Sometimes talking to people about public education is like talking to tree stumps. Our culture is melting down around us, largely due to the malign influence of public schooling, it’s turning into a garbage-heap right before our eyes–and still they send their kids to public school.
But what can we do, but to tell the truth?
You are letting kooks and perverts “educate” your children.
It will not turn out well.
The rot of our culture has certainly been abetted by the education system. For me, that was mostly in the ’60s and even then, the notions of political correctness were at work. Don’t offend, never give offense, don’t say anything that could make someone feel marginalized or different. So, fifty plus years later, we live in a world that sometimes resembles a freak show and everyone is keeping quiet, not giving offense.
The problem is, we need a world in which there are boundaries. “Anything goes” doesn’t work. Some of the most valuable experiences in my life took place when someone had the courage to confront me and to correct me where I was wrong. Was I offended? You bet I was! But then I had time to reflect and soon I realized that I needed to mend my ways, and I made changes, and I became a better person.
Many people in our day feel no sense of responsibility, and I think that the social environment of the school system plays a significant role in this. If someone skates through their education with little or no accountability, they will develop the mistaken notion that there is no accountability required on their part. If they renege on a debt, they can brush it off with a meaningless comment about greed and avoid all accountability. The same holds true for all sorts of things. I have heard of people crediting their criminal and aunt-social behavior to Karma. In other words, if you harm someone, that’s ok, because they probably deserved it anyhow.
When I started in school, we began every day with the Lord’s Prayer. The didn’t teach us from the Bible or include any indoctrination from a denomination, but we did start our day by acknowledging our Creator, and I think that set the tone. We were all in the same classroom, teacher, students and God was watching over us. It was a better time.
We had the Lord’s Prayer and the reading of a Psalm, covering both the Christian and the Jewish kids. If any atheist complained, he was told to go jump in a lake.
We have lost the ability to do that.
There’s nothing wrong in that. No one is forced to participate, nor should they be, but no one should be forced NOT to participate, either.
The latter has already been applied to every public school I know.
Indeed.