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By Lee Duigon
January 26, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

What is the last defense of public education?

They can’t sell us on the academics anymore. Homeschooled kids run rings around the public-schooled in every standardized test available.

Until recently, the best defense of public education was, “It’s free.” People are beginning to realize this is a lie: it’s paid for by your ever-increasing taxes. And it’s all about teachers’ unions devouring our money—making fabulous salaries, with benefits the rest of us can’t even dream of, and retiring at 55 on lavish pensions. Yes, people have been getting wise to this.

So the defenders of public education fall back on their last redoubt—“socialization.”

Supposedly, schooling your kids at home will make them feral—rather like locking them up in a chicken coop until they’re 21. Sending them to a Christian school isn’t much better: they won’t be exposed to the enlightened teachings of the teachers’ unions. What a handicap!

“Socialization” is the process of learning how to live with other human beings. According to the National Education Assn. et al, this process can only occur in a public school classroom. The fact that public school classrooms did not exist in human history until the middle of the 19th century only goes to show that people weren’t socialized till then.

As the teachers’ unions see it, the only way a human being can be properly socialized is by being confined to a room, or a series of rooms, with no society but that of other children exactly his own age—no younger, no older—under the direction of a union-certified teacher. This is to continue throughout one’s entire childhood, starting with day care and pre-school and going right on up to college, with no time off for good behavior. Incarcerated felons get a better break.

In this scheme of socialization, every child in the classroom is to do the same thing at the same time. When one bell rings, they start. When another bell rings, they stop. And if this makes you antsy, the school nurse gives you Ritalin.

Early on, your age-group peers will become the most important people in your life: what with Facebook and cell phones, and both parents working, now more than ever. Your peers will teach you what is cool and what is not. They’ll teach you who is cool and who is not—and heaven help you if you’re not! By this method, every child is educated socially by the vast experience and wisdom of the other children.

Sounds pretty normal so far, doesn’t it?

We mustn’t forget the role of the teacher. It’s the classroom teacher who will preach to the children, day in and day out, about “gay families” (whatever they are), how to choose your gender, the falsity of the Christian religion, and the despicable influence of America on world affairs. It is the teacher, backed up by the school administration, who will keep the children on the reservation, either through some senseless and draconian “zero-tolerance” policy, or some gentler method like mockery or detention.

More than anything else, the great lesson taught by public education is conformity. How could it be otherwise? If you’re ten years old, no teenager cares what you think, nor will any six-year-old be interested. But no one is as tyrannical as a group of children of the same age. As a group, the other ten-year-olds will insist on your conformity. Very few children get away with being any kind of oddball.

Publicly-schooled children are intolerant of differences; if you’ve ever been one, you know it’s true. The impulse to conform is programmed into them at an early age by “education” experts who’ve had 100 years of practice.

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Why the passion for conformity? Well, according to the teachers’ unions and the teachers’ colleges—if you don’t believe me, look it up—classroom teachers are to be “change agents.” Their function is to convince children that everything believed in by their parents and their pastors is stupid, hateful, and wrong. Their mission is to transform America—into what, the Devil only knows—by brainwashing whole generations of children. This mission really can’t be carried out unless the children are first programmed for conformity.

Unionized public school teachers have been getting better and better at this all the time. Visit the union websites and see for yourself what they’re up to.

Are your children being socialized by public school? If so, you really ought to reconsider your position.