‘Public Education’ as a Car: A Parable

by Lee Duigon

Suppose the government decided you had to buy a new car every year, whether you want to or not. If you already have a car, you can keep it. You don’t have to take possession of the government car, but you’ll still have to pay for it. They suck the money out of your taxes, so you’re stuck.

What kind of car would you like? The question is irrelevant: Government Motors manufactures the cars and you have to take what they decide to give you. They’ll choose the model, the color, the options, and everything else. You just pay for it. They’ll also decide how often you can use it, how far you can drive, and where you can or can’t go. You have no ownership rights: none at all. You just pay for it. Every year. Out of your taxes.

Does that sound like a raw deal to you? But it’s exactly the same kind of deal you get with what they like to call “public education.” Pay for everything; own no part of it.

Once upon a time we owned our public schools. Before anyone got hip to what was happening, the government sucked away our ownership rights to our schools.

The U.S. Dept. of Education (thank you so much, Jimmy Carter!), your state’s department of education, and the teachers’ unions—they now own your schools. You don’t. You just pay. They decide who teaches in those schools, not you. They decide what gets taught, not you.

Critical Race Theory? You don’t want it, but there it is; and you pay for it. Anti-American “teachers” who go on junkets to Venezuela to learn more about socialism? You don’t want them, but there they are. You pay their salaries, and really sweet pensions.

How did we ever get suckered into this? It’s like we woke up one day and that was how it was. Did they ever ask us if we wanted a Dept. of Education? Did they ever ask us if we wanted our kids to be taught that all white people are evil racists, that America is an evil racist country, or that you can be a boy one day and a girl the next, depending on how you feel?

Yeah, well, they never ask us, do they?

Especially in the Democrat-run inner cities, kids come out of public school barely able to write their names and knowing virtually nothing about history, literature, civics—and all they know about Science is that it’s always right so just shut up about it and obey.

And then millions of them go on to… “college,” I think they call it… which finishes the job of turning them into useful idiots for the Far Left Crazy.

This is a really rotten deal. We’ve been had. We’ve been taken to the cleaners. And still there are Americans who send their kids to those wretched schools because they think, “But it’s free!” Because the money comes out of their taxes before they even see it, and they don’t have to write checks—so they think it’s free. But then they, too, have been “educated” in those schools and never been introduced to the art of thinking.

Years ago, before the situation was anywhere near as bad as it is now, I told a class of high school kids, “For the first time in recorded history, the vast resources of the state are used to teach a whole generation that their country’s no good and unworthy of their loyalty. How well do you think that’ll play out, down the road a piece?” One girl in the class came up to me a few months later and said, “I can’t stop thinking about that thing you said to us.”

Well, at least she was thinking.

They’ll do that, if you give them half a chance.

Even in the public schools.

We have to get out from under this raw deal before it ruins us. This is a car that won’t run.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Click the link and stop in for a visit. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net