After having written a letter to the editor on the school levy (see below) I began to get some negative feedback from teachers and principals concerning my views. Since letters to the editor can only be at most about 350 words, I found it necessary to write this post to adequately address and clarify my concerns on this subject.
Here was my original letter:
In response to Shelly Dumas’ letter in last week’s Idaho Free Press, I have this to say.
I do not gloat over the defeat of the Levy, though I voted against it, because I love kids and want to see them properly educated, as we all do.
However, I sent my kids to private school and cost the taxpayer not a single dime to give them a far superior education than the baseline that is public education. I also spend much of my time teaching kids in the schools Chess as “The Chess Guy” but have found it difficult to teach in the public schools – there seems to be no priority there. Private and religious schools, on the other hand, seem to love me as do their kids. And look how they are flourishing these days as parents flee the demonically influenced pornography and sexual gender confusion along with the eradication of parental supervision. Just drive by St. John Bosco Academy in Cottonwood – new buildings, kids full of joy, active parents and teachers working to fund-raise the money not handed to them by collective theft at the point of a gun.
I must ask you Shelly; do you have a financial interest in the levy? Are you a teacher or benefiting in some way from the taxing of many people that do not directly benefit from the tax? We don’t hate you but there is simply too much wrong to support such a system. A friend of mine that drives public school buses also voted against the Levy due to his first hand knowledge of waste and fraud. Yes he voted to cut his own funding because it IS THAT BAD.
The state is constitutionally required to provide funding for the schools and judges have ruled that the legislature has not been doing its job.
Clearly a new bus a day does not keep the taxes away. The only people who can properly be given responsibility for spending money are those that have earned it.
Sanford Staab
I tried to make it clear that I am not against the hard work of the teachers or the principals but it seems I hit a nerve here so I would like to go deeper.
There is probably no public policy that can support collectivism and self-inflicted slavery more than free public education. That may sound quite radical and irrational on its surface but hear me out.
I visited the Cayman Islands for about a year to do a particular job over there in 2012. The Caymans has a strict work-permit law which I was actually jailed for violating, even though I didn’t really violate it, but that was how their bureaucrats interpreted it. The intent of the law was to benefit the natives of the Island by forcing businesses to hire a certain percent of locals in order to be permitted to have a business. In most cases, the locals didn’t even show up for work because their salaries were guaranteed regardless of performance.
This is a curse that feels like a blessing.
As time passed, the locals lived in comfort and idly forgot what work was like and lost all their skills to earn a living. They eventually became completely dependent on the state for their livelihood and, as outsiders worked and built hotels and businesses, the locals retreated to their neighborhoods which eventually turned into slums. They had tax-free land ownership and free income, yet it was tragic to see the waterfront’s massive wealth and hotels but only a few blocks inland were dirt roads and shacks where the locals lived.
The law that was designed to help provide for a people had turned them into slaves.
This is what free public education does. Anything beyond basic morals, reading, writing and arithmetic stunts the growth of a child because they become used to spoon-fed knowledge. Some people have talents that don’t even need education. There are athletes that are millionaires from thowing a ball through a hoop. One size does not fit all. In addition to being spoon fed, students in a rigid structure of test taking and pleasing their teachers for a good grade go on to tend to obey whatever the authority figure in the room says without question. I remember in Kindergarden the first thing I learned was how to stand in line, do jumping jacks together, and rank myself with those my age rather than with those at my intelectual or social level. This results in a populace that believes whatever they are fed in the media or by the movies and fail to take the responsibilities afforded a free people.
There is a reason that the communist manifesto has within it’s 10 planks, a provision for free public education.
First of all, that word free is a complete lie. It is funded by collective theft either by inflation, or taxes. Somebody has to pay for it. As teachers and principals get used to the idea of a nice paycheck and benefits and pensions from this theft, they gain a false evaluation of their skills and an entrenched dependence on the status quo. Soon the entrepreneurial and creative aspects of teaching go away and a grinding curriculum of collectively established norms takes over despite the efforts of many good and well intentioned teachers and principals. It is a feed-trough conditioning that will eventually enslave even the best of us.
The public schools don’t hate me; they just don’t have time for me as a Chess Coach because they are on a treadmill of test hoop jumping requirements handed down from union bosses and government bureaucrats. This is what I meant in my letter by “there seems to be no priority there”.
If “free” wasn’t enough to attract students to the system, Truancy Laws add to the utter slavery of the student. They MUST attend by the age of 6 and with that requirement come other strings like vaccine mandates and healthcare requirements. Home schooling is still allowed in many states but that can easily go away – whatever the state gives, it can take away.
The decay of human spirit under this system has continued to where, as I mentioned in my original letter, we now have gender confusion, pornography, low true self esteem, woke mentality, victimhood, narcissism, racism and violence. This is not coming from the teachers and principals, it is coming from the bureaucrats and the decay of the culture – another long-term side effect of collectively structured education.
With today’s internet technology, the ability of anybody that can read to educate themselves to whatever level of knowledge is desired is cheaply and easily available.
There is no longer any need for buildings, libraries, school busses, and even teachers beyond the very basic levels that most moms are able to do on their own and if they can’t, a little help from a home-school group or the church can fill that gap.
If all you wanted to do was educate the next generation, you could do it for pennies and come out with independently thinking, self-taught citizens that know how to take care of themselves and take on the responsibilities of a free person.
Note that this nanny-state mentality is now spreading into social media and the internet where un-approved narratives and proven facts are being routinely censored while false narratives are repeated ad-nauseam. This mentality long ago spread into the scientific and academic realms as well, where peer-review status and grants dictate what will be studied and what will not.
The public education system is a dinosaur waiting for extinction but the forces of collectivism will not let it die. We have had this system in place for over two centuries – how’s that working for us? We have massive technology but little wisdom to use it well. We are enslaving ourselves by this educational system and once that freedom is lost, it will be very hard to regain.
Again this is not blaming teachers or principals, the majority of whom were educated – as I was – within the very system they are working for but who, I am convinced, are doing their best for the kids.
Freedom is neither safe nor free, but it is worth all the sweat and pain needed to preserve it. I laud those educators that are striving for the best for your students. It’s not your fault what is happening. It is collectivism exercising its natural talent to enslave people to the status quo and lazy living by a socialized system of education designed and approved by communist philosophers and bureauocrats..
Musings from a Rascal 