September 29, 2014

By: Kelly Diamond, Publisher

If you’re reading this, then you might be a recovering American convalescing over ruthless indoctrination as well as battered citizen syndrome: where the government abuses your rights, and then later apologizes with an election and a nice speech.

So it might come as little surprise that a school district in Colorado wants to “soften” American history.   While the right wing wants to herald American imperialism as some God-ordained blood bath of glory, the left wants to shelter children entirely from the mere mention of the word imperialism.

That education is clearly no longer about the objective presentation of facts, much less the development of critical thinking skills, but rather about partisan politics, is a sad testament to what public schools really are: indoctrination houses for young minds. Both sides are whining about the other laying out their platform in front of the kids, influencing their opinions.

Sadly, this isn’t actually news as in “new information”. This has been going on for quite some time. That there were finally protests about it in Colorado is what put the issue on the media radar. Long before this, teachers were telling children about the Constitution, but never about the Federalist or Anti-Federalist Papers. They were telling their students that Abraham Lincoln was a great guy who emancipated slaves and that Franklin Roosevelt saved our country from the Great Depression.

Typical left-right politicking though, don’t you think? On the actual stage of government, the left wants to control and manipulate the masses through taxation and regulation of commerce; the rights to control and manipulate the masses through fear mongering propaganda and regulation of civil liberties.

How else do schools wind up teaching every president was great, every war was noble, and government is the necessary hero for all our country’s woes? In the end, the most important outcome is to have an obedient little citizen who knows their place in line.

Public school education isn’t new to revisionist history. But recent events which made the headlines have some folks in some districts – such as Jefferson County School District in Colorado – a little nervous about the role of civil disobedience in American History and its place – if at all – in the classroom.

For example, you have the referendum in Scotland. While it may have failed in leading to secession, it has undoubtedly spurred discussions about secession, and has injected that word into the mainstream media’s soliloquy. Naturally, such discourse entails the surfacing of all the pro-secession individuals and movements in the United States, and the need to tamp them down and marginalize them by the government.

There is power in concentration… which is why government remains centralized. Conversely, there is less power in decentralization, which is why government keeps history classes so disjointed. Students will inevitably pick up on cause and effect if history was taught in any cohesive or contiguous fashion. Imagine if children were taught about the Anti-Federalist papers. Then imagine them seeing the Scottish Referendum events unfold. They would’ve known about the warnings set forth in those papers, and naturally made a connection between tyranny and a concentration of powers.

You also have the Ferguson, Missouri shooting where an unarmed man who was initially detained for jaywalking winds up shot dead by a police officer. This sparked a much louder discussion about the militarization of our police and coverage of protests and acts of civil disobedience.

We have unending wars that need to be addressed so we deflect any sort of accountability, and focus on being good patriots who support their troops no matter what. We engage in exercises such as writing letters to soldiers, retracing the lines a little harder on the flag and how important it is, lest American enter similar doldrums to that era when Francis Bellamy introduced the Pledge to young impressionable school children.

As the great Bob Marley once said, “You don’t know your past, you don’t know your future.” Indeed, since we are not learning from our past we are repeating it. We are not learning from our past because we are hiding it from the future generations. That’s why the students protesting in Denver are suddenly outraged. It’s not disingenuous, but that they feel this is suddenly a problem indicates they never realized it was a problem before now.

Likewise, schools boards cannot shelter children forever from adversities happening in their country and around the world, nor should they. The district in Denver specifically wants to phase out the teaching of civil disobedience and reinforce the propriety of respecting authority. Keep the talk of secession over there in Scotland. Keep civil disobedience over there in the 1960’s.

Take a quick inventory of what an average public high school graduate has been taught:

• Debt is good
• A welfare/warfare state is integral to a healthy economy
• They need a four-year degree from a university
• They need permission to use the restroom
• Dissent leads to punishment
• Regurgitate what you’re told and you will do well
• Math that looks a lot like this:

Now take an inventory of what an average public high school graduate has NOT been taught:

• Debt is slavery
• The welfare/warfare state are a mortgage on your future and totally unsustainable
• You need an ethic, direction, and a plan on how to accomplish what you want
• How to budget or balance a checkbook
• How to draft a resume
• Dissent is a good thing, it fosters a solution oriented mentality
• Regurgitate what you’re told and you’ll go nowhere

All the false hope and promises pumped into these kids, who are left on their own to find out the hard way how little of an education they received from public schools.

Look, education never stood a snowball’s chance in hell of being any good when it was put into the hands of government. It’s a tragic race to the bottom on how we can keep unqualified teachers, pass illiterate kids, and maintain a monopoly on the impressionable minds of the American youth.

Government just does a very poor job of everything. It can’t even control people efficiently! What sort of system builds and sustains itself off the productivity of others, and then criminalizes the productivity of others?! Ours!

We need more people asking uncomfortable questions. The people who ask those questions, and who are dissatisfied with the answers they get, will be the innovators of real solutions in the future.  Protect the truth.  Protect the information.  Education is the only tool at everyone’s disposal to dig our way to freedom!