Choose to educate
Mark Greathouse
(8/2022) Our government-run public school system is perfect. Obviously, that’s untrue. Its why parents must have choices as to how you educate their children. Public school? Private school? Homeschool? Online? Classroom? Curricula? What a wonderful nation to have so many education choices. The state requires that children be educated. The choice of how is up to parents.
Me? I went to public school, earned undergraduate and graduate college degrees, had a successful business career, and taught college for 8 years as an adjunct professor. I served on a local school board. My wife and I homeschooled our two sons. They went on to earn college degrees, have great jobs, and marry lovely ladies. Are you with me? We made a choice, and it was an outstanding one.
America’s frontier west had plenty of choices. My great great grandfather Nicholas Dunn immigrated from Ireland to Texas in 1850 at age 15 and was necessarily home-schooled, though his younger brothers and sisters were sent off to private school in San Antonio. One of Nick’s sons leveraged his home education to become a successful banker and rancher. A sign of frontier civilization was a town having its own school (see inset of well-preserved one-room schoolhouse in Nuecestown, Texas). Importantly, the school master or mistress was well-known in the community and had to hold the trust of parents. Frontier education included reading, writing, and math coupled with history. Even Latin might be taught. Education was enhanced by practical life experiences like mucking stalls, churning butter, tanning hides, and raising livestock that spawned nation building. Homeschool, private school, town school…the lands of the tumbleweeds spawned plenty of
educational choices.
As a coach, I listened stunned as young athletes took turns reading aloud from the PIAA Code of Conduct and mangled most multi-syllabic pronunciations. I was dismayed at students’ poorly-written answers to essay questions during my adjunct days. While on the school board, I was the only board member to fully review a curriculum filled with errors of fact. Astonishingly, no parents reviewed it. I recently asked young adults whether they knew of Socrates or Pascal or the history of ancient Rome? Had they read Faulkner or Twain? Blank stares. It doesn’t take a mental giant to figure we’ve got a problem with our government-run schools.
Governmental elimination of school choice would only serve to exacerbate the problems with America’s education today. Vested interests, such as text publishers, test developers, politicians, and teacher unions, are intent on protecting the status quo, on controlling what’s poured into malleable young minds. These interests oppose school alternatives as threats to their control.
There are dedicated capable teachers out there, but most have drunk the proverbial cultural leftist Kool-Aid. Regrettably, far too many of today’s teachers graduated from college programs that taught them to be acolytes genuflecting to the far-reaching tentacles of the leftist-leaning teacher unions and their bought-and-paid-for minions in academia and legislatures.
A positive outcome of the recent COVID pandemic was that parents got an eyeful into the one-size-fits-all leftist doctrinaire horror show that is brainwashing their children. The resultant pushback by parents was so strong that the National School Boards Association tried to have the Department of Justice set the FBI on protesting parents as domestic terrorists. What are they so afraid of? A national debate rages today over public schools marinating our children in controversial dystopian agendas like critical race theory, gender dysphoria, drag queen shows, cancel culture, and vague notions of equity and social justice as promoted by politically leftist teacher unions, politicians, and media. Parents are expressing concerns that essentials like reading, writing, and arithmetic and even history play second fiddle as children are robbed of their innocence. Student exceptionalism has been relegated to the dustbin of Common Core 2.0. Moreover,
the government-run school establishment maintains a long-held aura of being best qualified to teach our children. Teach? It’s far more like indoctrination. And who is teaching our children in government-run schools? According to US News & World Report a few years back, it was noted that virtually all state university systems have separated their teacher colleges from the main state campuses so as not to pull down academic ratings.
When asked why I sat on a school board yet homeschooled my children, I replied that I was a responsible citizen concerned with educational outcomes from an institution serving my community. As to homeschooling, I joined the then 3.4 percent (now closer to 8 percent) of homeschoolers seeking to afford their children academic achievement, broader practical expertise, wider socialization, religious freedom, flexible scheduling and teaching modes, safer environment, higher morality, absence of vested socio-political influences, proven tailored curricula, and cost effectiveness. Once asked whether I feared my sons would miss the socialization of public school, I responded that the questioner was mistaking socialism for socialization. Notably, the leading reason (91 percent) parents homeschool is to provide a better learning environment for their kids.
Government-run schools largely avoid any biblical moral and ethical messages owing to U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the early 1960s and steady removal of all vestiges of religious influence over the past century. Moral relativity rules, as evidenced by ever greater resources spent on classroom "crowd" management, bullying control, internal justice systems, and erstwhile facility security. No question, the cultural left has spent decades gradually appropriating our education system to achieve their utopian globalization dream. Or, as our president’s administration recently described it, "the liberal world order."
Why be concerned? Partly because our government is intent on eliminating choice and partly due to the obvious fatal flaws in a government-run education system that produces a high percentage of graduates unable to perform in the "real" world. Coupled with rising numbers of ethically amoral "graduates" steeped in lascivious behaviors, increased violence, drug and alcohol use, and generally poor work ethics, and the government-run school system seems to scream loudly for personal accountability and responsibility grounded in a strong set of moral principles not taught since Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v Schempp in the early 1960s. Most of today’s graduates cannot think or reason but can spout "facts" shoved into their pliant brains. There’s hope. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of supporting school choice by overturning a Maine law in Carson v Maykin.
Education is not one-size-fits-all. Parents have choices: fight back, choose education alternatives, or cave in. While many are locked into needing dual incomes to survive, taking the responsibility to have a child obligates the parents to make the best, even sacrificial, education choices for their children. Far too many don’t. Parents must heed the insidious tentacles of leftist agendas reaching from liberal urban centers into regions yet clinging to traditional educational values. Despite assurances otherwise, we are dealing with a very real threat posed by cultural Marxism. Our schools are far-less-safe intellectually and physically.
In sum, our nation’s education system with all its delivery options is critically important for sustaining the excellent quality of life and freedoms for which the United States has become known. When the educational system fails us morally and academically, we all lose. Choice is absolutely essential to a socially and economically vibrant nation. We must head off liberal cultural creep. Choice equals freedom. Parents must make the right choices. Just sayin’.
Read past edition of the Tumbleweeds
Read other articles by Mark Greathouse
