‘You as a parent have to become actively involved’

In this Sunday's Review-Journal Opinion section, page Dog-4 (Delta-4, if you prefer), another well-meaning bureaucrat employed by the government school system — local high-school teacher Joan Parks, in this case — moans that all her efforts are for naught if parents won’t step up and do the bulk of the motivational work.

“Learning is a two-way street,” writes the undoubtedly earnest Ms. Parks. “I can present the information, but your child has to practice and use the information — and you as a parent have to become actively involved for learning to occur.”

Ha! This is a recurrent whine of the dismally failing teacher cadre in recent years: “How can you expect us to accomplish anything if the parents won’t cooperate?”

Just one problem. You’re working for an institution that set about, quite deliberately, to seize children AWAY from their parents, to separate children FROM their parents (physically, emotionally, and intellectually), to MARGINALIZE parents, to teach kids to listen to you and IGNORE their parents, all based on the premise that the main goal of the government schools is social engineering, and one of the main obstacles to that giddy goal is ... parents!

Visit www.scribd.com/doc/6128871/Nine-Assumptions-of-Schooling-by-John-Taylor-Gatto, or www.spinninglobe.net/9assumptions.htm. There you will find former New York City and State (government) teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto’s pithy essay “Nine Assumptions of Schooling, and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss.”

One of the vital, unavoidable, underlying premises of our current state-run schooling system, Mr. Gatto’s research reveals, is, “The biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids; most often they love their kids, so their motivations are self-reinforcing, unlike those of schoolpeople who do it for a paycheck, and unless held in check even a few unhappy parents can disrupt the conduct of an educational experiment.

“The second biggest obstacle to a planned society are religious sects, each of which maintains that God has a plan for all human beings, including children.

   "And the third biggest obstacle is local values and ethnic cultures which also provide serious maps for growing up.

   “Each of these three is an external force bidding for the loyalty of children against the directions of the political State which owns the schools. ...

“In a planned society individuality, cultural identity, a relationship with God or a close-knit family are all elements which must be suppressed if they cannot be totally extinguished. The Soviet Union was an object lesson in this utopian undertaking and the United States has been going down the same road, albeit with more hesitations, at least since the end of the first world war,” continues Mr. Gatto, author of the fine book “Underground History of American Education.”

“To accomplish such a complex transformation of nature into mechanism the general public must be led to agree to certain apparently sensible assumptions — such as the assumption, for instance, that a college degree is necessary for a high-status career — even though Swiss corporations and the British government are often run by managers without college training,” Mr. Gatto explains.

“The security of the school institution depends on many such assumptions, some which by adroit concealments worthy of a card sharp seem to link schooling and future responsibility, and some which serve to exalt the political State, diminish essential human institutions like the family or define human nature as mean, violent and brutish.

“I’d like to pass nine specimens drawn from these latter categories of assumption in front of your minds to allow each of you to gauge which ones you personally accept, and to what degree.

“Nine Assumptions of Schooling:

“1. Social cohesion is not possible through other means than government schooling; school is the main defense against social chaos.

“2. Children cannot learn to tolerate each other unless first socialized by government agents.

"3. The only safe mentors of children are certified experts with government-approved conditioning; children must be protected from the uncertified, including parents.

“4. Compelling children to violate family, cultural and religious norms does not interfere with the development of their intellects or characters.

“5. In order to dilute parental influence, children must be disabused of the notion that mother and father are sovereign in morality or intelligence.

“6. Families should be encouraged to expend concern on the general education of everyone but discouraged from being unduly concerned with their own children’s education.

“7. The State has predominant responsibility for training, morals and beliefs. Children who escape state scrutiny will become immoral.

“8. Children from families with different beliefs, backgrounds and styles must be forced together even if those beliefs violently contradict one another. Robert Frost, the poet, was wrong when he maintained that ‘good fences make good neighbors.’

“9. Coercion in the name of liberty is a valid use of state power. ...”

This completes today’s reading from Mr. Gatto.

You want parents to “become actively involved” in their kids’ educations, Ms. Parks? Many already have. They’re gone. They pulled their kids out of your youth propaganda and internment facility long ago. Either they are making great financial sacrifices to see their kids privately schooled, or they are making different but equal financial sacrifices to home-school the children they love.

You have what’s left, Ms. Parks. You have — under coercive force of law, meaning you’ve got quite a nerve, seeking “cooperation” from the victims of the armed kidnappings that provide you with your ”student body” — that cadre of impressionable, relatively helpless young Brussel sprouts that those who founded our government schooling institution wanted you to have — largely segregated and divorced from all that insidious parental input, helpless “blank slates” on which you can now go to work, preaching that the Environmental religion is a matter of “established scientific truth,” that murderous, thieving tyrants including Lincoln and FDR were “great statesmen and leaders,” etc.

So hop to it, missy. What’s your problem? You now want to complain that “parents have to become actively involved for learning to occur”?

Ha.

Oh, ha ha ha.

Good one.

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