In the ongoing debate over education, it’s the defenders of the public schools who seem to be getting desperate.
Talk to Action, a website of the Religious Left, has lashed out at critics of the public schools. In a recent article by Bruce Wilson (http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/3/31/13544/0640), we read of “a dual strategy by the Christian right to defund and delegitimate [sic] America’s public schools” by dint of criticism that is “baseless and partisan.”
Strong language — but there is a reason for it. The debate over how America’s children are to be schooled is central to a clash of worldviews as to what kind of a country America is to be: a “democracy” micro-managed by a secular elite, with citizens trained to obedience to the state; or a republic governed by an unchanging, written constitution, whose citizens acknowledge the unchanging, written laws of God as the ultimate moral authority.
Education as Culture War
How can we so confidently say the future of America is the prize at stake in this contest?
But that is how both sides see it. In Part II of this series, we quoted from R.J. Rushdoony’s 1963 book, The Messianic Character of American Education, a study of the ideology and the evolution of the public schools.
Rushdoony continued to argue that public education was the key to a utopian, secularist vision of America’s future, the chief instrument by which a statist paradise was to be created. Here is more of Rushdoony’s analysis, this from a Chalcedon Position Paper of August 1979 (reprinted in Roots of Reconstruction, [Ross House Books, Vallecito, CA: 1991], pp. 24–25):
“A young woman, mother of a girl of six years, described conditions in a grade school (K–6) across from their church. One teacher is openly a lesbian. Some boys regularly drag screaming girls into the boys’ toilet to expose themselves to girls, and nothing is done about it …
“Much of this stems from one of the greatest heresies of our day, the belief in democracy … [I]f our relationship with God is a democratic one, we can correct the Bible where it displeases us, eliminate what we cannot correct, and use other standards and tests for the church and the clergy than God’s enscriptured word. Then, logically, our word is as good as God’s word, and is as authoritative as God’s.”
Quoting from Lord Percy’s 1955 book, The Heresy of Democracy, Rushdoony described democracy as “a philosophy which is nothing less than a new religion. In fact, Lord Percy said of state schools, ‘This is indeed democracy’s characteristic Mark of the Beast … [O]f all means of assimilation, the most essential to democracy is a uniform state-controlled education.’ To challenge that system is to shake democracy’s structure” (ibid., emphasis added). (For those who cannot believe that Rushdoony can be so hostile toward “democracy,” bear in mind that Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” and nowhere mentions “democracy.”)
Rushdoony is not contradicted by the defenders of public education.
Christopher Lubienski (University of Illinois), co-author of a new statistical study that supposedly proves that public schools are academically superior to private schools (http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdf), published an article in 2003 entitled, “A Critical View of Home Education” (http://www.multilingual-matters.net/erie/017/0167/erie0170167.pdf). His comments support Rushdoony’s analysis.
“Increasingly, people are withdrawing from many of the common institutions that have defined social life in market democracies over the last century,” Lubienski wrote. “… [T]he decision to do so essentially represents the privatisation [sic] of educational decision-making … rejecting interference from, and accountability to, any external authority” (Lubienski, p. 167).
Removing children from public schools, he wrote, “can have detrimental consequences for institutions premised on collective participation” (p. 160), and “this situation [homeschooling] may deprive children of exposure to more diverse socialising [sic] experiences” (p. 171).
According to Lubienski, “in a pluralistic democracy, this goal for education [socialization] takes on the added imperative of exposing children to more diverse experiences,” and, “… [p]re-empting the opportunity for individuals to investigate and experience different alternatives undercuts their autonomy.” Also, “in liberal democracies that celebrate the rights of individuals, the public has an inherent interest in assuring that future citizens are exposed to different worldviews, life options, and so on” (p. 174, emphasis added).
“Indeed,” he concluded, “compared with the institution of the family, the institutions of state-supported education are better suited to promote equity — a central concern of a democratic and meritocratic society” (p. 175).
As represented by Rushdoony and Lubienski, both sides agree that education is about a lot more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. In practice, “exposing children to diverse worldviews and life options” often means teaching them that Christian morality is wrong, homosexuality is right, private property is evil and socialism is good, and so on.
The general public may not be aware that education is a main battlefront in an all-out culture war; but the actual combatants are well aware of it.
“I don’t consider myself an enemy of homeschooling per se — members of my family homeschool — but I have concerns about the way that it is being advanced, and the implications of that,” Lubienski told Chalcedon. “Certainly, public schools do transmit worldviews. Whether you or I agree or disagree with the many views at play in public schools is, I believe, a question to be settled through democratic processes.”
Except, of course, when activist judges say otherwise.
A Manufactured Crisis?
We have gone into this in depth so that our readers will understand why teachers demonstrate angrily outside reporter John Stossel’s office (after ABC’s 20/20 aired his documentary Stupid in America”— see
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
and why Talk to Action hurls wild accusations at “the Christian right” and the U.S. Department of Education: “[T]he Bush administration wants to see lots of public schools labeled as failures. It’s basically a long-term plan to erode the public’s faith in public schools and thereby increase support for private schools and vouchers” (see
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
As the centerpiece of its argument, Talk to Action offers a 1996 book, The Manufactured Crisis by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA), which supposedly proves “that ongoing criticism of America’s public schools is baseless and partisan.”
If anyone is partisan, it is the authors of this book, who make much of their “outrage” and the “organized malevolence” of public education’s critics (Berliner, p. xi).
The public schools’ defenders are in denial. If the schools are rife with crime, drugs, violence, and illicit gender (not only among students, but between students and teachers), it’s because the schools have the problems that are endemic to society in general — the students bring these problems to school with them. No attempt is made to explain why such social pathologies are much less common, if not altogether absent, at religious schools.
Test scores are low only because so many more students take the tests than in the past. As for the use of schools to promote sodomy, abortion, and moral relativism, the only answers provided are those of flat denial. “From McGuffey’s Reader to today’s texts, our schoolbooks have been repositories of moral messages that encourage unity in our nation” (Berliner, p. 110). It is a mystery how that description could apply to gender education texts like It’s Perfectly Normal (see
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
— provided by Planned Parenthood for grades 5–9 (ages 9–14) in the Waco, Texas, public schools. This is about as close as you can come to a Kama Sutra for children.
When their book is boiled down to essentials, Berliner and Biddle, along with the teachers’ unions and the Religious Left, are really after only two things: more tax dollars for the government school monopoly (p. 77), and socialism. Their cri de coeur on page 286 speaks for itself:
“It is not healthy for our nation to be so divided between haves and have-nots! … If concentrating the wealth among the few is allowed to continue, this nation will see the same kind of social unrest that has marked other nations for decades. Our country now has more private security guards than public safety officers, and this is just one of the inevitable outcomes of this kind of distribution of wealth. In contrast, by redistributing income, increasing the number of job opportunities, and providing more social services we could assure that more people in our country would experience or aspire to middle-class life styles” (emphasis added).
In fact, we agree that today’s crisis in education was manufactured
by elitist “philosophers” and “social planners” like John Dewey and his many followers, who sought in public schools a stealth weapon for remaking all of American life;
by a careless public that accepted the “free” public schools with no questions asked, until conditions therein deteriorated to the point where questions now have to be asked;
by lackluster church leaders, pietists, who reduced the Christian faith to a quest for personal salvation and forsook God’s calling to dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:28);
by elected officials who came to depend on money and manpower contributions for the teachers’ unions as the mainstay of their incumbency.
Many people labored long and hard to manufacture this crisis.
In the final article of this series, we will examine how the homeschooling movement offers the best solution to this crisis — and what the Left is doing to prevent it. |
_________________
God understands me. why don't you?! |
|
| Thu Jun 15, 2006 9:57 am |
|
|
Goober_JIL
Site Admin
Joined: 12 Feb 2006
Posts: 2143
Location: Seattle, WA - USA |
|
| |
|
| |
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
Lee Duigon
May 17, 2006
Statist education began as a subversive movement … The ‘public’ or statist schools, which began their history as a subversive movement aimed at subverting the old order, now cast the implication of subversion on the family! … Statist education is increasingly intolerant of any rivalry.
—R.J. Rushdoony[1]
Some people disapprove of gay men and lesbian women. Some even hate homosexuals because they are homosexuals. People may feel this way toward homosexuals because they think homosexuals are different from them or that gay relationships are wrong. Usually these people know little or nothing about homosexuals, and their views are based on fears or misinformation, not on facts.
—Robie Harris, It’s Perfectly Normal[2]
R.J. Rushdoony (d. 2001) did not live to see just how subversive, anti-family, and anti-Christian the public schools would become. Robie Harris’ book, for instance — which twice lists the anus as a gender organ (pp. 23, 26) — has been used as a textbook in the Waco, Texas, public schools (see “‘It’s Only Normal’ — Not,”
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
).
This spring, a second-grade public school teacher in Lexington, Massachusetts, outraged some parents by reading to her class a fairy tale entitled “King and King,” a story about a young prince who passes over the princesses and “marries” another prince. The school principal and the Lexington superintendent of schools supported the teacher’s action, refused to give parents the opportunity — supposedly guaranteed by Massachusetts law — to opt their children out of such activities, and wouldn’t promise not to let it happen again (for details, see
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
).
As a keen student of the origins of public education and its philosophy, Rushdoony didn’t need to wait until 2006 to see where government schools were headed. Because he understood the nature of the beast, he helped to found a movement to remove Christian children from these schools and either homeschool them or put them into Christian schools.
Although no one can say exactly how many American children are being homeschooled today (the U.S. Department of Education roughly estimates a little over a million, but that figure is several years out of date), “[h]omeschooling’s economic and political impact is keenly felt by teacher unions, educational bureaucrats, ideological indoctrinators and other beneficiaries of today’s system,” Chris Cardiff wrote. “What will happen when the growing number of homeschooling families withdraw their political support for the enormous taxes required to fund today’s $300 billion government system?” (“The Seduction of Homeschooling Families,”
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
).
Lashing Out
“No one is going to come out and say, ‘Let’s make homeschooling illegal,’” J. Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association (www.hslda.org), told Chalcedon. “But every effort to make it harder to homeschool — I mean legislative bills backed by teachers’ unions calling for more government testing, ‘oversight,’ etc., of homeschooled students — is not only intended for the purposes which they say, but is also meant to discourage people who are on the brink of homeschooling. And I believe that’s planned.”
In many states, the public school empire strikes back at homeschooling by demanding legislative intervention. But it uses other tactics, too.
The crudest and most blatant of these is the scare tactics on display at such venues as Talk to Action, a website of the Religious Left. In a recent Talk to Action blog piece, “Death by ‘Chastening Rod’”
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
, we are asked to believe that homeschooling parents are actually prone to beat, torture, or even murder their children! This, says the blogger, is attributable to the “dark Christianity” practiced by “dominionists.”
The teachers’ unions favor subtler smear tactics. In a recent article on the National Education Association website, Dave Arnold called homeschooling parents “well-meaning amateurs” incapable of providing their children with proper “socialization” (
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
).
“Children should have the opportunity to interact with others their own age,” Arnold wrote, as if this could only happen at a public school. “Without allowing their children to mingle, trade ideas and thoughts with others, these parents [those who homeschool] are creating social misfits.”
Why such hysterical rhetoric?
Because, as Rushdoony understood and frequently explained, public education’s reason for existing is not to teach children academic subjects, but to program them to become a certain kind of person: a humanist servant of the state. This is what all the talk about “socialization” really means.
“Horace Mann, the founder of the state-supported public school movement in the United States, saw the public school (and university) as man’s true church and his great hope of salvation,” Rushdoony wrote.[3] His 1963 book, The Messianic Character of American Education, lays out this case in compelling detail.
Meanwhile, the parents in Lexington, Massachusetts, have learned exactly what “socialization” means.
If scare tactics and legislative tweaking prove ineffective in deterring parents from homeschooling, there is always the threat of intervention by the court system.
“That’s what we’re here for,” J. Michael Smith said. The Home School Legal Defense Association must always be ready to defend parents’ rights to educate their own children, he said, “because we recognize that these judges don’t always follow the law.”
Rob Reich, education and political science professor at Stanford University, has already propounded a “constitutional framework” for state supervision of what homeschooling parents are to be allowed to teach their children (see “A Quiet Threat to Homeschooling,”
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
). Reich argues that children have a constitutional right to learn values, attitudes, and ways of life different from those of their parents.
“Some of these tactics might send some homeschooling parents underground,” Smith said, “without stopping them.”
The Pressure Mounts
Why does the education establishment feel increasingly pressured by homeschooling?
Because homeschooling works!
Libertarian Brad Edmonds recently listed “Some Interesting Facts About Home Schooling” (
Only registered users can see links on this forum!
Register or Login on forum! |
).
“On standardized tests nationwide,” he reported, “home-schooled children on average hover around the 80th percentile in all subjects … [while] government-schooled children perform around the 60th percentile.”
Homeschooling also benefits minority children, Edmonds wrote: “While most minorities in government schools do worse than white students on standardized tests, among home-schooled children the differences disappear — black, Latino, and white home schoolers all do about the same.”
Furthermore, “home-schooling is cheap: Government schools nowadays spend an average of $5000 per student per year. Home-schooling families spend an average of $600.”
So the public education empire can’t claim academic superiority to homeschoolers, and can’t play the race card anymore. It has nothing left in its arsenal but scare tactics, smears, and the “socialization” argument.
Rushdoony didn’t only criticize public education. He also explained why Christian parents should assume the responsibility of educating their own children. For example:
The Christian school is based on the logical premise that, while the gods of Humanism are dead, the Christian God is not dead. Our choice of schools indicates our faith [emphasis added]. If our God is left out of every area of life, or virtually every area, then we subscribe to the death of our God, or at least to His basic irrelevance to our world … Even as the growing collapse of statist education signals the death of the religion of Humanism, so the growing strength of the Christian school movement heralds the fact that God is alive and strong.[4]
We have seen in this series of articles that the defenders of public education have finally awakened to the threat to their monopoly posed by Christian schooling. Decades of being the only game in town made them slow to react to the threat. Now they’ve been energized.
But Christian parents are even more energized, and homeschooling continues to gain momentum. And every time the empire gets caught trying to herd children into the homosexual lifestyle, homeschooling looks like a better and better idea to more and more Christians.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Rushdoony, The Nature of the American System, (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1965, 2001), pp. 23, 26.
[2] Robie Harris, It’s Perfectly Normal, (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1996), pp. 17–18.
[3] Rushdoony, Chalcedon Report #54, Feb. 1, 1970, in Roots of Reconstruction, (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1991), p. 690.
[4] Ibid., p. 692. |
_________________
God understands me. why don't you?! |
|
| Thu Jun 15, 2006 10:16 am |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
|
|
