School choice is a necessity

Opinion

School ended last month, and this month for my hot take, I say school needs to end permanently. No. I’m just kidding (kind of). Public schools (which are really government schools) are seriously bad news though, and we need to talk about it.

A quality education is a necessity for a functioning society. A public enlightened can share ideas and uphold the virtues of freedom, but if you’ve been alive these past few years you’ve surely noticed that it seems as though almost nobody is enlightened and almost everybody is ready to give up their freedoms. Safe to say, government schools are not doing what they’re supposed to. And let’s not think of this as a left vs right thing because the reality is both sides would greatly benefit from education freedom.

Early History of American Education

Our founding fathers were big believers in an educated public. They wrote extensively on the subject. In a letter to James Warren on February 12, 1779, Samuel Adams wrote, “If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security.”

So, right away we can understand that our founders were looking for ways to keep the people from becoming oppressed, and believed they needed the people to possess virtue and knowledge. And while I think people generally try to be good, the reality is, many are not knowledgeable about the things that keep them safe from tyranny, and we see this all the time when we look to the policies that people vote for and uphold as being beneficial for the public. A lack of understanding is how people start believing their good intentions are also good deeds.

In the 1788 book, On the Education of Youth in America, Noah Webster states, “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”

There is a key phrase that I want to point out in this text, and that is, “systems of education.” The plural of “systems” is important because it alludes to an understanding that we need more than one kind of education system for the public. Something that Americans were deprived of for a time, but more on that later.

A 1791 quote by founder James Wilson goes, “It is the duty of parents to maintain their children decently, and according to their circumstances; to protect them according to the dictates of prudence; and to educate them according to the suggestions of a judicious and zealous regard for their usefulness, their respectability and happiness.”

In other words, parents were meant to have an active roll in their children’s education to see their children grow up and flourish. However, much like the dearth of multiple educational systems, this would eventually phase out of American culture, and not for the better.

Our founders were big believers in a well-educated public, believing in meritocracy over aristocracy, because people who are well-educated and talented are people who will fight for freedom for all. They have a better understanding of economics, law, human behavior, and so much more. People who aren’t well-educated, however, are more likely to be fooled and tricked out of their money and liberties. One very basic modern example would be those horrible looking spam emails that are clearly fake and are meant to be obviously fake. Why? Because scammers want to trick those that are most easily fooled as they are more likely to complete all the steps of the scam. People who can recognize obvious spelling errors among other problems aren’t going to go through with the scam, saving the scammer time when dealing with people.

Throughout American history, homeschooling was the norm. Only the wealthy really went to classrooms. In fact, before America ever became an independent nation and even 61 years after we declared independence, people, for the most part, didn’t go into classrooms to be educated. That only started happening less than 200 years ago in 1837 when the “common school” movement took hold. This was when Horace Mann became the Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts. He quickly began reforming the state’s schooling, advocating for publicly funded “common schools,” which would become the basis for the modern-day public school.

Even still, formal schooling was not mandatory in Massachusetts until 1852—the first state to make it law. Massachusetts would be joined in this mandate by the state of New York a year later, and the final state to create compulsory education laws would be Mississippi in 1918. It should be noted that parents did still have a choice as to what kind of school they sent their children to. Homeschooling, public, private, or even religious schools were fair game.

In 1857 the National Education Association (NEA) would be developed. This organization was originally meant for men up until 1866, and today upholds a lot of the wokeness that is being taught in schools. They advocate for racial and social justice and creating “safe and just” schools in a time of COVID and “long after.”

Ten years later, in 1867, President Andrew Johnson created the first Department of Education—a predecessor to the Cabinet-level agency that emerged in 1979. Right away this department faced concerns of having too much power over local schools and was scaled back to the much smaller Office of Education just after one year. The original purpose of this agency was to collect information on individual schools that would help states establish their own effective public-school systems.

American Education in the 1900s

By 1900, 78 percent of all American children between the ages of 5 and 17 were enrolled in schools, but only 11 percent were enrolled in high school and even fewer graduated.  

The school year had been built around what was convenient for the elites. School originally went year-round until the 1850s when rich urbanites demanded a summer recess during the hot months so they could go on vacation with their kids to their country homes. By the 1900s, school really didn’t take up any time at all. It would only last about 150 days a year and only ever took up a few hours a day as kids were still needed to perform manual labor in most scenarios. However, this is also when our society began to change. We went from a mostly rural agricultural society until the industrial revolution where many began feeling like kids were not prepared for the future jobs that we would need filled in factories. As Hannah Cox from Based Politics explained, “We needed a complacent, subservient population that would be trained to leave the home, go into factories five days a week, eight hours a day, perform mind-numbingly monotonous tasks and do exactly what it was told by supervisors without thinking to question its existence.”

This claim has been backed up by many millionaires and billionaires and was explained in 2019 by American finance author and investor Robert Kiyosaki in the Speech that Broke the Internet.

Schools today are structured with work-tight schedules and an expectance to conform and sit in silence five days a week for eight hours (like little factory workers), which is abnormal child behavior. This structure is also used as free childcare so more people can go out and get a job while the government indoctrinates your kids to become slaves to big businesses that pay to keep certain politicians in power. As people became more used to government schooling, other alternatives became abnormal—a real Overton Window.

By the 1970s, however, parents started to wake up to the realization that the government has no business raising their kids and filling them with information meant to keep them from excelling in life. The concept of charter schools emerged in 1974, though with controversy that still lingers today. In 1977, educational theorist John Holt realized the devastating reality Kiyosaki explains in his speech and started the Growing Without Schooling newsletter which would go on to inspire the first modern American homeschoolers.

American Education in the 2020s

According to data from the CDC, kids today are more depressed and anxious. Studies suggest that IQs are also going down and government schools are thought to be one factor for these trends. If one positive came from the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the widescale exposure of government school corruption. Teachers unions showed that they work for the Democratic party, not our children. News sources like Project Veritas and accounts like Libs of TikTok have exposed what many teachers are doing and saying to their students in the privacy of their classroom. Parents can now be classified as domestic terrorists if they speak out at schoolboard meetings for things such as finding books with pornographic images in the school library. And even more heartbreaking, this brainwashing of children at government schools has led to a dramatic increase in confused kids transitioning despite not being transgender, kids refusing to speak to their parents, upholding communist and socialist ideologies, and one in five college students believe using violence is okay to keep someone from speaking if they hold a different viewpoint. Due to all of this, more and more people are turning to alternative forms of education, though mothers like talk show host Quisha King warn to be wary of private schools as they can be just as bad as government schools.

Arguments Against Leaving Government Schools

Teachers unions try to argue against school choice saying it would endanger teachers and students alike. This is nonsense. This would benefit students by putting them in an environment that fits more to their needs of learning. This would also help teachers as research suggests that school choice competition would lead to them having better wages and would open teachers up to having more options for jobs as more teachers are receiving offers from families to teach learning pods and charter schools. Teachers unions try to trick good teachers into believing they hold those teacher’s best interest at heart. The reality is good teachers will always hold their own best interest at heart, not some union with a clear political agenda.

Another argument is that homeschooling and other forms of schooling outside of government schooling is too experimental. However, if you actually read through this article and understood it, you already know that government schools were the experiment, and they failed miserably.

The last argument I’ve heard is that not all students can leave public schools so this would only benefit those that can, which is not equitable. To this, I say, it shouldn’t have to be. The reality is if you want to hold some students back for the sake of equitability, you don’t actually have an interest in your community/state/country thriving. If someone has an opportunity to do better for themselves, you should want them to take that opportunity. To not want that for someone comes off as legitimately selfish and you need to get your priorities in check because the reality is that a government in control of our children’s education is a government in control of our future.