Government-Confiscated Education
Corie made a very important point in her recent article It’s History, Not Legend when she noted that “James Madison, and all of the great individuals who aided in the founding of America were educated.” It seems the topic of education reform is forever on the table.
Ron Paul advocates a step in the right direction by promising to shut down the Federal Department of Education. It wasn’t all that many years ago that we had the understanding that education is a local matter. Even then, however, education was not in reality local because so-called compulsory attendance laws had started showing up in the middle of the 19th century, making education a state matter. That was the beginning of the end we now suffer and so Ron Paul’s step is really only a first step.
That said, I would like to share the following letter I wrote to the editor which originally appeared in the MetroWest Daily News (Framingham, MA) on Sunday, January 7, 2007:
Government-Confiscated Education
With reference to “Raising the bar, raising confusion, with MCAS” (Gary Dzen, MetroWest Daily News, December 25, 2006), you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can make a child go to school, but you can’t make him learn.
Enter the MCAS.
Designed to “raise the bar” by making children learn, it is actually revealing the folly of government-instituted education systems. It is not surprising that these are prohibited by law.
It is a requirement of our law that our Legislatures and Magistrates encourage the interests of Literature and the Sciences. The officers of our government cannot compel interest but can only encourage it by encouraging the interests that naturally arise as a result of our corporate lives. Yet since 1853 children have been compelled to learn what someone in an increasingly distant office thinks they should learn, not what their parents think they should learn, or what they themselves are interested in, but what a stranger thinks is good for them.
Enter the MCAS.
Children and those who care for them are no longer people. The system got rid of parents in the mid-1800’s and now it is getting rid of the teachers. Here is what this is about: Government confiscates education and the money it needs to build a system “for the people.” Putting aside that we never authorized government to define education, when it can’t deliver on the promises made it proceeds to confiscate even more funds to save the sinking ship.
Why not take children out? There are practical reasons of course, but also this: believing there is a law that requires you to send your children to school, you think that if you don’t send them you will have to submit to government authority on the matter. Better to send them than to have to realize that you are not free to educate your own children. It may be of interest to some that there have been at least two cases in the Commonwealth in recent years where parents who questioned the authority of government agents over the education of their children have won in court.
Our towns (that’s us) have failed to resist government intrusion into our affairs. What was repugnant to our law in 1853 is still repugnant today.
Enter the MCAS, tip of the iceberg.
