What Next For Education?

[powerpress]

From primary school through graduate school, government funding comes with a high price tag – control. When Horace Mann founded the public school movement in the 1850s, it was designed to combat the growth of Catholic schools that were independent and religious. Early government school pioneers like Mann and John Swett of California sought state control of children, and opposed the fundamental right of parents to guide their children's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual growth.

Catholic education flourished at all levels until the government started funding it. Before 1965, new schools and churches and colleges were appearig throughout the country. Since then, however, countless schools have been closing, and those that have survived have lost their uniquely Catholic character – even though the educational quality of their secular counterparts has collapsed.

 

PRI REVIEW

What’s Next For Education?

 

February 17, 2017

 

In the next four years, there will be many battles in Washington as the elites gather round their sacred cows and demand that we all worship them.

The issues are countless – taxes, immigration, crime, defense, and jobs. On abortion, President Trump has already embraced the Mexico City Policy, returning to the sensible practice of refusing to force the American taxpayer to pay for abortions all over the world. Moreover, he will soon request that the Republican Congress write this into permanent law – something which pro-abortion forces on Capitol Hill, thankfully in the minority today, have prohibited for decades.

The president's next step will be to remove federal funding from the country's most notorious and aggressive abortion provider, Planned Parenthood; he will also move to protect the states from the demand that they send their own taxpayer funds to this abortion monolith.

This move will save many young American lives, which is vitally important. But it will represent a broader move on the part of the average Americans who elected the president with regard to the elites who find them so deplorable: because for decades those elites have used the money taken from those deplorable by force to feather their own elitist nests throughout the government and the culture.

The late Howard Phillips, a devoted conservative and champion of the family, said it best: "Defund the Left."

And there is no leftist bastion more worthy of defunding than the one erected by the radical elites in the institutions that were once called educational – America's colleges, universities, and public schools.

Few Americans today realize that most of our oldest universities began as seminaries, demanding of their graduates a thorough knowledge of Greek, Latin, history, literature, and Scripture.

Nor are most of us aware that the public school movement began 150 years ago as an integral part of an attack on the Catholic Church.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant “Know-Nothings” won many elections across the country. For practical purposes, their political platform was one word: Anti-Catholic.

The Know-Nothings railed against the millions of newly-arrived Catholic immigrants. Most of these newcomers were Europeans – Two generations of Irish who had been starved by their English overlords in two government-imposed famines; German Catholics who had been kicked out by the virulently anti-Catholic chancellor Bismarck; and many more.

All of these immigrants were legal, but that didn’t matter to America’s anti-Catholic elites. We recall that the Ku Klux Klan’s membership comprised at least one-third of prominent businessmen from Pittsburgh all the way through the Midwest to Saint Louis in those days – and the Klansmen hated Catholics a lot more than they hated Blacks or Jews.

Moreover, in the 1980s, Democrats elected one of those Klansmen as their majority leader in the United States Senate. Senator Bobby Byrd of West Virginia was not only a pro-abortion big spender, he was also a former KKK Grand Cyclops who loved to stroll around the Senate floor quoting Scripture.

But Bobby had to apologize for his bigotry – his predecessors in the nineteenth century didn’t have to. Not only did they brand these newly-arrived Europeans as “criminals,” they also feared them. After all, these Catholic families had a lot of kids and were starting their own schools, complete with armies of foreign nuns to teach them and papist priests to catechize them.

According to Rousas Rushdoony’s history of education, Horace Mann, who founded the public school movement in Massachusetts in the 1850s, believed that “the [public] schools are the means, instruments, vehicles, and true church by which salvation is given to society.” Given that goal, Mann “changed the function of education from ‘mere learning’ or religiously-oriented education to ‘social efficiency, civic virtue, and character.’”

Rushdoony notes that, by the twentieth century, character sadly “ceased to be a concern” in the public schools. That’s because Horace Mann’s “civic virtue” morphed in the “civil religion” advocated by the famous radical philosophe Jean Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of the French Revolution and grandfather of the Communist ideology.

Horace Mann paved the way for this secular enterprise, demanding that control of community schools be transferred into state hands. Who but the government speaks for “civic virtue”? After all, now virtue means serving not God, but the state.

A decade later and a continent away, another pioneer took up the cause. As California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction during the 1860s, John Swett was responsible for “framing the basic legislation of the state system.” Swett made his goals perfectly clear: “Children arrived at the age of maturity belong not to the parents but to the State, to society, and to the country,” he insisted – so children should be educated not according to the beliefs of their parents, but those of the government.

The “civil religion” taught in government schools was designed to neutralize the papist “heresies” taught in the parochial schools. Anti-Catholic Know-Nothings were powerful in the California of that era, and Catholic families were not only the competition: they were the enemy. Catholics were inferiors that had to be raised to the level of civic virtue expected of everyone else.

Swett objected to parents having any role in the education of their children. He ended the policy by which parents reviewed teachers every year – why, the parents even had the final approval to hire and fire teachers! That had to go. A rabid Unitarian, Swett was so popular with generations of secular government school employees that he is honored today as the founder of California’s most powerful teachers union, which continues to impose Swett’s radical agenda today on millions of helpless California schoolchildren.

By the way, California’s public schools rank near the bottom in every category of the entire fifty States. But why should performance matter? After all, school unions don’t protect the children – they don’t pay union dues. They don’t even protect good teachers – good teachers don’t need any protection, it’s the bad ones who should be fired; but they can’t – because the union protects them, whether they can teach or not.

But all teachers are often forced by state law to join the union, or pay union dues, nonetheless. Of course, there are other motivations: the schools’ cultures have sunk so low that many teachers need legal protection because they fear lawsuits from parents if their children get low grades.

The situation is clearly a crisis. Public school teachers are physically assaulted every day in many school districts throughout the country. In the year 2012 according to the American Psychological Association, hundreds of thousands of public school teachers are victims of physical assault every year – that’s one thousand every day school is in session!

Yet under Obama, teachers are forced to discipline students not according to their behavior, but according to their race – or the teacher will be charged with discrimination. And for that, she’ll need a lawyer.

Yes, even though the school unions can’t teach, they have lots of lawyers. They also have lots of money. In fact, they receive a quarter of a billion dollars per year in mandatory dues, 100 million dollars of which they admit are spent on pure politics.

Moreover, California’s public employee union pension funds are underfunded to the tune of one-third of a TRILLION dollars. Catholic schools in California can’t get a cent of the millions that Catholic parents pay in taxes, but you can bet that the government bureaucrats will make the taxpayers – including Catholics – bail them out, by the hundreds of billions, when their bloated gravy train breaks down.

And yet, despite this dismal record, they’re the only game in town. The result? Most California public high school graduates need remedial math and English merely to get into community colleges as freshmen – 90% of them do, in fact.

As Joe Sobran once observed, we used to teach Greek and Latin in public high schools. Now we teach remedial English in College.

When we come back, we’ll look at the situation in primary and secondary education. This is PRI Review from www.pop.org.

Segment two

So far, we’ve looked at the background of today’s public education debacle. Well, what about Catholic education?

It’s a marvel that, in spite of the formidable opposition from diehard bigots over the course of more than a century, Catholics and Catholic schools continued to prosper – all on the local level. After all, Washington had nothing to do with education until well into the twentieth century. In fact, as Robert Nisbet once observed, in 1913, the years he was born, the only connection the average American had with the Federal Government was the Post Office.

But then came Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, and with it, intrusion of the federal government into every aspect of American social and cultural life. At the same time, Roosevelt threatened the Supreme Court – successfully, alas – forcing it to support his destruction of the rights of states and communities to govern their own affairs, including the education of their children.

As taxes on Catholic families rose under Roosevelt, Catholics found they needed federal government permission to channel some of the local school taxes they pay to help fund the education of their children. In a series of famous cases from the 1930s stretching all the way to the early 1960s, the Supreme Court paved the way for the secularization of American public education that has only become even more radicalized since.

By 1963, even reading the Bible in public schools was found to be unconstitutional by the court – which was led at the time by Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose appointment President Dwight D. Eisenhower later called his biggest mistake.

Yes, by the early 1960s , Catholic parents seemed to be out of luck when it came to applying any of their tax dollars to the education of their children. But that was on the level of parochial grade and high schools.

For colleges, Catholic education’s fortunes started to change in 1965, the year the Second Vatican Council ended, when Lyndon Johnson, proclaiming his “Great Society,” offered countless billions in taxpayer funds to finance the “Social Justice” agenda – and, in a move both clever and insidious, to fund Catholic higher education, hospitals, and welfare agencies. We’ll look at that in the next segment, but let’s look at LBJ’s overall impact on education.

In order to secure the government’s hold on local schools, the schoolteachers’ associations that had once devoted their efforts to improving curricula were inspired by Johnson to become politically active zealots. Only ten short years after his Great Society started, their massive support propelled the hapless Jimmy Carter into the White House – and Carter repaid them by creating the Federal Department of Education.

Since then, Washington education bureaucrats have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and all they’ve done is destroyed literally thousands of public schools throughout America.

Here are just a few random observations considering today’s government-funded schools.

Public school unions are so afraid of competition that they not only resent families who are not satisfied with government schools, they attack them. Virginia’s left-wing governor McAuliffe repeatedly vetoes legislation allowing home-schoolers to use the sports facilities their parents pay for. Urged on by the union Left, he is implementing communist dictator Mao Tse Tung’s “death of a thousand cuts” to keep children out of their homes and under government control.

One of his most valuable allies in this effort is another government operation called "the Child Protection Services." This serpentine bureaucracy responds to any allegation of abuse, including those that are made anonymously. I have interviewed the representatives of CPS in Virginia, and I learned some pretty interesting facts.

First of all, most allegations prove to be false. A vast number arise during divorce proceedings, with spouses routinely accusing one another of abuse in order to be awarded custody of their children, and to get a corresponding higher payment of alimony from the supposedly guilty partner.

Another large component of CPS complaints is explained by a report from the U.S. Department of Justice. It reports that, if a child is raised by a single unmarried mother living with her boyfriend, that child is thirty times more likely to be abused during his childhood than a child who is raised at home by two married parents until age 17.

Now, these two scenarios alone – boyfriends abusing children of their live-in girlfriends and divorcing couples – account for the majority of reports of child abuse. Yet the agency often feels compelled to investigate children in normal homes – real families, that is – in order not to be accused of discriminating against divorcing spouses or those living in abnormally immoral circumstances.

That's where homeschoolers come in. In many jurisdictions – take New York, for example – school unions are so afraid of losing students to homeschooling parents that they will report those parents to Child Protection Services, even if their families have received all the proper documentation for homeschooling.

Now I’ve mentioned lawyers already. Here, it is the accused parents who must hire legal counsel to combat the so-called findings of the taxpayer-funded CPS "investigator.”

So just what training do these investigators have? I interviewed our local county social services investigators and found that both of them had only one prior employment experience: working as babysitters in a day care center.

Moreover, they told me how much they preferred the public schools in our community to homeschoolers. "In public school we can undress the child to make sure there are no bruises – and we never have to tell the parents at all," she gushed. Of course, to do that to the child of a homeschooling family, the agency would have to receive a warrant even to enter the home.

And what message does this practice send to the children? “Don’t trust your parents! Don’t tell them – tell a trustworthy government employee!”

In one case in our local school system, one teacher jealous of a colleague’s promotion reported that colleague as an abuser of one of her students because she hugged him. Yes, she had to hire a lawyer, and, two thousand dollars later, the charge was dismissed – as most of them are.

In fact, most of the allegations proved to be fallacious – sometimes outrageously so. Nonetheless, the accused families must engage an attorney to protect their rights. However, the CPS is protected by law from being sued, nor is it required to reveal the name of accusers, even if those accusations proved to be false.

When the shoe was on the other foot, volunteers at churches like our local parish are designated as "mandated reporters" – which means that we are required to report “suspicions” – even though they will cause the irreversible process to start grinding away.

What if we’re wrong? We’ve caused a family irreparable harm. Frankly, some reports are made simply because the intimidated volunteer doesn’t want to be charged with “failure to report.” When I called Virginia’s 24-hour Child Abuse line, Tina, the helpful CPS agent, told me “it’s always better to make the report” – and Leviathan will rev its engines. After all, your anonymity will be assured. But if you’re sued for making a false report, you have to hire your own lawyer to defend you.

Yes, lawyers love the Child Protection Service.

And for the same reason, teachers unions hate our new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, because she wants to save children from the dumbed-down, feel good politicized curriculum of many failing public schools and let parents, not the state, choose what’s best for their child.

This is the first major step towards family freedom since John Swett began his frontal assault exactly 150 years ago, but the unions are outraged.

Lili Eskelsen García, the new president of the National Education Union, labels any of Donald Trump’s statements, “bullying” and tells teachers to keep all of the president’s statements out of the classroom.

Of course, teachers are welcome to criticize Trump, as they virtually revered Obama. That’s today’s version of public “education.”

And that’s not all. The feminist ideologues push vulgar sex ed classes and punish naturally active boys with Ritalin, and twelve years of their browbeating goes a long way to explain why the National Mental Health Alliance reports that mental health issues are rampant on college campus. In fact, the alliance reports that one in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have a diagnosable mental illness.

The list goes on and on. A quarter century ago, education professor William Kirk Kilpatrick found that in 1948, teachers listed their top problems as running in the halls, not using the wastebasket, or chewing gum. Forty years later, rape, drugs, assaults on teachers, and shootings on and off school grounds. And it’s only gotten worse.

In fact, Dr. Kilpatrick has written the best book on this dismal situation I’ve ever read; it’s called Why Johnnie Can’t Tell Right From Wrong. It is a masterpiece.

This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.

Segment three

Now let’s look at the government’s control of higher education. For colleges, Catholic fortunes started to change in with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” He offered countless billions in taxpayer funds to colleges, so long as they hewed to the “Social Justice” agenda of the left. Very quickly, Catholic colleges put their faith on the shelf and teamed up in a lobbying coalition designed to get as much taxpayer funding as they could get.

All this came at a price, and Notre Dame, my alma mater, paid it immediately.

For 120 years, Notre Dame had been governed by the priests of the Holy Cross order that founded it. But in the 6os, the university quickly laicized its board to become eligible for taxpayer funding. To make their position even clearer, the university joined several other Catholic institutions and signed the Land o’Lakes Charter, declaring their independence from Rome, the Holy Father, and traditional Catholic teaching – all so they could lobby Congress for more taxpayer dollars.

And lobby they did. Today, while Notre Dame proudly proclaims its independence from the church, it is quick to comply dutifully with every directive, however, capricious or onerous, from the federal bureaucracy that provides so much of its funding. After Obama appeared at Notre Dame’s commencement in 2009, Notre Dame had a record year of fundraising because of a $30-million-dollar taxpayer-funded grant that came in a few months later.

Notre Dame serves as a microcosm reflecting what has gone on everywhere ever since – in Catholic dioceses, colleges, universities, hospitals, and welfare agencies that it calls “charities.” To be sure, several brave bishops strived mightily to curb the excesses – the sidelining of the fundamentals of the faith, and often the outright rebellion among chancery bureaucracies and tenured faculties of formerly Catholic institutions. But those few bishops largely failed – mostly because they were hesitant to exercise their full and genuine authority to protect the faith and the faithful.

Since the 1960s, these “Catholic” institutions have received tens of billions of taxpayer dollars – an emolument now considered by bishops to be indispensable, given the decline in Sunday collections and the departure of thirty million Catholics from the Church. And the sex abuse and coverup scandals didn’t help. Quickly, bishops turned to professional lobbyists and PR experts (many who were profoundly opposed to Catholic teaching) to pursue and preserve that income – by getting it from the government.

Meanwhile, most of the faithful are totally unaware that this taxpayer funding of their bishops even exists. Of course, the bishops are aware, but only rarely do they bother to tell the people in the pews. And while Catholic bishops undoubtedly believe that they receive this funding because they are such good guys, anyone on Capitol Hill can tell you that every dollar of federal funding comes with a price tag.

And what is that price for America’s Catholic bishops? Well, consider: most Catholic bishops are about my age, and, like me, most grew up in Democrat households. When they entered the seminary at high-school or college age, their studies concentrated on a mastery of philosophy, theology, biblical studies, Church history, and apologetics.

What little they knew about politics they brought with them from home.

Today they constantly crusade for the agenda of the party we all grew up with – “global warming,” amnesty for illegal aliens, raising the minimum wage, Obamacare (minus abortion coverage), massive funding for failed poverty programs, increased foreign aid (including billions for “family planning”), and the rest of the Democrats’ “Social Justice” agenda.

This crusade goes hand in hand with a policy of silence regarding any possible criticism of Catholic politicians who champion abortion rights.

This has all been going on for quite a while, of course. In fact, the first grant that the newly-minted neighborhood organizer Barack Obama received long ago came from the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.

Most U.S. bishops have been critical of President-Elect Donald Trump. It is an open question, whether they will be able to work with him to reverse the hostile anti-Catholic policies of the Obama Administration, on the one hand, if they are afraid of losing the billions in government funding on the other.

Are things any different on non-Catholic campuses? Hardly. We’ve all read about the pervasive muzzling of students by the “politically correct” tenured radicals. The left-wing agenda has infected not only the classroom and the campus, but even college sports – after all, the NCAA is merely a subsidiary of college administrations anyway. So their threats to boycott states that protect girls from dirty old men in bathrooms merely reflect their obedience to the college ideologues who supply the athletes.

Moreover, all colleges and universities that seek federal funding have to pay for it with obedience not to parents, not to the taxpayer, but to the federal bureaucrats that hand out the money. And even though higher education receives countless billions a year from the taxpayers, many of those same taxpayers can’t afford college because tuitions have been rising three times as fast as inflation for over fifty years. Notre Dame’s tuition was $1600 a year in 1967; fifty years later it is more than thirty times that figure.

And how do all these universities get this federal cash? They hire lobbyists, and a few of them are friends of mine. These make millions, bringing in billions for their clients. And universities that really want to sell out to the feds hire not educators, but politicians, as presidents – because they know how to get the money. So New York University, the University of Texas, Oklahoma, and Cal-Berkeley, just to name a few, have followed that path.

Berkeley is an especially craven example. Its president, Janet Napolitano, was Obama’s Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Yet just a few weeks ago, when College Republicans at Berkeley invited a speaker, this “security expert” president provided no security, and virtually encouraged gangs of anarchists wearing black masks who attacked students attending the lecture, criminally assaulting several of them and sending some to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Cal-Berkeley police had orders not to interfere, not to arrest any felons, and ultimately to cancel the appearance because – get this – there was not enough security!

Leftis college professors routinely attack Big Business and the powerful, but they are patent hypocrites.

Consider the average classroom. The teacher has a lot more power over the student than any corporate CEO does.

Can the CEO of Citibank ruin your chances of getting into a top-ranked college? No? Well, a third-rate, washed-up high-school union teacher can. Aggrieved love-in leftovers love to fail those bright and very brave students who show them up in class. They call it “social justice.” I call it criminal.

Same thing goes for the rest of your life. “The Rich” can’t keep you from going to Harvard Business School (although your better judgment might) — But a spiteful professor in your college major sure can. It’s spelled “D.” And these tyrants don’t see a “No Admittance” sign on the Catholic schoolhouse door. Some of the worst malefactors are the fallen-away “Catholic” teachers on a mission: they scorn the faithful students who haven’t lost their faith yet. I worked my way through grad school playing music in roadhouses. One feminist teacher at a major Catholic university once bragged to me that if she couldn’t corrupt the “altar boy” types any other way, she’d seduce them. That is sheer, hateful spite, of the destructive leftist variety.

Socrates tells us that the teacher must love his student more than the student loves himself. Where that virtue is absent, the teacher is a tyrant.

And inside very budding tyrant eager to save the world is a constellation of envy, hubris, and diabolical destruction of limits – a contempt for metaphysics, contempt for definitions themselves. Confucius advocated the preservation of the proper meaning of words; the tyrant seeks to destroy them.

This charade has simply go to stop.

We live in interesting times. Stay tuned.

This is PRI Review from Pop.org. Thanks for listening.

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