Good morning and happy Tuesday. Ever get one of those days where you simply can’t wake up? Yeah, it’s like that. Anyway, glad you're here.
Today in history:
1978: Jim Jones. Kool-aid. Enough said.
1963: The push button phone, using Dual Tone Multi Frequency technology, was deployed at the home-user level. Actually, DTMF had been used as part of long-distance service for years prior.
1916: End of the Somme Offensive.
1883: Canadian and American railroads adopt time zones.
Birthdays include actress Chloe Sevigny and English author Alan Moore
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I wrote a couple of weeks back about how our national interests would be best served by removing government from the educational process. The response in the comments was universally approving. So you might imagine me raising a Spock-like eyebrow upon finding this on Fox News’ home page this morning:
At the University of Mississippi, the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom seeks to give students a deeper, more accurate understanding of America’s founding principles and the freedoms on which the nation was built. Director Dr. Steven Skultety and Associate Director Dr. Rankin Sherling spoke with Fox News Digital about the Center’s mission and their concern that too few Americans receive a solid education on the nation’s founding — a gap they believe contributes to many of the challenges facing the country today.
Sherling said "it's pure and utter ignorance" when it comes to the knowledge of founding documents among Americans. But he added it's not their fault.
"They've been taught in a certain way. And then this is compounded over time so that the teachers themselves are ignorant of what's actually in the founding documents… many of them haven't read the founding documents without some sort of coaching as to what they mean," he said.
Well, exactly. The article goes on to point out that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did a study on the subject and found 70% of Americans failed a basic Civic Literacy quiz.
Sherling believes the problem stems from students rarely reading or engaging directly with the founding documents.
Spot on.
As I said last month, “The original purpose of government, therefore, is to protect, nurture and defend, and if possible expand the influence of, the culture that gave it life.” The results of the U.S. Chamber survey are alarming, in light of that original purpose. Government schools are particularly deficient here.
“But, Eric, what about the parents? Isn’t teaching such things their task as well?”
Well, yes, it used to be. C. Bradley Thompson, back in 2022, pointed out, however:
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
To achieve these goals, the single most important task of the new government schooling was to disconnect the natural ties between children and their parents.
No longer would parents determine in what, how, and by whom their children were to be taught. These functions would now be taken over by the government. Thus, the first steps in liberating children from the baneful influence of their parents could only be achieved by legislating compulsory attendance laws and mandating a common curriculum where all students would learn the same political ideology.
As an aside, funny how you don’t see this sentiment on PBS anymore, huh? That might have something to do with the gravy train that used to run from the ED to PBS coffers directly.
There’s more, of course, that results from governmental involvement in the education process. As an example, the Seattle schools conclusion that teaching math is racist. And that is hardly the most egregious offense.
While we’re here, let's discuss government schools teaching “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). For years, the left told us that the existence of a CRT curriculum was pure right-wing fantasy — until the Biden administration unleashed the FBI on anyone who objected to it being taught.
Related: The Federal Government Protecting Its Power, Then and Now
Back in '76, Jimmy Carter established the U.S. Department of Education, supposedly to improve our education systems. What the ED has done in reality is to take us from being mid-pack worldwide in terms of test scores and push us to the bottom of that list.
The ED spends more every single year than did Elon Musk in his purchase of Twitter. I think it is the working definition of the worst investment in human history.
Indeed, the failures of our government-run education system are so obviously prevalent as to make statements about how education is improved under the control of the federal government laughable at best. We’ve now reached a point in our national history where Johnny can’t read his diploma but he’s all over how America is an illegitimate racist country, how he won't make it by without the government giving him money, and how white Christian men are evil and climate change is all our fault. We have gone from teaching Latin in what amounted to junior high school to teaching remedial English in what these days laughingly passes for college.
Now, we can argue back and forth on the question of the damage being intentional. But I would ask a focusing question: Let's assume it's not for the sake of argument. If they actually intended to destroy us, how would the people responsible for this outrage have acted differently? What actions would possibly been more effective toward that goal?
President Trump has driven a stake through the heart of this monster, and the good Lord bless him for this. There is, however, more to do to set all this to rights.
We'll be watching.
Have a great day today. I'll look forward to see you here tomorrow.
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