Public schools do more than just dumb down our kids

万得福

It is the nature of governments that there exists a silent state of hostility between the government and the people. Governments rule by deception and force. The goal of government is to coerce the people into a regimented, docile and obedient mass under a propaganda system based on altruism and self-sacrifice.
Governments are not benevolent. Instead, they are autocratic and all autocratic systems seek to consume the wealth and resources of the producers of wealth while carrying on perpetual diversions.
Governments are created and organized to monopolize power and wealth. If we consider the growth of government and coercion of the people through a mass of complicated laws and regulations, we can only conclude that the nature of government is force. This means not only force upon our physical mobility, but more importantly force upon our mental processes. We are disciplined to "political correctness" and the giving over of our minds to a self-serving system.
Government propaganda effectively destroys our capacity to see our master/slave relationship to government. Government coercion and force has a very high success rate as long as it is invisible to the great majority of people. Governments justify plunder and theft with self-serving laws. The public is trained to obey all laws without question. They cannot discern the illegality and bad intent of the laws.
This training begins at a very early age. The people are taught very young to pledge fealty to the state through the public (non)education indoctrination system. Children are taught they must not question authority. Zero tolerance policies squelch free speech and the exchange of ideas. Truths and absolutes are rejected in favor of tolerance, situational ethics and consensus. Immoralities are presented as normal lifestyles. Feelings are elevated above logic.
In his book, Government Schools Are Bad For Your Kids, James Ostrowski explains how government schools came about. He shows that public schools have always been about indoctrination above education. They began with Martin Luther in 1524, who urged German princes to "compel the people to send their children to school" because "we are warring with the devil."
Ostrowski quotes historian Murray Rothbard:
"The Reformers advocated compulsory education for all as a means of inculcating the entire population with their particular religious views..."
Later, John Calvin endorsed compulsory schooling. Like Luther, Calvin did so to spread his religious doctrine by government force.
Early in the 19th century the militaristic and authoritarian Prussians pioneered compulsory education in Europe. Following its defeat at the hands of Napoleon, the Prussian nation began to reorganize itself and prepare for future wars. Under King Frederick William III, the absolute state was made stronger and the nation’s minister, von Stein, began abolishing the semi-religious private schools and placed education under the minister of the Interior. Then the ministry set up a system for certification of all teachers and created a graduation exam.
Again quoting Rothbard, Ostrowski writes:
"It is also interesting that it was this reorganized system that first began to promote the new teaching philosophy of Pestalozzi, who was one of the early proponents of ‘progressive education.’ Hand in hand with the compulsory school system went a revival and great extension of the army, and in particular the institution of universal compulsory military service."
Quoting professor Richard M. Ebeling, Ostrowski writes:
"Modern universal compulsory education has its origin in the 19th century Prussian idea that it is the duty and responsibility of the state to indoctrinate each new generation of children into being good, obedient subjects who will be loyal and subservient to political authority and to the legitimacy of the political order. Young minds are to be filled with a certain set of ideas that reflect the vision of the official state educators concerning ‘proper behavior’ and ‘good citizenship.’"
The American education system began its turn toward mass indoctrination in 1946 following America’s joining with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which set in motion the deliberate destabilization of American society through the rejection of absolute morals and values, Judeo-Christian tradition and Roman law, writes Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in her book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. From that point on, UNESCO dictated policy to the U.S. government regarding education.
At the time of the legislation joining the U.S. to UNESCO, President Harry Truman remarked, "Education must establish the moral unity of mankind." Truman’s words were echoed by a Canadian psychiatrist named Brock Chisholm — an influential (to the United Nations) communist — who presented a paper to the UN World Health Organization (WHO) titled "The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress." In it Chisholm wrote, "The reinterpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong... these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy."
Chisholm went on to recommend that teachers around the world be trained in "no right/no wrong" psychotherapy techniques that have since made their way into the teacher training curriculum.
American public education has become much less than just a sad joke. Its downward slide accelerated with the passage of "No Child Left Behind" under George Bush the Lesser, and then further with the adoption of Common Core. None are left behind because none are allowed to get ahead. The intelligent children are left languishing and fending for themselves while extra resources are devoted to those unable to keep up.
A few years ago I inquired of a young relative of mine what he had been studying in his seventh grade U.S. history class. Well, we spent about 20 minutes on World War II, then several class periods on how the U.S. Olympic Hockey Team beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics, was the reply.
In class they watched Miracle, the 2004 movie about the team and its victory.
How backward is that? Twenty minutes spent learning about a six-year war spawned from the feckless, irresponsible and dastardly policies of the elected and ruling classes that resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 62 million and 79 million people worldwide; but several class periods on a three-hour hockey game that gave Americans a temporarily thrilling victory over a Cold War foe at the tail end of four moribund years of Jimmy Carterism.
Even the seventh grader was perplexed by his teacher’s decision.
Glossed over in his class was more than 230 years of American history. And while U.S. history is being glossed over, it is geared toward ensuring "schoolchildren believe that America has been a nation of bigots, racists, greedy collusive poverty creating capitalists, war mongering imperialists, anti-immigrant, segregating, discriminating, and disenfranchising racists and farmers; and that kids should be an anti-war peace loving through diplomacy, diversity and immigration seeking, tolerant through racial identity politicking citizens of big government spending through redistribution of wealth and regulation providing Medicare, minimum wage, civil rights and affirmative action powered by the auspices of globalization and the United Nations," according to teacher and author Dean Kalahar, citing documents issued by the Florida Department of Education.
In public schools, children are taught the great explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries — if they’re taught anything about them at all — were genocidal maniacs responsible for the destruction whole races. U.S. Founding Fathers are presented as evil, slavery-loving, women-hating bigots. Actual freedom-stealing racist tyrants like Che Guevara are presented as role models.
The evils and murders of totalitarian regimes have been whitewashed as necessary for the safety and continuation of the state — hence the acceptance of the very uncivil war; the American love affair with the war criminals Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman; and the dismissal of the deaths by violence, disease and starvation of 850,000 people, many of them noncombatants. Americans today support the overthrow of totalitarians in every nation but their own.
Today’s school children are taught that we needed the Constitution because the nation was in chaos, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved us from the Great Depression and Theodore Roosevelt saved us from the "robber barons."
And in all teaching, the state is presented as right and just, and able to accomplish this despite a Constitution that is outdated, inadequate and unjust.
The result of this is that once an individual goes through the public school system he is a mature manifestation of the system and practically insulated from reality and original inquiry. But beyond that indoctrination, he’s simply much dumber than when he started.
A test developed for NASA to determine the creativity of its engineers and scientists was administered to children aged 4 and 5 in the 1990s. The tests showed that 98 percent of the children were creative geniuses. Scientists then administered this same test to the same children every five years. What they learned was that by age 10, just 30 percent of the children were still geniuses. By age 15 the number had dropped to 12 percent. When administer to them as adults aged 25 and up, fewer than 2 percent were still creative geniuses.
This demonstrates the power the indoctrination and subsequent propaganda from the corporate mainstream media has over the human mind.
With this deterioration of cognitive abilities, chances are great that the person will live his life a fiction. Cognitive dissonance — the psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously — sets in, rendering people with inability to consider any truth other than the "truth" he or she has been programed with.
From there the only acceptable social and moral thing to do is to accept authority, conform to authority and above all, never question authority, let alone its morality and its modus operandi.
The more generations that pass without open conflict with authority, the more the public mind conforms and the more the people and the government become one. Any "deviant" or "divergent" who questions authority is sure to encounter a hostile response from his friends and neighbors. He has defiled the Holy place.
Human liberty can only exist or be restored with an accurate perception of reality. Mind distorting fictions of government must be exposed. Our children and our grandchildren must be removed from these public indoctrination centers and be placed in private schools or home schooled. To do otherwise is to keep us dependent on an ivory tower mysticism based on lies and the duplicity of politicians and bureaucrats.

Yours for the truth,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter™