-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.10/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.10/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 10</A> The Laissez Faire City Times March 8, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 10 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ----- The Coming Collapse of Public Education by Don Lobo Tiggre "It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy that our own market economy." —Albert Shanker, former president, American Federation of Teachers Albert Shanker is the same man who rocked the education establishment even more by saying, than, teachers’ unions would start representing the interests of the children when the children started paying union dues. It is interesting to see such undisguised comments originating from within the system, even as critics outside are becoming more and more aware of the roots of public education in 19th century Prussian production of cannon fodder, as last week’s Laissez Faire City Times article on "Education: The Fifth Estate" demonstrated. However, more interesting than the question of where public education came from is the question of where trends in education are leading it. The first trend to note is that the systems of public education are broken, and that the disintegration is getting rapidly worse. The inner cities are leading the trend, but even in rural America, where the metal detectors have yet to appear at school doors, there is a growing awareness among educators that a crisis is drawing nearer. The decay is so clear that even the educrats in Washington, alarmed by the sinking rankings of American students compared to students from other industrialized countries—as low as 28th, in some comparisons—have made serious-sounding noises about education reform. They are only noises of course, but striking nonetheless for what they imply about the situation, given that they are coming from the National Education Association and the U.S. Department of Education. The National Commission on Excellence in Education of the Department of Education issued the "Nation at Risk" report in 1983, basically documenting the slide in academic performance in American public schools and warning that things needed to improve or the nation’s future would be at great risk. In the sixteen years that have passed since "Nation at Risk" was issued, we’ve seen a lot of so-called reform efforts. Half of them seemed to be disguised calls for more money to conduct business as usual under new names, and the other half seemed to be calls to "lower the bar," under guise of fostering "creativity" and "self-esteem," so that results could look better, even as they continued to slide. But the educrats can’t hide the results of their pretenses forever. According to a 1993 U.S. Department of Education study, even after many of the least successful students have dropped out, fewer than 40 percent of high school seniors are reading at or above grade level. Indications are that the situation is much worse today. A con job by any other name smells just as bad. Whether it’s called "A Shift in Focus," the "Education Technology Initiative," "FACT" (Families, Agencies, and Communities Together), or "Goals 2000," the "reform" programs of the education establishment seem to have only one goal: to keep the decrepit system going so the special interests who profit from it can continue milking it. This refusal to embrace any serious change, combined with the failures of the alleged reforms to make any real improvements are changing the nature of education in America. Consider the Goals 2000 program, which current reports indicate will not have helped a single state to achieve its educational goals by the year 2000. Many states will not even achieve one quarter of their goals. Meanwhile, many parents are realizing that the program further federalizes education and leaves parents with even less control over what their children are taught. One result of this sort of dismal failure is the acceleration of another trend: privatization of education. Voting with Their Feet I don’t mean the "dream" of privatization, but the reality that is sweeping the country. The various state-based think tanks are leading valiant charges against the heavily defended "Seminary Ridge" of state-funded educational monopoly, pushing for tax credits in one state, or vouchers in another. For every advance made in one place, however, there’s a "Pickett’s Charge" in another where the pro-educational choice activists are all but crushed out of existence. This struggle is a symptom of the deep dissatisfaction with public education that is growing in American parents. It’s also a good distraction that will keep the education socialists chasing the wrong enemy until it’s too late. The real sea change is in the home schooling movement. While the various special interests and public policy advocates wrangle in the courts over the constitutionality of vouchers and other educational reforms, the people themselves are simply and quietly voting with their feet—or with their children’s feet. More and more students are disappearing from the public schools. Some are showing up in private schools—more of which are sprouting up across the country, many operating at a far lower cost per pupil than the public schools—but more are simply vanishing from the system. The number of such defections is not only growing, but accelerating with every passing year. Parents are tired of decades of lies and self-serving statistical smokescreens and are taking matters into their own hands. State legislators, many of whom (if not a majority of whom) receive significant campaign contributions from teachers’ unions, are getting cut out of the loop. So are the U.S. Congress and educrats by the buildingfuls in Washington and the fifty state capitols. The effect of this is like that upon a pool of insured if an insurance company has a fee structure that is unattractive to the healthy. As the healthy leave the pool, there remains a higher and higher concentration of unhealthy, who cost the company more to serve. The company then has to charge higher prices, encouraging more of the healthy to jump ship, making matters worse. The same effect is transpiring in education now, as the concerned and committed parents pull their children out of the increasingly militarized eco-religion brainwashing environment of our public schools. The more this happens, the higher the concentration of the children of apathetic or ignorant parents remains in the schools, and the cycle continues to spiral downward toward disintegration, faster and faster. This spiral toward self-destruction is very much like that which many of us predicted would result in the collapse of the former Soviet Union. If the Soviets could be prevented from sustaining their economically destructive policies with infusions of wealth acquired through conquest, their system had to collapse eventually, because it punished achievement and rewarded parasitism. And so it is with public education, except that instead of conquering and absorbing competitors through warfare, the education establishment is more likely to try using the coercive machineries of the state to regain wealth (students) from private schools and home schools. Regulations can be passed that impose such burdens and intrusions on home schoolers that they decide the effort isn’t worth it. Or more likely, home schoolers could be required to include ecologically "sensitive" curricula and other such nonsense in their teaching that would basically bring the public school system into the home. The establishment wouldn’t have to even force the issue directly. They could simply require standardized testing for home schooled children—after all, they’d have to be sure those anti-social parents were actually educating their children, wouldn’t they? If they did that and cooked the tests so that children who are not taught politically correct idiocies would perform poorly, truancy and neglect laws could then be used against the parents of those children. Only the Educated Are Free If the public education system can re-absorb the best and the brightest it is currently losing, it may be able to fight collapse off for a while longer. Conversely, if it can be prevented from doing so, its collapse will mark the end of one of the few remaining great pillars of socialism in the world. In the war between freedom and statism, the educational front has been heating up for years and it’s going to get hotter still. It could well become one of the few battles that determines the outcome of the war. This is in part because of the lesson the collapse of public education could teach. It is also in part because of the huge portion of taxes and other extortions that are extracted from the people in the name of education. But mostly, it is because the minds being instructed outside the education establishment are not being taught the slavish virtues of "good citizens" as they would be in the government indoctrination centers we call public schools. And that’s really the heart of the matter. As Epictetus wrote in his discourses almost 2,000 years ago, "Only the educated are free." This is why advocates of human rights and the freedom philosophy should keep a careful eye on the educational battlefront. They should lend their support to anything that helps break up the state’s near-monopoly on education, and oppose any attempt by the state to restrict, absorb, or regulate private alternatives. They should be especially watchful of any measure that would tighten the screws on home schoolers. Whether it be anything as seemingly innocuous as requiring home schooled students to take the same standardized tests that children in public schools take, or something as obviously invasive as requiring parents who would home educate to get teacher’s licenses—watch for it! Like the old Soviet empire, if we can keep public education stewing in its own juices without recourse to conquest, it will collapse of its own weight of internal contradictions. And the rumbling thunder of that collapse will echo around the world, like a trumpet call of freedom. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don Lobo Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 10, March 8, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. 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