Vin Suprynowicz

Don’t you love it when a member of the ruling class slips up and admits to the peasants what they’re really up to?

For years, I’ve called for the complete shutdown of America’s massive archipelago of mandatory government youth propaganda camps. The defenders of this Largest Jobs Program in History shriek and bellow that I must be “against education,” which is sort of like charging those who opposed slave galleys with being against ocean navigation, or branding those who called for the end of chattel slavery with “having something against growing cotton.”

Read de Tocqueville for his amazement at the high level of literacy — including an ability to discuss complex political issues of the day — found among American workingmen of the 1830s — 20 years before Dewey and Mann launched today’s government-run youth camps on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in 1852.

The average eighth grader in 1870 (when the current coercion regime was just getting started in most states) was far better versed in this nation’s history, far better prepared to articulate a defense of free markets and limited government and sound money — heck, better able to craft a simple grammatical sentence — than today’s typical high school senior, despite today’s per-pupil allocations shooting through the roof.

Math? My friend Bill Hanlon, who tutors government-school math TEACHERS, says of today’s young inmates: “At this point we’re lucky to get three years of algebra into ’em before they graduate. And Vin, they only did that by creating two classes that you and I would call ‘Playing with Blocks,’ and re-naming them ‘Algebra One’ and ‘Algebra Two.’ ”

When they find they can’t shriek us into silence, the defenders of the government lock-down camps deftly switch to Option B: “If not for the government schools these kids would be out roaming the streets, breaking into your house and stealing your stuff,” which may be my favorite. At least it tacitly admits this is at heart little more than a massively expensive incarceration operation, sweetened up with some colorful holiday cutouts on the bulletin board.

When that fails, they pirouette just as gracefully into Option C, pursing their lips into a pout and whining, “Of course we acknowledge our public schools currently have some problems. But instead of being so destructive, won’t you work constructively with us to try and institute some reforms?”

No. No amount of new paint and crepe paper can “reform” an institution that’s doing precisely what it was intended to do, purposely fragmenting learning into isolated little factoids that — never being integrated into a cohesive whole — are forgotten as quickly as they’re memorized.

The New York Times reported Feb. 27 fewer than half of American teenagers know when the Civil War was fought, and one in four believe Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750. About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany’s chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him in a multiple-choice test as a munitions maker or premier of Austria.

Why is anyone surprised? The academic curriculum is the “cover,” the “front.” The real goal is not to ensure, but rather to insure AGAINST successive generations developing a cohesive philosophy of self-sufficiency, a code of ethics appropriate to a free people living under a government of limited powers. The goal is to make sure successive generations are powerless to muster the historical and economic context, logic, and critical thinking skills necessary to see through the latest scheme to seize yet more of our wealth and use the loot to hire more bureaucrats to regulate yet another portion of our lives, our industry, our commerce.

California’s Second District Court of Appeal on Feb. 28 declared the parents of most of that state’s 166,000 home-schooled children to be outlaws, ruling California law requires parents to send their children to full-time state-certified public or private schools or else have them taught at home by “credentialed” tutors — which most home-school parents, presumably, aren’t.

“California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling, which makes it clear those parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply.

And did Judge Croskey and his black-robed ruling-class pals say this was because the home-schoolers weren’t doing as well at teaching reading, writing, and ’rithmetic?

Of course not. They couldn’t say that, because tests consistently shows home-school kids, taught by parents without state “certificates” or licenses, score 30 to 37 percentile points higher than their public school peers across all subjects.

So why ban home-schooling, if the academic results are far better?

Judge Croskey obligingly explained: “A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”

Imagine that. “Loyalty to the state.” Almost as if what they’re running are, I don’t know … mandatory government youth propaganda camps, or something.

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K.G. writes in: “Dear Mr Suprynowicz, I’m a homeschooling mom who thoroughly enjoys your columns on government schooling. I wasn’t always a homeschooler. I stumbled upon J.T. Gatto while researching school reform after dealing with my local school district and getting nowhere but Delphi’d and a SLAPP letter.

“I read ‘Underground History’ — in fact, I was unable to put it down. It explained HOW IT HAS BEEN DONE, how Americans have been turned into stupid, apathetic, self-absorbed, toadying sheep. … At this stage of the game the social engineers no longer even pretend to educate. They ‘socialize’, they ‘mold minds’, they decide who will go to college and ‘lead’ and who will dig ditches for the local business-government or the national corporate state.

“After finishing that book I had to get my kids out, pronto. I regret that they spent their most formative years in the govschool gulag learning to take orders and stand in line, raising their hands to go to the toilet. In fact, when I told my youngest daughter, starting ‘3rd grade’, that we would be homeschooling, she asked me if she would be allowed to go to the toilet whenever she wanted. I almost cried.

“Closing down these indoctrination camps is the only way to save our liberty.

“Another ‘source’, if you haven’t already read it: Samuel Blumenfeld’s book ‘N.E.A.: Trojan Horse in American Education’. This book has a lot of information on the early designers of this Prussian school system, the animal training incorporated into it, and of course the NRA stranglehold and Marxist platforms.”

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A local attorney writes in: “Mr. Suprynowicz — I do enjoy your columns and am a disciple. Each Sunday I clip out your column and tape it on the door of my office and spend the next five days arguing your positions with my staff. I do the same with Ann Coulter. I include her picture; she is better looking than you.

“Even though it is still technically ‘Sunday’ one of my paralegals is jabber-jawing about how home school kids are socially ‘backwards’ and that they can’t fit into the world because they are too sheltered. She did concede that home schooled children excel academically.

“Clark County School District has between 7,000 and 10,000 gang members. I guess it is important that children socialize with gang members in the name of diversity so they can understand that kids who wear blue shoot at kids who wear red and vice versa. This is more important than understanding science or being able to put sentences together. Driving by a public school and seeing kids who can’t cover their underwear with their jeans and slouching around smoking makes me think that social activity is far more important than achievement.

“Government schools are liberal indoctrination camps, nothing more. My son was shown ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ during 4th grade and now berates my wife for using plastic bags. He is a GATE student (gifted) but curiously received a “C” after he disagreed with his teacher that global warming was caused by human activity. He said no humans were around when the last ice age melted and for that he was punished.

“His teacher went on to teach the class that President Bush used cocaine and that the moon landing was staged. She had white students apologize to black students for slavery and (said) that taxpayers should pay reparations because slavery destroyed the black family. He was also taught that a perfect electric car was made many years ago but the oil companies killed those responsible.

“My older daughter was taken to a cemetery and encouraged not to commit suicide because after all, that is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I called the school and asked if students were demonstrating suicidal behaviors and was told that there were no reports of such behavior but that all young girl’s will develop feelings of worthlessness and statistically are likely to contemplate suicide, therefore it was necessary health lesson. I told them to knock off the nonsense.

“My cousin home schools his children. His son who is 15 tracks the family’s expenses, the time spent with various activities and the return, and he is taking college level classes through independent study. He is showing an affinity for geometry and physics.

“His reading skills aren’t that of a typical 15-year-old, but his math skills surpass those of most college students. He is reading books about maritime history because he is interested in it. He reads them non-stop even though his reading ‘level’ is below what some standardized test says it should be.

“When he attended a public school in Belmont, Calif., he was put in special classes for learning disabled children. No doubt his teachers had high hopes he would become a dishwasher. …”

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Frances M. writes in from California, in response to my recent comment “One of the points Mr. Gatto makes about the skills George Washington managed to acquire without benefit of much formal schooling …”:

“When my family and I (husband and two homeschooled children) toured Mount Vernon a few years ago, the tour guide kept talking about how much George Washington loved books and how smart he was. When we got to Washington’s study, a room lined with books, the tour guide told his audience, yet again, how much Washington loved to read, so, ‘All you kids better stay in school like George Washington.’ My husband very respectfully asked, ‘Well, wasn’t George Washington homeschooled?’

“After the guide sputtered a bit he admitted that Washington was indeed ‘tutored at home’.”

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Miss Ross writes in:

“Good Morning: You forget the purpose of education is to create a new ‘real world.’ In my city, they now have a police officer attached to each and every school. That’s to instruct the children that they are being watched by the police continually, and to obey or suffer a ‘lockdown’ as in prisons.

“Next time you write on this issue, you may want to remind your readers that free public education and the suppression of home education is the 10th plank of the Communist Manifesto. These days, most folks act as if free public education is expected, like rain or something. And that homeschooling, which has been the norm for most of history, is an interesting novelty.

“So I guess it would be fair to say that the Communists have won the Cold War, since they have gotten pretty well all of the planks of the Communist Manifesto inserted into our lives.”

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J.B. writes in from upstate New York:

“Thank you Mr. Suprynowicz, for your recent essay about public schooling. I recently finished reading Mr. Gatto’s monumental work, ‘The Underground History of American Education’, and to say I was blown away would be an understatement.

“His book, ‘Dumbing Us Down’ was instrumental in helping me make my decision to homeschool my two children, and we are in our fourth year of doing so. I am finding history a difficult subject to teach, because so many of the books are very slanted in how they portray the people and events of the past. What am I supposed to do? Teach them what is true, or teach them what the standardized test is going to ask them? (I live in New York, which requires such things from homeschoolers.)

“Of course, I am learning right along with them, because as a product of the public schools, I got the distorted version. It is very humbling to be 42 years old, and learning the same things as your 10 and 8 year old, I can tell you!

“Anyway, just wanted to take a moment to thank you for helping to get the word out on the largest crime ever perpetrated on the human race: the locking away and dumbing down of our beautiful, vibrant, smart, loving children. I dream of a day when the parents rise up, en masse, and scream for their release!”