by Tammy Drennan

Tighten your seatbelts, everyone. The federal government is brewing another experiment that will utilize public schools as laboratories and students as lab rats. And they’re backing it with 2.35 billion dollars.

Here’s the deal. Key (politically influential) people believe students still don’t read as well as they should. Even though the government has been in charge of teaching reading for 160 years, these people still feel it’s the best vehicle to improve reading scores in the United States. In spite of over a century and a half of government education flops, legislators and the president think they’ve finally found the solution.

Jamie P. Fasteau, vice president for federal advocacy for the Alliance for Excellent Education, thinks the proposed legislation is great, because, he says, “We had long known how inextricably linked literacy is to high school success.”

Please excuse my incredulity and the resulting sarcasm, but I must say that our insights just get deeper every generation: We now know that high school success is linked to literacy. Whatever will we discover next?

Here’s a discovery that would really rock our country: Government involvement in education is linked to intellectual mediocrity, moral and cultural decay, destruction of community, and loss of liberty.

Quite a few million families have already made this discovery and taken corrective action – they’ve chosen independent forms of education. Millions more are on the edge of making the discovery; they just need a gentle nudge to fully awaken them.

But the majority languish in the sort of public education Never Land that produces statements so patently absurd that they’d be funny, if only the people who made them didn’t have so much influence over real children.

The solution to this state of affairs is to expand and strengthen the foundation of freedom by refusing to be educated by and refusing to allow our children to be educated by the government.

The solution is to stop further empowering the state by throwing our energies into vouchers and other schemes that increase government’s control over children.

The solution is to take all that passion and money (are you listening, Bill Gates?) and instead of trying to manipulate the public school system, create government-free education choices for the neediest – choices that help families up and out of the cycle of despair inflicted on them in large part by schools that fail to prepare children in any way for a life of significance and liberty.

The solution is to inspire parents, to help them see what education could be, what their children’s futures could hold, to light fires of indignation over what the state and its partners have inflicted on us all.

The solutions will be as various as human beings. I’m not talking about creating a new school bureaucracy, even if it is free of government meddling. Our whole history as a country proves that variety is the life of growth and improvement. Until the mass government takeover of education in the 19th century, we were a nation that reveled in diversity. It wasn’t always neat and it certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was a system inclined to progress. And we were moving forward — in every way — until our government found a dozen ways to wrestle our progress from us and turn it into a campaign to make everyone the same, the chief means being public schooling.

Mao loved conformity, Stalin loved conformity, Hitler loved conformity. Does this not teach us something? Conformity requires control – lots of it. If we hope to see a free and prosperous and happy future, we will have to give up control and depend on persuasion and example. It will be a hard principle to embrace, even without government in the picture. Control is easier and more satisfying. Power is addictive.

But the manipulation and coercion of others has never resulted in anything good. It never will. It doesn’t work in the most basic relationships. It doesn’t work at the governmental level, and it doesn’t work in education. It results in the opposite of everything it purports to accomplish. When we accept this obvious truth, we’ll be able to move forward.

Respect, persuasion, creativity, innovation, invitation – these are the ways to revolutionize education. Offer substance, model excellence, lift others up to become your peers, not your beneficiaries.

Let’s shed the numbness of mind so long imposed on us through government-delivered education, so we can have meaningful conversations and create meaningful options.

by Tammy Drennan 

There’s no end to what the powers that be can make into a major issue. Now they’re arguing over whether school children should be taught to write in cursive or if printing is good enough.

After all, one side argues, the only thing people write by hand anymore is personal stuff, like shopping lists (although my house sports five computers, we generate hundreds of pages of handwritten stuff each year).

Just a minute, the other side argues, cursive develops muscle control and hand-eye coordination (they could replace it with special non-cursive hand-eye exercises). Besides, they add, children could end up one day in some remote area without computers (maybe even their own backyards where they might see a butterfly and feel suddenly inspired to pen a poem).

At any rate, the important thing to understand here is that whoever wields the most political clout will win. Different views may win in different states or school districts, and one day, if we keep careening in the direction we’re going, we’ll have federal “standards” and everyone will develop the skill or not based on what Uncle Sam dictates.

If we think that the arguments aren’t even more vehement about other subjects, we kid ourselves. Let’s work harder yet to achieve full independence and rid ourselves of all this nonsense.

For over 150 years, America thrived without the state telling people how to write, yet clearly it was not a problem. The signers of the Declaration of Independence came from all manner of backgrounds. Some had a lot of formal schooling, some had virtually none. Yet they signed — then they wrote home about it, often eloquently — utilizing more than 140 characters — because they could, both mechanically and intellectually. Today’s students, by many accounts, lack both the mechanical and the intellectual skills to express their thoughts. Of course, all too often they lack thoughts worth writing, so maybe they don’t need the skills after all. Maybe schools could just teach how to twitter better.

The tragedy of all this is that there is strong evidence that children want to learn more, stretch their brains and skills, come to grips with the meaning of life on a deeper level. Even at the level of handwriting (200,000 entries in a penmanship contest), there’s evidence that children long for the substance state schools cannot offer for the very reason that they are state schools and unavoidably political.

In a world in which education is a free act of the people, instead of a state action against them, people will gravitate toward what benefits them in the lives they choose for themselves and what enables them to interact effectively with one another. Common knowledge and skills have always been common because people are naturally social creatures — they need and want each other and they do what they need to do to enrich their desires and to meet their needs. No government created this state of affairs, but like the proverbial Johnny-come-lately, almost every government has rushed in to try to take it over then take credit for literacy and human competence.

Enough is enough. Let’s leave them in the whirlwind of their own self-importance and just walk away. Let’s join relatives and friends and neighbors and fellow church members to create better options. Let’s take back our humanity.

by Tammy Drennan

[Okay, there’s a ton of stuff out there about this speech, and I wanted to get your attention.*]

The big speech is today – September 8, 2009. Of course, it’s already on the web, so we all know what the president will say.

And what does he say?

It’s the type of rah-rah speech you’d expect. There are a few good, inspirational lines. There are the obligatory three examples of real people who did it that marks almost all political speeches today. There’s the “my story” part, too.

It’s hard to overlook the fact that the speech seems to have been written mostly for disadvantaged children, kids who face tough neighborhoods, low income families, absent fathers.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but you do have to wonder if these children are weary of hearing about how hard life is and how hard they need to work in the face of their trials. Mr. Obama’s mother, he tells us, dragged him up at 4:30 every school morning (for a time) to give him extra tutoring, but did she preface each session with a speech about how tough his life was and how he could overcome his disadvantages? This may be good and necessary for older students to hear, but it could be discouraging for younger children, who may wish that the grown-ups would just start being grown-ups (and I don’t mean only their parents).

Which brings is to another popular mantra in education circles today — the call on children to prepare themselves to save the world we’re messing up. We can’t even seem to manage to prepare them adequately, because we need them to do that, too.

The furor over the president’s speech comes, I think, mostly of people growing in their distrust of him – or maybe suspecting he’s more talk than feeling, that he doesn’t really connect with the common man. I’m not going to address that here – just make the observation.

I’m sure we could pick apart many past speeches by presidents to school children and find as much fault as we can with this one.

Of greater influence than the speech will be what teachers do with it, and that will, too often, be influenced by their own ideology. Not much can be done about that. It’s the chance parents take when they commit their children’s education to the state. We all have a worldview (though for most it’s not a consciously chosen one but one we picked up here and there along the way — with no small amount absorbed from our schooling), and it’s hard to prevent it from surfacing when we interact with others.

Normally, such a speech would have passed way under the radar of most people, parents included. A few kids might have been inspired, most would have forgotten the speech within minutes of hearing it or would not have paid attention in the first place. Teachers would have made some related comments afterward then returned to the lessons of the day. And the speech would have slipped into history as one more boring school lecture.

But the storm has turned it into something that will be examined, dissected, analyzed, criticized, praised, and used one way or another in schools, homes, the media, workplaces and on the streets.

Maybe that’s not so bad. It’s not the greatest way to get more people involved in the conversation about education, but it’s better than nothing.

* After a long soliloquy about how “you can do it, try harder, keep focused,” the president inserted this contribution to America’s future:

“And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.”

[Related commentary: President to Children: Wash Your Hands]

President Obama to Address School Children, Bill Gates to Follow 
  
President Obama will address public school children in a 15-20 minute speech on September 8, 2009 at noon (EST) from the White House via the White House web site and C-Span. His administration (Department of Education) has developed companion lesson plans for teachers to use to prepare for and help children evaluate the speech.1
 
The lesson plans are carefully couched in the language of “teachers could, teachers can” do this or that. Among the things teachers might want to do with their students:
 
• Before the speech, read about presidents’ lives, including President Obama
• Discuss what the president might say
• Discuss what the president did say and what he is asking of students and others
• Create poems, essays, songs and art based on the president’s speech (implied)
• Set personal goals and develop ways to track them
 
Almost needless to say, there is a fair amount of outrage over this event. Individuals and groups are questioning the propriety of a president telecasting himself into classrooms full of confined children.
 
But this is not the first time a president has addressed school children about the challenges they face, and while it is up to individual schools districts whether or not they’ll show the speech (as it has been in the past), and while parents can always keep their children home that day, it nevertheless does bring up issues of concern about the federal government’s increasing involvement in education, something that portends frightening consequences.
 
Bonus Feature: The Get Schooled Initiative
 
More disturbing may be what follows the president’s speech on September 8.
 
Later in the evening, will be the kick-off of a five-year program — The Get Schooled Initiative — sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in partnership with business leaders, policymakers, entertainers and others:
 
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Viacom Inc. will join other corporations and nonprofit organizations, as well as education thought leaders, policymakers and concerned entertainment industry professionals at the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood to formally launch the Get Schooled initiative and engage students, families and community members in efforts to reform the nation’s public schools and provide American youth with a world-class education.”2
 
The opening ceremonies will feature, among others, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller, New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein, and Los Angeles area high-school athletic director Stephen Minix.3
 
Also premiering will be a documentary called Get Schooled You Have the Right, “which highlights the education stories of three successful professionals who work with President Barack Obama, 2009 NBA MVP LeBron James and pop superstar Kelly Clarkson.”4
 
The documentary will be aired at 8 P.M. (EST) “in the first programming “roadblock” of any kind across all Viacom networks, including BET, MTV, VH1, CMT, Comedy Central, Spike TV, TV Land, and Nickelodeon.”5
 
The Department of Education offers this explanation of its own part in The Get Schooled Initiative on its web site:
 
Is the “Get Schooled” television event in the evening on Sept. 8 hosted by the Viacom network and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation connected to the president’s speech?
 
While the U.S. Department of Education is a partner in this effort, the president’s noontime address is a separate event. Get Schooled is a five-year national platform developed by Viacom and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that connects, inspires, and mobilizes people to find effective solutions to education challenges….

The grand finale of the opening ceremonies of the September 8 kickoff of The Get Schooled Initiative: “[T]he Gates Foundation and Viacom will welcome corporate partners AT&T, Capital One Financial Corporation, and NYSE Euronext, which have each signed on to the Get Schooled initiative…” [end quote]
 
One can’t help but feel that this effort is reminiscent of the powers that contributed so heavily to the government takeover of education to begin with, as documented in John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education.
 
What do you think?
 
The most important questions about President Obama’s speech will not likely have anything to do with the content. It’s hard to imagine that he will say anything too radical or anything students don’t hear every year from their government-employed teachers, principals and counselors.
 
Some of the bigger questions include:
 
• Is this an appropriate thing for a president to do?
• Is this one more step toward a more embedded presence of the federal government in education — and what might that lead to?
• What are the implications of the government working in any way with a private foundation, which is working on the same project with powerful business leaders and influential entertainers, to influence the formation of children into adults?
 
Your thoughts are most welcome. 
  
References
 
1. Suggested lesson plans and activities from the U. S. Department of Education:
http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/lessons/prek-6.pdf
http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/lessons/7-12.pdf
 
2, 3, 4, 5. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/press-releases/Pages/get-schooled-documentary-launches-in-hollywood-090827.aspx

by Tammy Drennan

Written for the Alliance for the Separation of School & State

Link to article

Excerpts:

You probably know there’s a war going on regarding public schools. It’s been going on since the mid-1800s, but it’s taken on new proportions of late.

It’s a complicated war consisting of many fronts….

Whose side will win the school wars? What action will end the war? Will the children you know be able to dodge the bullets unharmed, step cavalierly over their injured peers, and emerge to take up a gun themselves? Is that what you want for the children you love?….

This is a war that a free people should not be fighting….

We could end the war….

Dale & shovel in Antarctica

by Tammy Drennan 

I met retired electromagnetic engineer and champion of independence Dale Reed over ten years ago by way of a discussion loop associated with the Alliance for the Separation of School & State. The loop was a place where we talked about government involvement in schooling and held each other to rigorous standards of thinking and expression. Dale struck a great balance between stirring the pot and being an encourager. He’s been a stalwart supporter of many freedom causes – and in some unconventional ways.

Today, Dale and his wife Katy enjoy retirement in Seattle where he walks, throws boomerangs and continues to stir pots on-line and support the preservation and promotion of liberty.

During their child-rearing years, Dale and Katy’s two sons started out in public school, but when it became clear those schools were not meeting their expectations, they switched (when the boys were 11 and 12) to private. Dale writes:

“Katy had been carrying her folding lawn chair into their grade school classrooms but after she attended a Preparing For Junior High meeting where a bearded counselor told about one hundred nodding-in-agreement parents that they should “back down, back up, and back away” from their fast-becoming teenagers she gave up and started shopping for a non-government learning environment.  Homeschooling was not legal yet.”

Katy already had some experience with private education. She had run her own “Pooh Corner Pre-School” while Dale was teaching at the University of Colorado and working toward a higher degree.

Here is Dale’s story, in brief, in his own words.

Tammy: What is your educational background, as well as your “career history”?

Dale: Mostly government schools except for one year of Military School when I was in tenth grade. We were living in Denver and our father thought Dean [Dale’s brother] and I should try out a private school where an old friend of our father taught.

We lived and went to school in Lakewood, Colorado, El Monte, California, Salt Lake City, Pomona, California, back to Denver then to Wheat Ridge, Colorado where I, then Dean, graduated from High School. I attended (earned a BS/EE) the University of Colorado, in Boulder, on a tuition-free scholarship (top five high school graduates earned these merit scholarships and I was the second in my class), then my senior year Dean and I lived together as Dean started, but never finished, studying Meteorology. Later (after marrying Katy), I returned to the University to teach and earn a MS/EE.

After I graduated with the BS, I trained at the National Bureau of Standards, in Boulder, then spent a year at Ellsworth Station, Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year studying the Ionosphere and Cosmic Rays. Returned home (Boulder) for a brief try in Geology at the University of Colorado before quitting and driving my little open top red MGA to Fairbanks, Alaska.

Back to the ice at Byrd Station to study the Ionosphere, Radio Noise, and Very Low Frequency phenomena. Home to marry my secretary (Katy), father two sons, teach and earn my Masters, then to Seattle for thirty years at Boeing.

Fifteen years in Aerospace and fifteen years in Commercial. Protected the Minuteman system against the NEMP threat, trips to the Pacific Ocean, etc., eventually designing the shielding of the fly-by-wire 777 against the Induced Lightning Threat. Turned a Sword into a Plowshare applying the electromagnetic codes developed for the military to commercial purposes.

Tammy: When and how did you first come to believe the state should not be involved in education?

Dale: Heard Stephen Arons use the phrase “Separation of School and State” during a speech at a local Catholic High School.  Always had libertarian tendencies (from my dad) and our sons were not prospering in the local government schools. Trucked Marshall Fritz (and all his stuff) from Seattle to (ferry ride) Jim Boyles’ church so Marshall could give his speech and sell his tapes.

So between Arons, Marshall, John Holt, Jerry Mintz and a couple boxes of other materials in my attic I started supporting alternatives to the present establishment.

Tammy: How did you meet Marshall?

Dale: Depends on the definition of “meet.”  I was involved in libertarian/Libertarian Party activities and may have talked to someone in a SepSchool booth or possibly visited the Advocates for Self Government [Marshall founded the Advocates], whatever. 

But I actually pressed the flesh for the first time at a friends of his apartment near Green Lake, Seattle when I filled the back of my 1990 Dodge 4×4 with the Great Big Winch Bumper! and trucked him across Puget Sound to Whidbey Island. 

Tammy: What are some ways you’ve promoted independent education?

Dale: Participated in tens of homeschooling lists, attended a few homeschooling conventions, wrote and had published many letters to the editor, invited private school folks to have tables at Libertarian Party conventions, and at one I made sure that David Friedman talked to our local Sudbury Valley school. Ran for school board. Lots of stuff including Logo1.doc and Math1.doc [see resource list below] and my participation on the SepSchool lists.

Tammy: Tell me about running for school board. I recall you having pencils or pens made up with some provocative saying on them. What prompted you to run?

Dale: Pens and window stickers but that was for Katy’s projects.  The “gold” ball point pens had three things printed on them:  “Visit Your Child’s Classroom,” “Parent’s Duties,” and “Parent’s Responsibilities.”  The window sticker said “Visit Your Child’s Classroom.”

Prompted to run by my experiences attending hundreds of school board meetings.  Mostly my own Highline School District but also ”county” school board meetings.   In Washington State we have three levels of school board and I ran for two of the levels.  I thought I could do a better job and I wanted to learn about running and if I won I would learn about the government schools from the inside.  

Previously I had been elected and participated in many different ways with the engineering union (SPEEA) that represented the engineers and some techs at Boeing. Learned a lot for sure being an insider rather than just throwing rocks from the outside.

[Read Dale’s surprising School Board campaign Position paper.]

Tammy: Can you think of a particular rewarding experience related to your efforts?

Dale: Not really. I expected the homeschoolers to come up with better ways of learning but even though I keep reading (I used to subscribe to many) homeschooling magazines in the library I am disappointed in their lack of new ideas.

Tammy: What’s the most effective thing you think people can do to promote independent education besides removing their own children from public schools?

Dale: Our sons, and most of the children in the neighborhood, could add and subtract in different number systems before they started school.  They learned as they helped me saw, split, and stack my winter wood. Many have dropped by over the years to say how much they enjoyed visiting our home because of all the interesting books and other things to learn from — especially the summers when the yard was filled with children participating in drawing/designing contests that I judged when I got home from work. Others remember all the trips we took to the seashore, mountains, skiing…  Lots of opportunities to learn when you are with Pooh and Piglet in the Hundred Acre Woods.

Tammy: How much of an impact on our future liberty do you think our continued devotion to state schooling will have?

Dale: I like to compare it with a term we engineers, especially electrical engineers, have called “positive” feedback.  And positive does not always mean good.  It is what happens in a large concert hall when the amplifiers are turned up too loud and the sound bouncing off the walls gets back in the microphone where it is amplified again until terrible Squeals and Howls result.   

But better ways of learning what we want to learn when we want to learn it are being developed.  Can’t just turn off the government schools without better alternatives.  Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.   

Tammy: Are there any books you would recommend for someone new to the idea of schooling free of state involvement?

Dale’s book list and other resources.

Two documents Dale created to help homeschoolers and other parents; they contain a mountain of good ideas, book and web resources and links: Math1.doc and Logo1.doc

“The Almanac of Educational Choices, Private and Public Learning Alternatives and Homeschooling” by Jerry Mintz 

“Beyond Discipline, From Compliance to Community” by Alfie Kohn, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandra Virginia     

“Separating School and State, How to Liberate America ’s Families” by Sheldon Richman

‘The Myth of the A.D.D. Child, 50 ways to Improve Your Child’s Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion” by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.

“School’s Out, A Radical New Formula for the Revitalization of America ’s Education System” by Lewis J. Perelman

“Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling” by John Taylor Gatto

“The Teenage Liberation Handbook, how to quit school and get a real life and education” by Grace Llewellyn

“Short Route to Chaos, Conscience, Community, and the Re-Constitution of American Schooling” by Stephen Arons

“The Connected Family, bridging the digital generation gap” by Seymour Papert

“The Art of Education” by Linda Dobson

“Freedom and Beyond” by John Holt

“A Sense of Self, Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls” by Susannah Sheffer

“Education and Ecstasy” by George B. Leonard

by Tammy Drennan

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine¹ has been running a feature in The Homeschool Minute e-newsletter in which people share their top ten reasons to stick with the homeschool journey. The entries range from funny to touching to philosophical, and they all serve the excellent purpose of encouragement.

But there’s really only one reason for the Christian to reject public schooling – God did not give you children to house and feed on behalf of the government.

God gave you children to house, feed, nurture and educate on behalf of none other than himself. He stamped your children with his image, not Caesar’s, and not even the church’s. Then he placed those God-stamped children in your care with the profound and serious call to rear them to be God-obsessed – to honor and love and obey God, to think about him and follow him day and night, to long and work to become more like him, to grow into ambassadors for him.

God placed your children in your hands to ensure that as they grow his image becomes sharper and more pronounced in them, clearer, and unblurred.

The goal of public schools has absolutely nothing to do with God. However “good” a school might be (and what does that mean?), it aims to shape your child into something that neither considers nor needs God to navigate life. God is simply not relevant to the image public schools work to stamp on your child.

And don’t fool yourself into thinking they are not trying to stamp your child with any image at all. Education has a purpose, no matter who is doing it. Educators, be they in schools or be they you, are pursuing the shaping of children for some purpose. That purpose may be good citizenship, a workforce to promote the vision of the state for the future, the dream of a nation that beats all other nations on tests, or the desire to rear up a new generation of men and women doggedly in pursuit of God and his excellence.

Some people believe they see signs that God has called them to choose government education for their children. Maybe they get a flier in the mail that offers free state virtual school for their children. Or maybe the local high school has an excellent sports program that an athletically gifted son would like to take advantage of, or an incredible music program that might open doors for a talented daughter. Maybe it’s the school’s lab for your science-oriented child or the art program for your budding painter or sculptor.

Do not make the mistake of taking these things as signs. They are temptations. They leave God out of the equation, and God never gives us the option of leaving him out of any equation, above all the equation of education.

If it is God’s design for your son to have a football career or for your daughter to become a famous singer, he will make a way. But don’t be surprised if he has not chosen these paths for your children, talent notwithstanding. Think of Eric Liddell² and his incredible gift of speed, yet his work for God led him to minister in China, where he ended up in a Japanese internment camp during World War Two and gave to others until illness cost him his earthly life. God may want to use a beautiful singing voice in an orphanage in Romania rather than in concert halls and on CD labels. Don’t mistake American ideals and definitions of success for Biblical ones.

God’s definition of success has nothing to do with America’s definition of success. The two may sometimes be compatible, but that is because America submits to God’s view and not the other way around. God’s ways are not our ways, and all too often our ways are not God’s ways.

This article would not be complete without addressing the very real problem of those who find themselves with no choice but government schooling. There are fewer than many think – there are plenty of people who think or claim, for any number of reasons, they have no choice who really do. They may have their priorities mixed up or they may be sincerely misjudging their situation.

But there are some who truly do not have a choice. This does not mean that God has ordained government schooling for their children. It means that fellow believers and churches have failed in their role to nurture and provide for their own, to secure the kingdom of God before turning to woo the world to God’s ways. It is not a reflection on God’s ways but a sad sign of our misplaced priorities. Our job is to set our priorities, as individuals and as churches, in line with God’s priorities and remedy the situation.

Finally, it is impossible to talk about this topic without also addressing the “salt and light” issue – the idea that God is calling us to make missionaries of our children.

Has God called any parent to send a child into an ungodly culture for the express purpose of fitting that child for life yet also for the purpose of having that child try to turn the culture on its heels and convince it that it is on the wrong path? How is it we send our children into a culture to be both shaped by it and to change its shape, to be educated by it and to educate it, to respect its leaders and get along with its followers yet reject what they stand for and how they live?

God does not even call adult missionaries to embrace the tutelage of pagan cultures while trying to also change them. Does the world of public schooling need a missions outreach? No doubt. Has God called us to send forth our children as missionaries disguised as students to do the job? We know he has not and that we do not seriously believe that in sending our children to state schools we are actually enacting the Great Commission.

May we pursue more avidly the godly nurture and education of our children and may we take more seriously our duty to help others do the same.

1. www.thehomeschoolmagazine.com

2. http://www.heartoscotland.com/Categories/eric-liddell.htm

Can We Handle Freedom of Education?

One thing that must happen on the road to freedom from state schooling is a complete redefinition of education. There is no choice. (Article includes ideas and links to resources.)

Did Public Schools Make America Great?

“By 1940,” according to public school historian Lawrence A. Cremin, “the average American adult had completed 8.6 years of schooling.”** That’s an average of about an eighth grade education 164 years into our nationhood – in school years that were considerably shorter than they are today. By that time, we’d built a phenomenal infrastructure, been through many wars…

Fake Freedom

So, you’ve decided to walk away from state schools and never look back. Now you’re free, right? Probably not. Just as a slave isn’t truly free until he sheds not only his master’s chains but his master’s definition of him…

Free Bodies. Enslaved Minds.

Freedom is the power that will overcome our fear, but we must embrace it in all its forms. It is no good to be physically free and intellectually enslaved.

Freedom is a Big Muscle

The good news is that freedom is one big muscle. Exercise it every day and it gets bigger and stronger. Strong produces confident. Confident produces fearless. Fearless produces committed.

Righteous Indignation

A little righteous indignation, please.

One of the things that fueled the American Revolution was old-fashioned righteous indignation — who did King George think he was…

Why do we yearn for affirmation from the state — as if we are inadequate until our government tells us otherwise? Where is our sense of pride and self-reliance, of confidence and independence? Where is our outrage that a government that is supposed to be under our critical eye is instead the critic and we the critiqued?

The Guts to Keep Our Liberty

Free people are not intellectually prepped for life by their government. In a free country, the government does not dictate or even predict the future then fashion the citizens to fit it. That’s how they do it in dictatorships. That’s how Hitler and Stalin and Mao did it. That’s how dozens of tyrannies and wanna-be tyrannies do it today.

Why Independence? Why Now?

Education is the heart muscle in a society. All other freedoms become weak and eventually non-existent without freedom in education. Freedom of the press, of assembly, and yes, even of religion, mean little where the state controls the intellectual and social development of citizens.

Religious Reasons to Choose Freedom

Articles, illustrative stories, a survey, resources to help parents and religious leaders think more deeply about their education decisions.

by Tammy Drennan

46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards (then volunteer to impose them on students)

Do you know what everyone needs to know? Could you compile a basic list and feel so certain of it that you’d be willing to impose it by force on others?

To test your conclusions, here’s an idea: Pick a couple of hundred people you consider successful and test them. See if they know everything on your list. And while you’re at it, test Congress and other elected officials. If there’s anyone who needs to know everything we all need to know, surely it’s the people who could ultimately decide what we need to know. 

And test the governors of the states. Because they are arrogant enough to think that they can determine who knows what we all need to know, and they’re arrogant enough to volunteer to impose those standards on us. So we want to know what they know.

I think we should also test everyone who labels himself an expert, everyone who testifies before Congress about anything, all of our judges, and maybe above all, all of our teachers.

Who knows how many people are running around conducting life without adequate knowledge, but the ones with power over us are the ones we need to worry about most. Imagine – people who don’t know diddly-squat about the Monroe Doctrine making decisions about our lives and our money. 

As you ponder this effort of 46 governors, you might want to keep in mind that they’re just doing it for our own good – so that we will be successful.

I guess someone will have to define successful, but I’m sure our country’s governors are up to the task.

by Tammy Drennan

Here’s an interesting state of affairs. IBM ran a full-page ad in today’s Wall Street Journal (6/1/09, page A20, print edition) touting its solutions to education in America.

Of course, IBM’s solutions would benefit IBM, which would be fine, except that we do not have a freedom-based school system in America, so IBM would be in cahoots with various levels of government to various degrees — and not in cahoots with parents and especially not students.

But to make this whole thing more interesting, the ad run by IBM offers as examples that we might emulate the school systems of China and Germany, two decidedly non-freedom-based systems using ever-improving technologies (IBM’s? We’re not told) to track students’ progress, attendance and who knows what else.

What makes it all even more interesting is that, according to The Wall Street Journal, “Foreign workers accounted for 71% of Big Blue’s nearly 400,000 employees at the start of the year [2007], up from about 65% in 2006.”

And in March of ‘09, when the afore-quoted article was written, IBM was getting ready to lay off another 5000 US workers and move more of their operation overseas.

Now, it’s IBM’s business who they hire and where, but it’s our business who educates our children and how much we let special interests and businesses play footsie with government in an effort to profit from or control the formation of our children.

It’s bad enough we allow it of interests based entirely in the US, but when we open access to our children to businesses barely operating here, you have to wonder just how far down the road of obeisance to the state and whoever it wants to play with we’re willing to go.

Folks, we’re talking about our children. Increasingly, big businesses and big special interest groups simply assume their right to target children through state schools, either for profit or ideological purposes — or both. Their arrogance grows with their success, just as the arrogance of the state grows with the cowering of parents.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating — the only thing that stands between all the child-eating piranha out there and your children is you. That’s it. There’s no one else. There are people and groups who wish to help you, but you are the front line of defense. If you won’t act on behalf of your children, no one else can do a thing.

Your children have nowhere to turn but to you. When schools employ IBM or other technology to track and control your children, when special interests employ the government to influence, shape, study or otherwise utilize your children, when government employees of public school systems use their positions to undermine the values you wish to pass along to your children, your children have only you to safeguard them.

Our children are depending on us… hoping, wishing, longing for us to stand up and shield them from the hordes of exploiters who camouflage themselves as saviors of humanity.

Our children do not belong to the state or to our neighbors or to social activists or business interests. They belong to us – the people who love them, not the people who wish to use them for financial gain or political or social ends.