Bust the Public School Monopoly
I am an enthusiastic supporter of homeschooling. When parents are in a position to prioritize their children’s education, young minds learn more information more quickly. A young person who excels in mathematics, for instance, is not forced to follow the regimented schedule of the state’s curricula, in which geometry belongs to a certain grade level, an introduction to calculus must be kept secret until the final years of high school, and summer vacations interrupt the accumulation and application of new knowledge. Those who show promise in mathematics — especially those who enjoy working with numbers — should not have their educations slowed down merely because a state education board has decided that everyone should learn the same things at the same age.
This is particularly true today because public schools are “dumbing down” lesson plans, eliminating advanced classes for bright students, and replacing academic competition with generic passing grades. A half-century ago, students who failed classes were forced to attend summer school or repeat the same grade level in September. Now everybody passes, and in certain Democrat-controlled cities, it has become entirely too common for entire “graduating” classes to be incapable of demonstrating proficiency in concepts that should have been mastered years earlier. In some Democrat-controlled school districts, sizable percentages of “graduating” high school seniors read at an elementary school level.
Such failures should shock people. What is the point of putting a young person in a classroom for twelve or more years if nothing is learned? If teachers’ unions and school superintendents believed that their primary responsibility is to educate young minds, then they would hang their heads in shame and desperately seek solutions. But it seems clear that modern-day school administrators have no interest in helping the youngest members of society learn how to think critically. They are interested in the number of tax dollars they receive for each name on an enrollment sheet.
Whether those names belong to bodies that will actually sit in chairs in functioning classrooms is irrelevant to those who treat “education” as a business. If “students” show up long enough to be counted, and if those counts are sufficiently large enough to justify increased school budgets, then it doesn’t matter whether anything is taught or learned. If those numbers need a little padding, then Democrat officials can flood the local schools with illegal aliens. There’s a reason teachers’ unions love open borders and mass migration: Like other human-traffickers, they make big money by aiding and abetting criminal activity.
Today, many public school teachers are babysitters at best and prison guards at worst. They are expected to do the “parenting” that parents won’t do. This was not the case in the past. An education was not treated as a “right” that teachers (or anyone else) owed to students. It was considered a privilege, and, accordingly, students showed a measure of respect to those who did the teaching. Teachers did not “owe” a student a passing grade, and teachers were not expected to endure bullying from their “students.” Parents understood that there were serious repercussions for their children should they fail classes or be expelled for bad behavior.
These days, the inmates are officially running the asylum. When students behave inexcusably, parents blame the teachers. When students fail exams, parents blame the teachers. Should a teacher attempt to discipline a student, parents become irate. Teachers are simultaneously expected to fill the many gaps that deficient parents leave in the upbringing of their children while doing so without a modicum of deference from those wayward parents or their incorrigible offspring.
A primary reason for the collapse in academic and behavioral standards in public schools is the absence of moral teachings. When U.S. courts effectively banned the expression of Christian principles in public school settings, they torpedoed teachers’ ability to cultivate virtue in their classrooms. Educators since the time of the ancient Greeks have understood that young minds require a proper mixture of intellectual, spiritual, moral, and physical rigor to reach their full potential. When courts demanded that Christians hide their beliefs and teach students as if God were not real inside a school’s walls, the recipe for meaningful education was corrupted.
Devoid of spiritual authority, moral lessons became antiseptic. Without the sowing of firm moral foundations in the classroom, true virtue could no longer be reaped in the outside world. Without the supervised struggle of rejecting sin and seeking salvation, character-building disappeared from public schools. Students deprived of a moral education left school without the protections of fully formed shells constructed from discipline and nurtured character. This deformity metastasized and crippled society. Why? Because those who lack moral character find themselves both intellectually and physically ill prepared to face and fight the struggles of this world. No person can become a great thinker if the soil in which his thinking has grown lacks the spiritual and moral nutrients found only in a relationship with God.
Without these necessary nutrients, teachers’ unions and public school administrators added synthetic versions of their own. Left-wing politics became the public school’s “moral code.” Sexual propriety was jettisoned for abortion on demand. Historical facts were supplanted with politically correct “narratives.” Math became “racist.” Literary masterpieces were bowdlerized to conform to “woke” standards or discarded entirely for being “white supremacist.” Love for knowledge disappeared. In its place, leftists taught students to love the “cause” and “revolution.” By taking control of public schools, leftists grew young minds in Marxist manure, and the stench of that manure oppresses America today like the smells of a junkyard trapped under a dome of summer heat.
We may not be able to save public schools from themselves. Until the whole monstrosity is demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, I will continue to support all opportunities for young students to discover their true potential. If schools exist to indoctrinate, rather than to educate, then they betray their purpose. If they insist on teaching students what to think instead of how to think, then they are just brainwashing camps. If they prioritize narratives over knowledge, then they are simply surgical wards for amputating critical thinking. American students need to be rescued from the intellectual barbarism and moral vacuums now posing as public school education.
For me, it’s back to basics. I don’t think there is any one way to learn. Daily schooling for children between the ages of five and eighteen, after all, is a modern invention whose implementation more or less coincided with the emergence of the nineteenth-century factory. As business owners enticed workers to leave their farms for industrial jobs, the creation of public school institutions provided three immediate benefits: (1) Schools kept an eye on children who might otherwise get into a bit of mischief while their fathers toiled. (2) Schools taught children the skills needed to become an entrepreneur’s future employees. (3) Schools put children on a daily work schedule that mimicked the schedule of a worker in an industrialized society.
Before the growth of public school systems, people learned wherever they could. Christian priests and ministers taught children reading, math, and logic as part of their moral education. Civic leaders such as Benjamin Franklin established public libraries. Parents taught their children personally. Those who could afford private tutors hired teachers to supervise their children’s education. Today, almost every thought that has ever been committed to writing is available online. It has never been easier for a human being to acquire a free — yet priceless — education.
Teachers’ unions criticize parents for daring to help their children escape the public school prison. They think they know what’s best for American students. They think they are every student’s true parents. They are not. Too many are liars and grifters. Learning does not require so much dogmatic control.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/11/bust_the_public_school_monopoly.html