Recently by Gary North: Which Flation Will Get Us?
You may remember My Pet Goat. President Bush read this book to a class of third graders on September 11, 2001. Then he was told about the attack on the first tower. He kept on reading the book to the class.
Obama will deliver one speech for children ages 5 to 18. It must communicate effectively — even inspirationally — to kindergarten students and legal adults taking Advanced Placement, college-level classes.
Can you imagine Karl Rove telling Bush to read My Pet Goat to a combined class of kindergarteners and calculus students? They called Rove “Bush’s brain.” What should we call the dimwit who dreamed up this scheme?
I have this vision of how the speech will begin.
Hello, boys and girls. My name is President Obama. That is because I am the President of the United States. Do you know what the President does? He gives speeches like this one. He controls the use of nuclear weapons. He tries to look important, when the whole world knows that Nancy Pelosi is running the show, which is why I have to give a speech to Congress tomorrow night. She told me I needed to get front-and-center behind her health insurance bill.
Today, I am going to talk to about a government program called public education. It costs a trillion dollars a year. Do you know what a trillion dollars is, boys and girls? I mean, what a trillion dollars are? That is the size of my administration’s budget deficit every seven months. But this will be down to only $900 billion next year and every year thereafter until 2019. We are fighting waste in Washington.
And so on, for 20 minutes.
Bush was widely criticized for not responding to a national crisis rather than continuing to read My Pet Goat. But nobody asked this: “What was the President of the United States doing in a third grade classroom reading a book to kids?”
It was a photo op to show that the President was behind tax-funded education. And why not? The public school system is the central institution in every modern nation by which the government secures control over the voters, beginning at age 5 or 6. More than any other institution, the public schools set the terms of discourse on politics, beginning with this: “Tax-funded education is the right of every child. Anyone who says otherwise is a threat to the social order.”
Conservatives are upset about having the President speak to millions of students. Isn’t this partisan politics? Of course. But aren’t the schools supposed to be bipartisan? They are bipartisan. They secure the population for at least 12 years for a bipartisan agenda, namely, the expansion of state control. Both parties favor this.
In 1963, a conservative theologian, R. J. Rushdoony, and a liberal church historian, Sidney E. Mead, had books published in which they identified the public school system as America’s only established church. Rushdoony opposed the schools; Mead favored them. Rushdoony’s book was titled The Messianic Character of American Education. Mead’s was titled The Lively Experiment.
The problem is not the fact that Obama wants to position himself as a defender of America’s schools. That goes without saying. The problem is that the schools are political indoctrination centers. That has been their purpose ever since the 1830’s, when Massachusetts stopped funding the Congregational churches and set up tax-funded schools.
He will speak on the need for education, meaning more tax-funded schools. That sounds innocuous enough. Well, it isn’t. Better that he should speak on health care. That would enrage conservatives. They would see through this charade. What threatens our freedom is the charade that tax-funded education isn’t political to the core.
September 7, 2009
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2009 Gary North
