No

by AnonymousThoughts

Created on: April 07, 2010

Public Schooling Should Absolutely Not Be Mandatory to Any Age

Absolutely not.  We should not force students to go to school until they are eighteen.  I would go so far as to argue that public schools are unconstitutional.  The one thing that destroys democracy is when government starts favoring any one group of people over another.  Yes, education is an example of the government favoring those young people over everyone else.

Sadly, we seem to have an aversion to using simple principles to help us make important decisions in this country.  What a pity.  You see, when people are given anything that they either haven’t earned or they haven’t asked for, people are rarely going to get something that is good for them.   Public education violates those basic principles.  What about this principle?  When you favor one group of people over another, you create monsters out of the favored group and set them against other groups in their society.  Are the nation’s children not completely out of control?  Are they not set against the values and authority of their parents and other adults in their community?

Here is what a good government does and here is what I would think that “Equal Protection of the Laws” in the Fourteenth Amendment and the prohibition against “Forced Labor” in the Thirteenth Amendment should cover:

1)      Good governments provide services that are equally and directly usable at any time by all citizens regardless of gender, color, age, class, or religion.  Our government first faltered when it began to provide help not only to certain classes of people, but also to people in certain age groups.  For democracy to stay on track, its people must never allow it to fund programs that directly serve only a particular religion, a particular race, a particular class, a particular gender, or a particular age of citizens.  It is by this method that politicians buy votes and it is for this reason that these types of government programs are as unconstitutional as any programs favoring a certain religion or any actions discriminating against a certain race of people.  Good governments build roads and infrastructure, provide mail services, form armies, and create libraries and parks that can be directly enjoyed by or a benefit to ALL citizens.  It must never be allowed to curry favor with any particular group.  Public education is an institution that is perhaps of greatest service to parents who need someone to babysit their children.  It directly serves only those parents and their children who attend, and it is not open to any citizen of any age.  It is therefore unconstitutional.  There must be separation of school and state now.  This is absolutely no different from the government pandering to any other group of people out there.  It does not EQUALLY benefit everyone in the country at any one moment in time.  It is, I say again, unconstitutional.

2)      Secondly, forcing young people to go to school with compulsory attendance laws or even dictating to them that they get a certain education or that they learn certain skills is also unconstitutional.  No matter how noble a cause education may seem to be, we have enslaved many children and families whose children either do not enjoy or appreciate education in general or do not enjoy many of the classes they are forced to take in our nation’s public schools.   Taxes are the one and only thing that just governments should ever be allowed to compel people to do beyond those laws which constrain people from those activities that endanger, hurt, or take advantage of other citizens.  It is simply unconstitutional to prey on children and young people because they are as powerless as African Americans used to be in the south back in the days before the Civil War and before Civil Rights. 

Here are some simple and sad facts about public education:

Public Education has been doing nothing but getting worse since its inception.  It has not become worse because its students, teachers, parents and administrators are not doing their job right, it has become worse because it improperly uses public funds AND enslaves and institutionalizes a certain segment of the population.  That, by itself, is what is destroying America.

Public Education cannot force children to learn who don’t want to learn.  It can’t force children to like classes and subjects that they do not like and for which they have no talent.

Public Education does a very poor job at doing anything but that which its students enjoy most: having expensive sports programs and having ill-conceived dirty dances, neither of which are essential skills or recommended activities for our young people whom we wish to grow up to be functional, successful, and happily married.

Public Education robs parents of the decisions and responsibilities which are properly theirs.  It causes parents to be abdicators of their parenthood instead of parents who actively engage in guiding their children towards a career AND/OR a family.

I am aware of the fact that our public schools are FULL of teachers, coaches, and administrators who are genuinely doing their best to serve the nation’s children.  The problem is not their intentions but the constitutionality and the unintentional damage done to these children by being institutionalized the way they are. 

Want the bottom line, which will surely be found to be most controversial?  Public education most serves those mothers who want out of their homes so they can get into the workforce.  However, one of the biggest reasons that our children are sleeping with each other anywhere and everywhere they can find an empty house and an empty bed is because there are so many mothers who are NOT at home because they are out working jobs that make them unable to be there for their children all the time, as they need to be.  Only a small fraction of mothers are able to find perfect jobs that allow them to be there for their children when they leave for school and when they get home.  Latchkey children suffer AND get into trouble.  Government must stop subsidizing this nonsense.  It is weakening these kids' future marriages which injures the prospects of the next generation of children to be able to live in peace and stability in their homes.

Furthermore, our kids are becoming oversocialized to their peers and undersocialized to those they need to be imitating more, their parents and other adults in their communities.  People identify with those people in their lives who are able to pour real one on one time and attention into their lives.  No teacher can hope to do that for a child who isn’t theirs and who they don’t see more than so many minutes a day in a classroom setting.  Even teacher-student mentoring programs can’t solve this problem as there is not real one on one time available through these programs.

Sorry, public education is not the panacea is has been built up to be for so many decades now.  If anything it seems to be less and less of a panacea, and more and more of an anathema.

Private education will find its way to those who need it and those who are willing to pay for it.  Then it will be appreciated, well targeted to a student’s true potential, and wisely and efficiently utilized.  As for now the kids really couldn’t care less about school, just ask them… 

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