What
Do You Call Someone Who Wants to Get Their Hands on Your 5-Year-Old?
by
Vin Suprynowicz
by Vin Suprynowicz
DIGG THIS
Three months
ago, Nevada held an election. The Democratic candidate, state Sen.
Dina Titus, wanted to grab millions more in tax moneys (you thought
it would all be free?) and use it to impose mandatory all-day compulsion
schooling for 5-year-olds. She ran against a pleasant congressman
and former airline pilot named Jim Gibbons, who said he’d prefer
to study the results of a current pilot program before committing
to such a huge scheme.
Titus lost.
Does that mean her plan to grab every 5-year-old out of Nevada homes
under threat of armed force is dead?
Oh, please.
Gov. Gibbons’
weak-kneed "Let’s study it" may postpone the inevitable
for a few years, but government-funded mandatory schooling from
age 4 to 18 (or will it be 22?) will arrive – and bankrupt us –
in our lifetimes.
What will the
"studies" show? The same thing studies of the federal
"Head Start" program show: universal government-run kindergarten
improves academic performance in first grade among the kind of kids
who didn’t used to attend kindergarten, but all such improvement
washes out by the sixth grade.
Given that
the main function of the government schools is to slow everyone
down and level everyone out, this should hardly come as a surprise.
No net gain
for a price of millions: One would think that makes universal tax-funded
kindergarten a non-starter. But parents will overwhelmingly enthuse
over the prospect of getting someone else to fund their all-day
child care a full year earlier, and the program will be adopted
with much glee and celebration.
At no point
in this "study of the results" of all-day kindergarten
will anyone mention the ongoing growth of social pathologies among
the young – violent crime, vandalism, unwed pregnancy, drug use,
a thorough scorn for their parents’ beliefs and standards, and a
total absence of historical context as they’re led by the nose to
demand a new government "program" to solve each new manufactured
"crisis."
Even though
these unpleasant and very costly outcomes track perfectly with the
growing amount of time kids have spent in government-run "schools"
over the past 70 years, most Americans will look at you like you’re
nuts if you posit any CAUSAL relationship between these problems
and locking our kids up in mandatory youth propaganda camps for
ever more hours, days, and years.
What is "kindergarten"?
Friedrich Froebel
opened the first kindergarten, in Germany, in 1840, as a means of
"socializing" children, writes Joel Spring, in The
American School, 1642–1885.
"As
the name implies, the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of
children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants."
The idea was
borrowed and brought to America in 1873, when the first kindergarten
opened in St. Louis. Its purpose, according to its superintendent,
William Torrey Harris, was not literacy, but to rescue children
from poverty and bad families by bringing them into the school system
early in life.
Education historian
Marvin Lazerson, in his study of the Boston school system, found
19th century administrators there saw kindergarten as an indirect
means of teaching slum parents how to run good homes. The goal was
always to increase the child’s time under government supervision,
and to do away with "idle time" – by which these experts
meant any time out of school – since (in the words of a Massachusetts
superintendent of schools in 1897) "Idleness is an opportunity
for evil-doing."
Mr. Spring
comments: "By the early twentieth century the school in fact
had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early
part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school
showers, nurses, social centers and Americanization centers turned
the school into a central social agency in urban America. ...Within
this framework, the school became a major agency for social control."
"Today’s
advocates of "early intervention" and year-round schools
seem to share that objective," comments Sheldon Richman, author
of the 1994 book Separating
School and State.
In discussing
this subject I often turn to the words of former New York City (and
state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, because he learned
the reality of modern-day compulsion schooling in the trenches,
on the front lines – and because his research stands unrefuted.
In Gatto’s
talk "Nine
Assumptions of Schooling – and Twenty-one Facts the Institution
Would Rather Not Discuss" he asks:
"Did
you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of
life and a nation which beats American school performance in every
academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before
the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don’t want to pay for the
social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his
home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. ...
Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9
years long, a net 25 percent time and tax savings over our own
12-year sequence? ...
"Did
you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size
of Norway’s, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical
category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that
Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than
Japan’s? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years
translate into higher performance? ...
"Or
did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school
year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in
the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is
it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can’t be the passionate
commitment to government forced schooling, which they don’t seem
to possess. ...
"If
you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment
to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the
increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling,
you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow
for a handful of colored beans."
"Shortly
into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away
from intellectual development or skills training as the main justification
for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering,"
Mr. Gatto explains, "a world where ‘socializing’ and ‘psychologizing’
the classroom preempted attention and rewards.
"Once
this design was in place – and it was firmly in place by 1917
– all that remained to reach the target was a continual series
of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope,
many breathtakingly radical like ‘IQ tests’ or ‘kindergartens’,
and a full palette of intermediate colors like ‘multiculturalism’,
‘rainbow’ curricula and ‘universal self esteem’. Each of these
thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger
utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended
as the particular redress of some current ‘problem’.
"But
the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents
have their own plans for their own kids. ..."
So kids must
be wrested away from their parents and taught that it’s really the
state that has their best interests at heart, from the earliest
possible age.
And once parental
authority is undercut, delinquency becomes inevitable, Gatto reports.
"Delinquent
behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It
is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school
districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist
on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently
intimidated into silence. Or dismissed."
In Chapter
15 of his masterwork, The Underground History of American
Education, Gatto goes into detail:
"The
push to extend ‘day care’ further and further into currently unschooled
time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring
utmost tractability among first graders. ...
"The
social pathologies we associate with modern children are natural
byproducts of our modern system of schooling which produces:
- "Children
indifferent to the adult world of values and accomplishment,
defying the universal human experience laid down over thousands
of years that a close study of grown-ups is always the most
exciting and one of the most necessary occupations of youth.
Have you noticed how very few people, adults included, want
to grow up anymore? Toys are the lingua franca of American society
for the masses and the classes. ...
- "Children
with a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is linked to
today. Children who live in a continuous present. Conversely,
children with no sense of the past and of how the past has shaped
and limited the present, shaped and limited their own choices,
predetermined their values and destinies to an overwhelming
degree.
- "Children
who lack compassion for misfortune, who laugh at weakness, who
betray their friends and families, who show contempt for people
whose need for help shows too plainly. Children condemned to
be alone, to age with bitterness, to die in fear.
- "Children
who can’t stand intimacy or frankness. Children who masquerade
behind personalities hastily fabricated from watching television
and from other distorted gauges of human nature. Behind the
masks lurk crippled souls. Aware of this, they avoid the close
scrutiny intimate relationships demand because it will expose
their shallowness of which they have some awareness. ...
- "Dependent
children who grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified,
dependent adults, passive and timid in the face of new challenges.
And yet this crippling condition is often hidden under a patina
of bravado, anger, aggressiveness."
 Sound
familiar? Want more of the same? Dragoon every Nevada kid into the
mandatory government homogeneity camps at the age of 5.
February
3, 2007
Vin
Suprynowicz [send
him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las
Vegas Review-Journal and author of The
Black Arrow.
Copyright
© 2007 Vin Suprynowicz
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