Educating our children is one of the most important responsibilities we have. A person who cannot read, write or use mathematics faces serious obstacles in life. The quality of the education one receives is directly related to the knowledge and skills he or she has at the conclusion of the education program. Private education has consistently produced better results than public education. Why then would the president of the United States condemn private education, even saying it is “anti-government” to use it? I’m totally flabbergasted by his public remarks made just a couple of days ago to national media.
CAPE, the Council for American Private Education has a web site devoted to the discussion of private vs. public education. In a report titled Private Schools: A Brief Portrait, the U.S. Department of Education had this to say about the academic performance of private schools:
- Private school students generally perform higher than their public school counterparts on standardized achievement tests.
- Private high schools typically have more demanding graduation requirements than do public high schools.
- Private school graduates are more likely than their peers from public schools to have completed advanced-level courses in three academic subject areas (see table).
- Private school students are more likely than public school students to complete a bachelor’s or advanced degree by their mid-20s (see table).
Private school students scored well above the national average in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP scores provide an immediate measure of student achievement, but the report also presents a long-term measure: attainment of a college degree. “[S]tudents who had attended private school in 8th grade were twice as likely as those who had attended public school to have completed a bachelor’s or higher degree by their mid-20s (52 versus 26 percent).”
Source: http://www.capenet.org/benefits.html
It would seem to me that our priority should be in properly educating people, not filling them with propaganda. What propaganda you ask? When an 8 year old boy is told he can cross-dress without telling his parents, that he can use the women’s restroom instead of the men’s room, that is propaganda. It’s promoting social values, or I should say “lack of values” when school is to teach children reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s these so-called “social values” I’m so concerned about, being Christian, as well as the lack of education our children receive.
Writing about the perils of public education, Dr. E. G. West, Visiting Professor at the Center for Study of Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University during 1976-77 had this to say:
The problems of American public education in 1977 examined in this article are not trivial, and it is not unthinkingly alarmist to speak in terms of hazards or even of perils. They extend from the decay in efficiency of the provision of conventional school services such as training for literacy, to the even more serious hazard of placing fundamental principles of constitutional democracy in grave jeopardy.
The first to be examined will be the deterioration in schooling effectiveness. The second peril is the growing threat of a large and expanding educational bureaucracy. The third is the increasing educational breakdown caused by strikes of teachers. The fourth is the peril of breakdown from strikes of taxpayers facing school bond issues. Fifth, there is the potential bankruptcy of many remaining religious schools brought on by unfair competition from the public system. The sixth is the possibility of takeover of the government-provided system by strong ideological groups who see it as the cheapest and most effective way of public indoctrination.
Seventh, and most importantly, there is the growing danger to constitutional democracy itself from the silent gradual eroding of the power of individuals to use their property and incomes in ways that respect their individual preferences as against the preferences of the administrators of the dispensations of government schooling.
Source: http://fee.org/freeman/detail/the-perils-of-public-education
Public education has turned into a sham and a scam. Disciplining students and guiding them in the right way has been abandoned. It’s time for the majority-population of Christians to join together and raise their voices to challenge such unintelligent statements as Mr. Obama’s.Let’s revive our national values to those that caused the U.S. to rise to become a major world power and to return to be an example to the world that it once was.