Home Schooling and On-Line Education

StarLAN Consulting Services is strongly committed to the cause of home schooling and on-line education. Modern remote access technology has allowed students to take classes without having to travel long distances. On-line education even allows a student to take classes at two or more entirely different educational institutions. And parents who home school now have a wealth of on-line resources at their fingertips.

Those who have chosen to liberate their children from our state-controlled institutions of education comprise a significant number of our clientele. There's a lot at stake, as anyone who has taken on the responsibility of educating their own children surely knows.

Why Home School?

But money isn't everything, and there's nothing new about this trend in America. Long before the notion of political correctness became politically correct, intellectual 'progressive' elites had their sights set on our institutions of learning. Frederick Gates, Chairman of the General Education Board, a private institution funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, remarked about their hopes for public education as far back as 1902. In the Board's Occasional Letter he wrote, "In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand."  This must be the 'molding hand' that has lent itself to the systematic destruction of the American ideal of individual liberty, achievement and personal accountability.

 

Who's Teaching Your Kids?

 

In 1932, Fabian Socialist George S. Counts wrote in Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order that, "Teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest...[toward the end of]...careful planning, and private Capitalism by some form of socialized economy." Some 'lone nut' in a basement? Hardly. He taught at Columbia University's Teachers College. And he had - and still has today - lots of company.

 

And then there's John Dewey, former honorary President of the NEA (the National Education Association) and one of America's patron saints of progressive education. Dewey had this to say regarding your children:

"Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent. The great task of the school is to counteract and transform the beliefs and values that the child brings from the home and the Church.”

Hardly anyone today understands the Marxist pedigree of Dewey's ideas. And so it has gone. The progression of this trend, and all its consequences, has continued almost unabated for the entire twentieth century. By all accounts, it shows no sign of stopping here in the twenty-first.

 

For example, consider the case of  Sonoma State University (Calif.) professor Rick Luttmann. Currently, blood bank rules do not allow men who have had anal sex to donate blood because of the danger of transmitting AIDS.  Luttmann disagrees, calling the risk of disease transmission “a small price to pay for an egalitarian (egalitarian: code word for socialist) society.” “A person receiving a blood transfusion from a gay man might get AIDS,” Luttmann admitted. “However, weighed against the certainty of diminished feelings of self-worth in the gay person denied the right to donate his blood, I think it is clear that all right-thinking people would agree that this discrimination is the greater evil.”  Mr. Luttman makes it pretty clear just who he thinks right thinking people might be. Needless to say, Mr. Luttman is also passing his views on to the kids who attend his classes.

 

 

Then there's the Annenberg Challenge Project, funded with over $110 million dollars of public money, and with an agenda that has little to do with its claims of  'improving education' and everything to do with turning our public schools into indoctrination centers for the Left. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) (also referred to as the Annenberg Challenge to Chicago) was a public-private partnership founded in 1995 that existed from intended to improve school performance by what it called "on the ground" investments in the form of professional development and technical assistance. Sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation, the CAC received a charter grant of $49.2 million in 1995. The CAC's operations were closed in 2001, and subsumed into those of the Annenberg Institute for Social Reform, an organization that persists to this day. Wikipedia.org reference to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Wikipedia reference to William Ayers.

William Ayers - unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, domestic enemy - and a 'professor' in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicag

The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists. In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC. 

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

The Workshop had been established in the early 1990s by William Ayers who hired Mike Klonsky, a Chicago cab driver, political activist, and a leader of the New Communist Movement who had earned a Ph.D. in education from the University of South Florida, and former activist with Ayers in Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. Klonsky had achieved limited notoriety in 1977 when he traveled to Beijing to seek the endorsement of Communist China for a political party he had helped establish in the United States, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) [not to be confused with Communist Party USA (CPUSA)-ETL]. More recently Klonsky has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago; his academic work focused on small school size as a solution to the problems of inner city schools. He is now the director of the Small Schools Workshop, a school outreach program associated with UIC. Wikipedia.org reference to Mike Klonsky
 

Cultural Warfare - Against You

 

One thing's for sure: this isn't just a trend we're talking about. It's a progressive crusade that also appears to include a smug effort to use education as a vehicle for cultural change via a teaching cadre that has been trained to view itself as so-called 'change agents'. The primary target of these 'change agents' has long been the stabilizing force of traditional Western values that works via individual conscience. Specifically, these are the wisdom and values of the ancient Greeks, Jews and their Christian progeny. At the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, David Horowitz described it as a blend of Judaic law and Hellenistic philosophy. It's the historic alloy of law and value, of personal liberty and individual accountability, of faith and reason. So when Jesse Jackson chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's gotta' go," as he did at Stanford University back in the late 1980s, his multicultural followers rejected the very values that gave the world the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence - and their own freedom. And the destruction of that value system clearly appears to be a concerted effort to reduce the public to a new barbarism, with the primary purpose of rebuilding a degraded and collapsed culture under an authoritarian socialism.

You can spot this trend in the infamous ‘values free’ movement that currently prevails in our public school system. The results are so bad that even the cofounder, Dr. William Coulson, has totally repudiated the concept. Coulson was one of famed psychologist Carl Rogers' closest colleagues. Coulson, Rogers and Abraham Maslow became pioneers of a theory they called "Humanistic psychology," later to become codified in the ideas of Outcome Based Education, otherwise known as OBE and implemented in a variety of ‘educational’ initiatives going under names like ‘Goals 2000’ or ‘School-to-Work’. The basic goals of these programs continue largely unchanged in the 'No Child Left Behind' act co-sponsored by George Bush and Ted Kennedy. "This non-theory of evil," notes Coulson, "is one peculiar version of the 'value-free' disease (which is the same as ethical relativism, of non-judgementalism, of Rousseauian optimism, of amorality - that is, nothing is wrong or bad enough to fight against)...What kind of educational philosophy is it that is unprepared for ill will? It's a philosophy in which nothing is bad or sick or wrong or evil."

Liberals under the Clinton administration attempted to push this to its extreme in with their "Goals 2000" programs. Frederick Close, director of education for the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C., described the situation pretty well when he said that, "The fundamental tragedy of American education is not that we are turning out ignoramuses but that we are turning out savages." 

And if you think Mr. Close's assessment to be extreme, there is this to consider. In the August 27  2007 Washington Post, Susan Goodkin and David Gold wrote,

"With reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act high on the agenda as Congress returns from its recess, lawmakers must confront the fact that the law is causing many concerned parents to abandon public schools that are not failing."

"These parents are fleeing public schools not only because, as documented by a recent University of Chicago study, the act pushes teachers to ignore high-ability students through its exclusive focus on bringing students to minimum proficiency. Worse than this benign neglect, No Child forces a fundamental educational approach so inappropriate for high-ability students that it destroys their interest in learning, as school becomes an endless chain of basic lessons aimed at low-performing students."

"These predictable problems were reported as early as 2003, when the Wall Street Journal warned that schools were shifting their focus overwhelmingly toward low achievers. Expressions of concern from distressed parents and educators of gifted children have come in increasing numbers ever since."

The NEA and its Agenda

And if last year's news isn't enough, let's take a look at the Fourth of July, 2008. The nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C. over the Fourth of July weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as "Gay marriage causes Global Warming only because we are so hot!", "Hate is not a family value," "The 'Christian Right' is neither," and "Gay Rights are civil rights." 

The delegates passed dozens of resolutions that now become the NEA's official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols.

NEA resolutions cover the gamut of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a "single-payer health care plan" (i.e., government-run), gun control, ratification of the (UN) International Criminal Court Treaty, and taking steps "to change activities that contribute to global climate change."

• The NEA fiercely opposes any competition for public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental option plans, or public support of any kind to non-public schools.

• The NEA strongly opposes designating English as our official language even though such a designation is supported by more than 80 percent of Americans.

• The NEA opposes home schooling unless children are taught by state-licensed teachers using a state-approved curriculum. The NEA wants to bar home-schooled students from participating in any extracurricular activities in public schools even though their parents pay school taxes, too.

• The NEA wants many additional (job-creating) services and programs to be provided by public schools such as early childhood education (i.e., baby-sitting for preschoolers). NEA resolutions call for "programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8," and for "mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance."  Their words, not mine, in quotes.

• NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as "the right to reproductive freedom" (i.e., abortion on demand); "comparable worth" (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology rather than the free market); full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women's Educational Equity Act; and "the use of nonsexist language," i.e., censoring out all masculine words such as husband and father.

• The NEA even urges its affiliates to work for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years ago. 

• The NEA's diversity resolution makes clear that this means teaching about "sexual orientation" and "gender identification," words that are repeated in dozens of resolutions. The NEA demands that "diversity-based curricula" even be imposed on preschoolers.  

• The NEA urges its members to offer "diverse role models" via the "hiring and promotion of diverse education employees in our public schools." The NEA puts "domestic partnerships, civil unions, and marriage" on an equal footing.

• The NEA wants every child, regardless of age, to have "direct and confidential access, without notification to parents, to comprehensive health education. That would include things such as learning how to use condoms for premarital sex, as well as social, and psychological programs and services."  Again, their words in quotes, not mine.

• The NEA wants public schools to take over the physical and mental care of students through school clinics that provide services, diagnosis, treatment, family-planning counseling, and access to birth control methods "with instruction in their use." Family planning clinics are called on to "provide intensive counseling."

• The NEA wants all sex-education courses, textbooks, curricula, instructional materials and activities to include indoctrination about sexual orientation and gender identification plus warnings about homophobia.

• The NEA is very generous with taxpayer money spent on illegal immigrants. The NEA not only favors amnesty for illegal-immigrant students, but also in-state college tuition and financial aid to illegal-immigrant college students.

• The NEA is strong for "multicultural education," which the resolution makes clear does not mean studying facts about different countries and cultures. It means "the process of incorporating the values" and influencing "behavior" toward the NEA's version of "the common good," such as "reducing homophobia."

Of course, the NEA supports "global education" to teach "interdependency in sharing the world's resources." It's also no surprise that the NEA adamantly opposes any requirement that schools "schedule a moment of silence."  All of this, coming to your local public school - if it isn't there already. But if you sit back and say to yourself, "Well, this can't happen at my school - it's too extreme and no one would stand for it," think again. Many of the items listed in the current NEA manifesto are already there  - in the textbooks, in the curricula, in the teachers' guides. It's merely a matter of degree. And enforcement.

Try a simple experiment. If your kids are in a public school, ask to see the teacher's guides and curriculum. Remember, all of this is paid for, developed and distributed with your tax dollars. Most teachers are under strict orders not to reveal their teaching guides or curriculum guides to parents. Expect refusal and stonewalling. Now why would that be the case? What's to hide? 

William Harman Black, one of the most outspoken American opponents of Nazi anti-Semitism wrote in 1938: “The initial battle is for control of the youth of the country. The Christian Church, on the one hand, desires to maintain its parochial schools, where the young people may grow up with an education based on the morals and the manners of the Christian religion; on the other hand, the German State wants to divorce all religion from the education of its youth. As Hitler himself announced, ‘The State must control all attitude, shaping influences finally, completely and irrevocably.’" 

The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information

Most of you who home school understand this very well. You know that today's public school textbooks are at best reflections of a knee-jerk liberal socialist orthodoxy. You know that in our public schools, the sense of pride that stems from real achievement has been thoroughly supplanted by 'change agent' instructors who write bad checks on empty accounts at the Bank of Phony Self-Esteem. But the worst problem associated with public education goes well beyond misguided social engineering focused on pumping up students' self-esteem and sense of entitlement. The real issue concerns a poisonous and truly corrosive worldview that public educators knowingly or not pass on to their students. Jean Francois-Revel, in a quote from his 1991 The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information summed it up pretty well:

“The great misfortune of the Twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought.”  

Revel's observation is in fact the defining modus operandum of public education as it is practiced by today's multicultural 'change agents'. So here's your picture; here's your bottom line: When public schools exist mainly to indoctrinate your children's' minds in the politics of victimization and the nobility of human servitude and sacrifice; when our institutions of higher learning are largely occupied by Marxist multiculturalists who despise the very philosophical and spiritual foundation upon which the architecture of liberty and human dignity have been constructed, then your only option is to withdraw your dollars and your children from such an irredeemably corrupt and Godless system.

Fortunately, the advent of modern communications technologies such as the Internet have lent wings to our efforts to liberate our kids from the publicly-funded politically correct factories of socialism, sheepery and phony self-esteem. There are now an abundance of resources available for home-schooling parents. On-line curricula and teaching materials, home schooling associations and informal study and teaching groups have all come together to provide our kids with the education and with the future that is their birthright.

StarLAN Consulting Services is proud to be able to contribute to the growing separation of school and state by providing satellite-based internet access, data security and networking products and services to those living in remote areas.