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Education: an entitlement?
How is it that in America, a nation known for
its freedoms, education has come to be regarded by many as something that ought
to be provided for everyone by the government? Knowing something of the history
of education in America, let us now look a little deeper into what motivated
its provision at various times.
The first American education law was the Massachusetts
Bay Colony's Old Deluder Act. It was written in 1647 by the Puritans there who
understood the need for children to learn to ready. Why? So that they might
have "knowledge of the Scriptures." Clearly the purpose of the first
education law was religious in nature. It had nothing to do with government,
per se, although government was used to enforce it, and nothing to do
with any sense of entitlement, but it had everything to do with what was then
a common understanding that God governed in the lives of men and that, in order
to do so, He wished for men to know His will.
Religion dominated American education throughout
the first 250 years of our history, for nobody denied that education is, always
has been, and always must be inherently religious. Indeed, for that reason,
an 1848 article in the North American Review stated, "to compel
a citizen to support a school would have been to violate the right of conscience."
But that was to change as the Unitarians, who took over Harvard in the early
1800's, saw in compulsory state-run education the means by which the human race
could be perfected. Their religion was the religion of man, not of the God of
their fathers, and they found willing allies in others who believed that society
could be perfected with the right set of imposed controls.
The first commune in America in New Harmony, Indiana,
by Robert Owen, an Englishman who was to become known as the father of modern
socialism. His experiment in the early communism failed, but not without catching
the attention of the Boston Unitarians, who saw common seed in Owen's socialism
an their own views of the perfectibility of man under the guidance of government.
Owen had, before coming to America, also captured the attention of the Prussians,
who were building their own government-run school system. Of it, he wrote, "It
follows every state, to be well governed, ought to direct its chief attention
to the formation of character, and that the best governed state will be that
which shall possess the best national system of education."
The Unitarians and the socialists all agreed on
a common goal: to institute a system of education fully run by the state, replacing
the parents as the primary providers of education and even separating the children
from their parents as much as possible. The Unitarians were motivated to stamp
out Christianity-directly the opposite of the first education law in America
-- and the socialists were focused on replacing the American form of government
with one very different.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels promoted government-run
schooling in The Communist Manifesto - stopping the "exploitation
of children by their parents," destroying the "most hallowed of relations,"
and "replac(ing) home education by social."
The socialists, communists and humanists found
their messiah in Horace Mann, a political lackey who found his purpose in importing
the Prussian state-run education system into America.
Immediately, and forever thereafter, academic
excellence was assigned to the back seat. Now socialization was most important.
Parents who had their children at home or in private academies were lobbied
to place their children in the new state-run schools so that their influence
-- and their money -- could rub off on the less-blessed. Protestants not so
humanistically-minded were urged to stave off a culture-changing mass influx
of Catholic immigrants by jumping on the new state-run school bandwagon. And
with the advent of tax-supported schools, enforced by the Prussian-inspired
compulsory attendance laws, education soon became ensconced as an expected duty
of the state, or what some would call today and "entitlement."
Furthering that concept of state-run education,
although for a different and perhaps even uglier reason, was an American president
who did arguably more harm to this nation than any other - - not FDR but Woodrow
Wilson.
Are we a republic or a democracy? In actuality
we are ruled by a few select powerful individuals and groups - - an oligarchy
-- and Wilson presided over the solidification of its power. In 1913 he violated
the Constitution and turned over the most important function of government --
the coining of money -- to an international banking cartel: the Federal Reserve.
In 1917 he gave the same group of bankers and industrialists control over the
government-run education system and established yet another reason for government
to control education--to maintain a steady supply of "human resources"
to enrich the oligarchy that pulls the strings behind our American government
and that actually controls the whole world.
Ben Graydon-- the right perspective --published in The Times Examiner
--7-10-02
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