By JOHN G. BOULET, MD
Readers here at The Wanderer assuredly are aware of the myriad controversies centered on public schools over the past half-century or more, many of which are ongoing battles fought through our school boards and dishonest court systems. To name a few:
The battles over prayer beginning 60 plus years ago: There are controversies to this day regarding whether it is permissible even for voluntary prayer on school grounds or at athletic events. There are battles over whether voluntary student organizations centered on prayer and Bible study are even allowed to recruit student members, or to host events on school grounds.
Free speech: Students have been suspended or expelled from schools based upon personal opinions expressed on personal social media posts.
Drag queen story hours: That there should even be such a thing as drag queen story hours for kindergarteners shows how far our society has descended. That there are sponsors and defenders of these “story hours” occurring in the setting of public schools is itself proof of depravity among so-called adults running most of our public schools around the country.
The recent tempests roiling Virginia — and in many other communities around the U.S. — regarding sexually explicit books being used; and regarding school policy on trans-gender issues — highlight the intersection of parental concerns with radical school boards.
The current controversy in Florida over Gov. DeSantis banning sex education in public school for kindergarten through third grade has garnered the outrage of the Left, whose battle cry is “don’t say gay!” — as though indoctrinating early elementary students into the LGBTQ agenda is a moral necessity that Gov. DeSantis is evilly blocking.
Controversies all over the U.S. regarding Critical Race Theory: Parents have been personally targeted and threatened by other parents; and by law enforcement, including the Federal Department of Justice, as “domestic terrorists.”
Controversies over Common Core Curricula, which seek to impose nationwide dictates on what children are taught. That there should even be a federal level of control on schools nationwide is of course abhorrent to this writer.
The fights and battles over content of textbooks have been too numerous to recount here.
Including how history is taught, quite often casting aspersions on the Founding Fathers, and refusing to include more than a few paragraphs about this country’s real history, and focusing instead on “women’s issues” and “gender issues” and race issues as being the legitimate focus of the lion’s share of history books — serving to indoctrinate young minds with leftist ideology.
There are now even controversies over teaching basic math and science, with math in California being deemed “racist” if certain minority groups tend to underperform their majority-race peers. Mind you, it is math itself that is being called out as being “racist” — and no attention paid to the circumstances in which disadvantaged students are being raised.
There are movements to eliminate standardized testing altogether, and to do away even with grading students’ work at all. That is how far our nation’s public school elites have brought our country.
There are so many “privacy” rules and laws that prohibit parents from knowing about their children getting birth control and referrals for abortions, and counseling for gender dysphoria — that it is impossible to enumerate them all here.
My answer to all controversies in public schools is this: Abolish Public Schools!
The GI bill after WWII established precedent for allowing school monies to follow the student even into religious-founded colleges. Litigation over the ensuing decades has established the precedent that tax monies can be used for selected purposes to support education of non-public school students.
My argument is to go further than the piddling crumbs toward true freedom in education that the Left has been forced to toss to conservatives. It is to abolish all public schools — period, full stop.
It is time to stand up for the rights and prerogatives of parents to have their children educated the way the parents decide, not how the leftist Marxist local school boards decide.
This is, after all, a battle between the all-encompassing, ever-expanding government and the families of America. Catholic teaching on the matter of who the primary educators of children should be — pick up the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and read through sections 2201-02; 2207; 2210-11; 2221-23; 2229; 2372; and others.
Remember that in some countries, such as Germany, there is no legal right of parents to home school. Parents have been arrested and prosecuted for the crime of daring to try to keep their own children out of the mouth of the Leviathan State. This sort of dictatorial tyranny of the state against parents is a threat at all times in America, too.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, to which my family belonged when our kids were being home-schooled, has not only documented the many petty tyrannies inflicted upon home-schooling parents all over this nation, but has gone to court on more than one occasion to defend home-schooling parents — with the outcomes determined by our often corrupt court system, after protracted and expensive legal battles against local school authorities with near-unlimited resources.
Mandatory school attendance laws around the U.S. dictate that parents must, under penalty of law, surrender their children as young as 5 years old to the Leviathan school system. There are always carefully crafted exceptions for private schools and home schooling; but always under the thumb of tyrannical school boards, who are then free to persecute non-public school attendees with petty bureaucratic rules, and by using local child abuse statutes to invade people’s homes, and to involve local child abuse authorities to remove children from homes for the alleged crime of wanting to educate your own children.
Give the tax monies to parents! It’s our tax money, for one thing. But more important, these are our children, and not the government’s!
I would go so far as to say: If you want your kids to attend “Atheist Academy Prep,” then go for it — here is the $15,000, tax-free, that our ex-public school system claimed to spend educating your children, it is now yours to spend as you see fit! You want your children at the local Madrassa, go for it! You want your child at Trade School at age 13 or 14, as often happens in Germany, then go for it; the U.S. could use more skilled tradesmen.
But I get to send my kids to the Catholic school of my choice, with the money that the public schools previously were wasting on liberal leftist indoctrination camps for kindergarteners.
The threat to freedom posed by the take-over of our public schools these last 60 years by radical leftists can’t be overstated. It really is almost too late to stop the runaway freight train that “educators” have been rolling down the tracks these last 60 years. The real prize is our children; and the fate of what is left of our civilization. Paying parents tax-free cash that has been spent on public schools all these years will also have a magnificent side effect: people will be incentivized to have more children; and for mothers to stay at home to make a home.
Imagine: You have five children?
And your school district claims to be spending $15,000 per pupil? You now have a tax-free check of $75,000 per year to use as you, the parents, see fit: private schools, charter schools, religious schools, and – yes — home schools, complete with voluntary school associations and tutors if that is what you want.
Of course, added funds could be and should be provided for special-needs children — quite often these children require twice the funds that non-special-needs children require for a good education. Still, there would be so much money left over when we are no longer paying the 50 percent that schools now spend on bureaucracy, that everyone will be getting big fat checks — tax-free — for the freedom to educate our own children.
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