David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

May 5, 2008

Government-Free Education: Do It For the Children

It's a claim that liberals make as easily as the rest of us breathe: If you don't blindly throw infinite piles of money at public K-12 education, you hate children. Never mind that the worst thing any loving parent could do to their child is turn them over to the state to be “educated.” That's an idea right out of the Soviet Union and Karl Marx's writings.

Even if it weren't already an immoral idea for the above reasons, the current government monopoly performs about as poorly as one could possibly imagine when it comes to truly educating. As for indoctrinating them in liberal agitprop, however, they're doing fine and dandy. And at a staggering cost that most can barely even comprehend. Is it so much to ask that we at least get some value and accountability for all those tax dollars?

Here in my home state of Minnesota, the Democrats announced that next year (after they presumably are all first safely re-elected this fall) they will try to stage a complete state takeover of education. Oh, they'll find something dishonest to call it that will give the ignorant masses warm fuzzies when they hear it and make the informed people who oppose it – which ought to be all of us – sound slightly more mean than Attila the Hun, but that's what it will be.

The fact of the matter is that the teachers’ unions here are tired of localities repeatedly voting down their incessant referenda demands for ever more money, ever fancier benefit packages (both health and retirement, which are already Cadillac plans compared to the private sector), and ever less accountability for what they produce in exchange for all that compensation. They react to student testing, merit pay and parental choice about the same way Dracula does sunlight and crucifixes.

So they'll just go to the Democratic legislators, whose re-elections they've bought with campaign donations culled from mandatory union dues, and get them to raise taxes statewide while wiping out the referendum process entirely. King George III himself would be proud of this tyrannical end run around the citizenry. If the people refuse to vote how you want them to, then you'll just take away their voting privileges – and their money.

This should be frightening to anyone who believes in what America used to be all about, and it ought to be fought with every fiber of our being. We should sooner start the second American Revolution than accept this flagrant infringement of our liberty. And it should serve as a stark wake-up call to all those who don't already see just how far the left is willing to go to ensure they keep power over you and your children.

And that is what we're really talking about here. The Democrats are so hell-bent on infinitely expanding education because it expands their power base. Republicans, meanwhile, are terrified of being labeled as “hating children.”

In shoveling money at teachers unions, Democrats know they'll get much of it back in campaign donations, as the most incestuous relationship in politics today – which is saying something, given how many of them there are – rolls on. Plus, the young skulls full of mush sitting at all those desks can be indoctrinated to believe liberal ideas, so as to create a virtually endless supply of future Democratic voters.

Lastly, since education remains one of two things (the environment being the other) that Republicans are too gutless to accept being accused of opposing, lots of other spending can be rammed through using the rhetorical club of “education” to intimidate and browbeat the ostensible opposition into submission.

Unless and until conservatives grow a spine and take on the education behemoth, they will have no chance of substantially altering the status quo. And that alteration should be the total removal of government from education. (As well as a concomitant reduction in property taxes, though that's a subject for another column.)

We need to return to a few simple principles here:

• That your children's education is your responsibility alone; forcing your neighbors to pay their tuition is simply wrong. And that everyone doing it doesn't even things out, it just makes us all equally guilty of thievery – save perhaps for the childless.
• That government will inevitably do whatever is necessary to perpetuate and increase its power, for the inherent nature of power is to corrupt. And that any monopoly, much less a government one, can never be held accountable, for there is no alternative to which one can turn.
• That for a people to remain free, its future generations must be able to think critically, the better to be able to fend for themselves and not be sucked in by the inflated, empty promises of leftist beliefs.
• And that the latter is completely incompatible with the former. Or had better be, if such dictatorial things as state takeovers of education and the annihilation of local referenda are to be stopped as they must.

Government-free education: Do it for the children.   

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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