M.

Tithing Your Children to the State

 

There is something that the ordinary citizen can do, but the ordinary citizen has no intention of doing it. The first thing to do, as I harp on repeatedly, and have said for over 40 years, is to pull her children out of the tax supported school system. She must not let the state get into control over her children's minds.

The average citizen has no intention of doing this. There is a reason for this: she does not want the responsibility of educating her children. She wants to get those kids out of her life eight hours a day, beginning at age 6, so she sends them off to teachers in the public schools. She submits to the taxation, and she goes down every two years to vote on bond issues, which often includes public school bonds. These school bond issues are very difficult to beat, unless a local group systematically organizes to beat them.

This has going on for well over a century. This is nothing new. This is a way of life for the average American, and a way of life for virtually every other citizen in the world. There is great faith in salvation by education. More to the point, it is salvation by statist education. The politicians have persuaded the voters to accept the fact that they, the politicians, have the exclusive authority to raise the money through taxation to support the public schools, and then they also have the authority to turn over the management of these schools, including teaching techniques and academic content, to a group of bureaucrats who cannot be fired under normal circumstances. These bureaucrats are tenured educators.

Of course a parent can stop this. But it has always been so expensive in the past that the typical parent has been unwilling to sacrifice the after-tax money that a public bricks-and-mortar educational program costs. But this is no longer a limiting factor. Online educational materials are available, and they are very inexpensive. The average cost of educating a student online in the United States today is about $500 a year. Almost any family can afford this. But, this would mean that the mother would be forced to stay home, monitor her children's progress, and also find out what materials are available, at what price, with what ideological perspective. In other words, she would have to become responsible for the education of her children, and we know that only a comparatively few parents in the United States have been willing to do this. Parents can afford to do it in terms of money, but they will not pay the freight in terms of price in time.

My father-in-law, R.J. Rushdoony, had the right phrase for this: "Americans complain about taxes, and then they tithe their children to the state." This is exactly what they do.

To place any faith in the electorate to do anything to solve the nation's problems is to misplace one's faith. There is absolutely no possibility that the average American will vote to overturn the welfare state, because the system is in charge of her children's education. She has gone through the system. She has been taught by the tenured bureaucrats of the system. She has read the assigned textbooks. She believes in the ideology of the state, which preaches that, without the interference of the state in the lives of individuals, they would starve, or lose their jobs, or in some other way become flotsam and jetsam in life.

Voters believe in the state, and they prove this by the fact that they turn their children over to the state to be educated. Why would anybody who turns her children over to tenured bureaucrats of the state be in any way interested in reversing the expansion of the state? The only thing that will motivate voters to do this is an increase of taxation. This is why the Tea Party does have some appeal, although little clout. It has little clout because it will not take a stand against the three major areas in which the modern state is dominant: old age welfare, the Pentagon, and public education. If you won't take a stand against these three institutions, and do so systematically, then you are not going to roll back the state.

I think the homeschooling movement is positive, but it is tiny in relationship to the total number of people, including self-professed Christians, who dutifully and even enthusiastically send their children into the public school system. The state makes it almost impossible not to do this. It places legal burdens on anybody who wants out, and anybody who wants out still has to pay for everybody who has not opted out.

Over time, meaning decades, it will be possible for parents to pull their kids out of the public schools. The online homeschool materials will get better and cheaper. The public schools will get worse.

Nothing is going to change until the mothers of America finally decide that they are going to reclaim control over their children's education. Every other program for political reform is going to crash into the shoals of maternal indifference. The mothers just don't care. Until the mothers care about what their children are taught and who teaches their children, then it is terminally naïve to expect any major change in the political system. If we cannot persuade mothers to take responsibility for their children's education, why should we imagine that we can persuade fathers and mothers together to rethink all of American politics, beginning with the public schools, and then vote accordingly? It isn't going to happen.

The conservative movement has never figured this out. The fundamental plank of the conservative movement should have been this: the reassertion of complete control over education by parents. Any other platform besides this one is simply spinning your wheels. The Establishment understands this, and it really does not worry about the conservative movement, because the Establishment controls the curriculum materials of the public schools. It always has.

The American Establishment understands how third rate the curriculum of the public schools is. This is why, for 130 years, they have sent their sons to exclusive prep schools. They imitate their English forebears, who began doing this 500 years ago.

I recommend this strategy: first things first. Don't expect deliverance by a halfhearted reform of some institution way down the list of priorities. Reform starts with religion, and at the heart of religion is always a priesthood. In the United States, and in the Western world generally, the established church is the public school system. The priests are the tenured bureaucrats who run the schools.

Reform begins at home. Reform begins, above all, with the adoption of a curriculum for your children that is not controlled by the state. Reform begins with a refusal to put your children on the yellow buses that take them off to be indoctrinated by the state.

When the Tea Party movement finally figures this out, it will then pose a threat to the American Establishment, but not until then.

It does not matter whether Senator Snort is re-elected or not. What matters is whether the yellow buses roll. http://www.garynorth.com/members/13030.cfm