Pulic Education is “Valuable”

At least for some entities it is.  Freedom Daily has the full article.

Sure, a teacher has some leeway to be flexible but imagine what would happen to a public-school teacher who announced to his classes, “What is written in these textbooks is claptrap, lies, and deceptions. I’m going to be teaching you the truth about the nature of the government, government schooling, free markets, individualism, and liberty.”

Well, luckily, because of tenure, it would probably be virtually impossible to fire this teacher.  Of course, it’s also impossible to fire the teachers who teach anything else, or who don’t teach at all.  Worse still are the ones who are teaching something they know nothing about.

I think the major goal of the public school system is definitely indoctrination over education.  At my high school I had to basically demand an education.  I was lucky to have a few really good teachers, one in particular, who were great educators, but I had others who were there to do the absolute minimum, and frequently not even that.

I actually found a way out this when I was in school.  My strategy was to behave just badly enough to get in-school suspension.  This was the “punishment” handed down for doing something that didn’t really warrant suspension–being disruptive in class, arguing with teachers, etc.  Sometimes, I’d just request it–the few teachers that cared and would let me go every now and then, until our principal caught on.

So for “punishment”, I got to sit in a room with the other bad kids, read the assigned lessons for the day and do the homework.  The beauty was that I could complete all of this work before lunch instead of going to class all day and taking work home.  For the rest of the day we were required to sit quietly without talking to one another.  This provided a great opportunity to read whatever books I wanted or work on extra math problems (yeah, I actually did extra ones just for fun–dork).  Not only did I not have to worry about taking work home, but I also got to study whatever I was interested in–that’s education!  I *gasp* chose to learn things!

Leviathon on the Right

This book has some potential.

I especially like the phrase “big government Republican”…that used to be called a Democrat.

Reagan made a pretty big impression on me when I was a kid with the “we’re from the governement, we’re here to help” line.  His party is hardly recognizable at this point.