Gary North

Sept. 5, 2009

You may remember My Pet Goat. President Bush read this book to a class of third graders on September 11, 2001. Then he was told about the attack on the first tower. He kept on reading the book to the class.

Obama will deliver one speech for children ages 5 to 18. It must communicate effectively -- even inspirationally -- to kindergarten students and legal adults taking Advanced Placement, college-level classes.

Can you imagine Karl Rove telling Bush to read My Pet Goat to a combined class of kindergarteners and calculus students? They called Rove "Bush's brain." What should we call the dimwit who dreamed up this scheme?

I have this vision of how the speech will begin.

Hello, boys and girls. My name is President Obama. That is because I am the President of the United States. Do you know what the President does? He gives speeches like this one. He controls the use of nuclear weapons. He tries to look important, when the whole world knows that Nancy Pelosi is running the show, which is why I have to give a speech to Congress tomorrow night. She told me I needed to get front-and-center behind her health insurance bill.

Today, I am going to talk to about a government program called public education. It costs a trillion dollars a year. Do you know what a trillion dollars is, boys and girls? I mean, what a trillion dollars are? That is the size of my administration's budget deficit every seven months. But this will be down to only $900 billion next year and every year thereafter until 2019. We are fighting waste in Washington.

And so on, for 20 minutes.

Bush was widely criticized for not responding to a national crisis rather than continuing to read My Pet Goat. But nobody asked this: "What was the President of the United States doing in a third grade classroom reading a book to kids?"

It was a photo op to show that the President was behind tax-funded education. And why not? The public school system is the central institution in every modern nation by which the government secures control over the voters, beginning at age 5 or 6. More than any other institution, the public schools set the terms of discourse on politics, beginning with this: "Tax-funded education is the right of every child. Anyone who says otherwise is a threat to the social order."

Conservatives are upset about having the President speak to millions of students. Isn't this partisan politics? Of course. But aren't the schools supposed to be bipartisan? They are bipartisan. They secure the population for at least 12 years for a bipartisan agenda, namely, the expansion of state control. Both parties favor this.

In 1963, a conservative theologian, R. J. Rushdoony, and a liberal church historian, Sidney E. Mead, had books published in which they identified the public school system as America's only established church. Rushdoony opposed the schools; Mead favored them. Rushdoony's book was titled The Messianic Character of American Education. Mead's was titled The Lively Experiment.

The problem is not the fact that Obama wants to position himself as a defender of America's schools. That goes without saying. The problem is that the schools are political indoctrination centers. That has been their purpose ever since the 1830's, when Massachusetts stopped funding the Congregational churches and set up tax-funded schools.

He will speak on the need for education, meaning more tax-funded schools. That sounds innocuous enough. Well, it isn't. Better that he should speak on health care. That would enrage conservatives. They would see through this charade. What threatens our freedom is the charade that tax-funded education isn't political to the core.

The White House consented to allow parents to see his speech in advance only after there was a lot of criticism from conservatives. The White House will post it on September 7, Labor Day, when almost no one will read it. We are assured that this speech will have nothing to do with his address to Congress on his health care program in a special session the next day. I'm sure it won't.

Principals have been sent lesson plans by the Department of Education. Read them here: http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/academic/bts.html

The original plan for PreK-6th grade included a classroom response: write a letter to yourself on what you can do to help President Obama. When that got a lot of negative attention, it was changed. "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals." The revised version is here. On the re-write, click here. The new version recommends getting 6-year-olds to write an essay. What adviser thought up this assignment? I wonder how realistic his other advisers are?

For grades 7-12, here is one of the assignments. Write down questions in advance.

Why does President Obama want to speak with us today?
How will he inspire us?
How will he challenge us?
What might he say?
Do you remember any other historic moments when the president spoke to the nation?
What was the impact?

Inspirational! Read more here.

No one has cleared this with parents. The costly resources of time and equipment will be funded by local taxpayers, of course.

If you think I am making this up, click here.

There are still parents who think tax-funded education is neutral -- morally, technically, and politically.

They think that tax-funding in no way shapes the curriculum and programs at the local schools.

They believe that their local schools are different from all the others, despite the fact that the textbooks are the same nationally.

They believe that they can safely send their children into the system, because it in no way indoctrinates children.

They think that a system where career advancement is by tenure -- time on the job -- is productive.

They are unaware that teacher union protection makes it too expensive for a principal to fire an incompetent teacher.

They need to visit John Taylor Gatto's site. They need to read his book -- free: The Underground History of American Education. Gatto was Teacher of the Year three times in New York City and once in New York state. Then he figured out that he had been a pawn in a larger agenda. He quit. He wrote his reasons in Harper's in 2003. Read the article here. Here is his conclusion:

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

If you want a self-directed, self-taught home school curriculum, K-12, for $200 per family (once), go here: www.RobinsonCurriculum.com.

If you want a self-taught YouTube-based math curriculum for free, kindergarten through calculus, go here: www.KhanAcademy.org.

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