To most of us, driving a car seems effortlessness. Our eyes, hands, and feet work together seamlessly, automatically, without conscious thought. But we first had to learn the basics of driving when we were young. Remember back to your father’s driving lessons? He taught you how to turn the steering wheel, where the gas and brake pedal was, how to stay in your lane, turn signals and stop signs, use of mirrors, keeping to speed limits, looking ahead. All these basics took time and practice to learn. Now, those of us who have been driving for many years, take these basics for granted. We drive “automatically” and with skill.

The same process applies to another skill-reading. Read a book or a newspaper and it seems effortless. Yet such skill comes from constant use, from constant practice of basic skills learned at an early age.

What are these skills? To read, you have to recognize words on a printed page, yet there are millions of them. Enter the wonder of the alphabet and phonics. It is by recognizing letters and their sounds that a child puts letter-sounds together to form words. Since all words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task becomes greatly simplified. The child need not memorize the word, only sound it out, read it, and find its meaning in a dictionary.

As in driving a car, reading is difficult at first. But, once learned, the skill becomes automatic, unconscious, effortless, and we read quickly without sounding-out every letter of every word. In the end, with practice, we read effortlessly, and all the knowledge of the world is open to us. Without learning the basic skills, however, reading is not possible.

Enter educrat “experts” who think otherwise. “Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word,” they ask ? “So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the boredom, drudgery, and hard work of phonics and spelling drills? How can reading be “joyful” if literature becomes drills?,” they say. “Why wound children’s self-esteem and self-expression with tests and standards and high expectations?”

“If we have children memorize whole words instead of drilling on the alphabet and letter sounds, all this pain is gone,” they chime. “Do not teach them to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R. Have them memorize what the whole word looks like-teach them word-pictures, teach them hieroglyphics, so they “recognize” the word in a book. Have the child read “Dick and Jane” learning books that repeat each word a hundred times, so the child comes to “recognize” it. Do this for each word.”

“If the child can’t grasp a new word because he cannot sound it out, teach him “pre-reading” strategies,” they expound. “These “strategies” will help him “guess” what the word is. Have him look at the title of the story. Have the child look at pictures, look for “clues,” look for “patterns” in the story that make sense. Or skip the word and come back to it. Or ask a friend who also cannot read it. Or finally, when all else fails, ask the teacher. Anything,” say the learned educrats, “except actually sounding out and reading the word.”

This, the educrats say, is the “centered,” “self-esteem-enhancing” way to teach reading. Meaning and context-not basics. Group discussions-not letters, sounds, drills, and independence.

This is your whole-language method (now called “balanced literacy” or some other deceptive name). This is the hieroglyphics of Egypt transported to your children’s classroom. This is our educrats’ pet “reading” theory, foisted on 45 million public-school children-victims across the country.

The results were inevitable-half the nation’s high-school grads cannot read a bus schedule. Businesses lose $40 billion a year for remedial reading classes for new employees fresh from high school. Thirty percent of Americans functionally illiterate. The child who is taught phonics is able to read thousands of words in a few semesters. The “whole-word” child-victim is able to “recognize” only a few hundred words. Thus we have the crash in reading skills, the dumbing-down of our kids, the millions of frustrated teens who drop out of school, turn to crime, and end up in prison because they can’t get a decent job.

Yet, in the face of such failure, such disaster for our children, the educrats turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. In the face of reality – massive denial and rationalization.

Buy why? What do they gain? There is always a reason for irrational behavior, and the educrats have many.

Educrats think phonics believers are extremist Christian Rightists or educational simpletons unable to understand the “complexity” of the educrats’ so-called learning theories. Yet, let reality be the judge. The children who learn phonics read far quicker and better than the “whole-word” readers. And the “complexity” educrats proclaim is a self-serving fantasy of their making, designed to ward off competition. Educrats think they are gurus with special skills no parent can possess. Rather, they are education buffoons who don’t know how to teach phonics to your kids any longer, or don’t want to bother.

Educrats claim that phonics and rules will turn kids off to the joy of reading. Just the opposite is true – when a “whole-language” victim-child tries to read the many words he was not taught to “recognize,” he will give up in frustration. His frustration will end his reading and his ‘joy” in reading. The phonics-trained child can read any word and any book, and the joy of reading follows from his skills.

This learning of basic skills need not be a struggle. What turns kids off? The insufferable boredom, the mediocrity of the educrats’ teaching methods, unchanged for 50 years.

Children learn the alphabet and letter sounds with delight at home. Sesame Street, “Hooked on Phonics,” the Internet, learning channels on cable TV, creative reading books especially made for kids by learning entrepreneurs can make learning letters and sounds a delight.

Phonics and drills are a drudge in government schools because educrats don’t have the time, skill, desire, or imagination to make them otherwise. Rather than blame themselves or their government-run system for failure, they blame everyone else. They now claim it is the child’s fault (he has attention-deficit disorder!), the parents’ fault (they don’t get “involved!”), or “society’s” fault (racism or “not enough money for the schools!”).

Educrats also say that drills and basics, tests and standards, are “unfair” to kids, cause them stress, and threaten their self-esteem. Just the opposite is true-real self-esteem comes from achievement, not from a teacher’s hot-air, feel-good compliments. Achievement needs tasks, content, ever-increasing complex skills children learn with guided effort. Joy, not stress, is the result of achievement. And what is more important than for children to learn that rewards come from effort and perseverence?

Educrats hate phonics and true reading skills because their teacher colleges don’t train them in the phonics method. Teachers who are not taught the phonics method will naturally feel inadequate to teach phonics to children. It is not the teachers’ fault. Rather, the fault lies with educrats, teacher colleges, and educational theorists who have contempt for phonics.

Phonics and drills requires a “teacher-centered” approach in the classroom. This approach requires greater effort and responsibility on teachers and schools to create lesson plans that show real progress in reading skills. The teacher-centered approach requires teachers and educrats to constantly test and evaluate both students and themselves.

The “whole-language” reading method, in contrast, is allegedly “student-centered,” meaning that kids get to sit around in circles and talk about their feelings rather than learn to actually read. With “whole-language” reading, educrats can claim there are no standards, no way to test reading skills and achievement. There are few rigorous tests, low standards, and no failing grades.

“Whole-language” reading therefore achieves the educrats’ ultimate goal – if there are no standards or objectivity, no one can blame them, no one can question them, no one can hold them accountable for their failure to teach our children to read. The educrats don’t want to grade their students’ performance because it allegedly hurts the kids “self-esteem.” I believe this attitude is merely a projection of the educrat’s primal fears-they do not want parents judging their performance and holding them accountable for teaching their kids to read. The educrats don’t want their fragile self-esteem threatened by angry parents who expect public schools to do one simple thing-teach their kids to read.

Government schools are designed to assuage the educrats’ terror at being judged by parents, and being forced to compete in a free-market education system. Government (public) schools’ ultimate purpose is to be a full-employment program for educrats-to give them guaranteed jobs without accountability to parents. It is to placate these fearful educrats that our government schools dumb-down our children and turn them into illiterates with bleak futures.

So what can you, as a concerned parent, do to protect your child? As long as public schools are run by government and their educrats, they will never change. In my book, “Public Schools, Public Menace,” I tell parents about wonderful new education alternatives to public schools, such as accredited, low-cost internet private schools. Parents, I urge you to look into these alternatives, before your children are irreparably harmed by public-school whole-language, anti-phonics, “reading” instruction.

Joel Turtel is an education policy analyst and syndicated columnist. He is also the author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children” and “The Welfare State: No Mercy For the Middle Class.”

Contact Information:

Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com

Email: lbooksusa@aol.com

Article Copyrighted © 2007 by Joel Turtel.

NOTE: You may post this Article on another website only if you set up a hyperlink to Joel Turtel’s email address and website URL, http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com

“Come to the medicine wheel!” the teacher’s cheery voice beckoned the Iowa fourth graders to a fun Native American ritual. “And wear your medicine bags.”

“Jonathan grabbed his little brown pouch and hurried to his place. His favorite teacher made school so exciting! She brought Indian beliefs about nature into all the subjects: science, history, art, reading. She even helped the class start The Medicine Wheel Publishing Company to make writing more fun.”

“She taught Jonathan to make his own medicine bag, a deer-skin pouch filled with special things, such as a red stone that symbolized his place on the medicine wheel astrology chart. This magic pouch would empower him in times of need, such as when taking tests. Jonathan wanted to show it to his parents, but his teacher said no. He didn’t know why.”

“Sitting cross-legged in the circle, the class sang a song to honor the earth: “The Earth is our Mother. We’re taking care of her. . . . Hey younga, ho.” Then the teacher read an Indian myth from the popular classroom book, Keepers of the Earth. It told about a beautiful spirit woman who came to save a starving tribe of Sioux Indians. This mystical savior brought sage to purify the people, and she showed them how to use the sacred pipe, a symbol of “the unity of all things” for guidance and prayer to the Great Spirit.”

“When Rachel . . ., a Minnesota mother, visited Mounds Park All-Nations School, she found magic dream-catchers in every classroom, mystical drawings of a spiritualized earth, and a ring of stones in the schoolyard for medicine wheel ceremonies. She heard politically correct assumptions about the evils of Western culture and the goodness of pagan spirituality. How can public schools promote Native American rituals but censure Christianity? she wondered.”

What’s wrong with these seemingly innocuous classes, aside from the issue of separation of religion and schools? The kids were having fun as they learned, so what could be wrong? Plenty. By teaching religious mysticism, public schools throughout the country are filling impressionable young minds with group think, multiculturalism, paganism, Earth worship, astrology, polytheism (belief in many gods), and pantheism (belief in spirit gods that exist in trees, rocks, and water). The God of Moses is out in our public schools, and Earth worship is in.

Many teachers in public schools across the country now stress feelings and mystical experiences, not facts and reason, much less critical reading and thinking. Their behavior modification techniques indoctrinate children with emotion-driven group think and anti-Western, anti-Judeo-Christian values. In classrooms throughout the country, Judeo-Christian beliefs are cast aside or ridiculed. Multicultural studies, environmental propaganda, and arts-education classes now indoctrinate children with New Age religious beliefs, often without parents’ knowledge. Public schools sometimes try to sneak offensive spirit or new age religions into their curriculum without parents’ knowledge.

In January, 2003, a group of parents sued a Sacramento Unified School District because certain teachers at their local elementary school were aggressively, and secretly, teaching anthroposophy, a religion that combines traditional Western religion with astrology and New Age religion. Pacific Justice Institute lawyers representing the parents indicated that many other public schools in California are now adding New Age and Eastern religions, including Islam, to their curricula.

What follows is only a small sample of the flood of “spiritual” sessions taking place in classrooms throughout the country (from Berit Kjos’s brilliant book, “Brave New Schools”) :

1. “Altered states of consciousness: Teaching students to alter their consciousness through centering exercises, guided imagery, and visualizations has become standard practice in self-esteem, multicultural, and arts programs. They often encourage contact with spirit guides.”

2. “Dreams and visions: After studying a pagan myth, students are often asked to imagine or visualize a dream or vision, then describe it in a journal or lesson assignment”

3. “Astrology: Countless teachers across the country require students to document their daily horoscopes. Others help students discover their powers and personalities through Aztec calendars and Chinese.”

4. “Other forms of divination: Through palmistry, I Ching, tarot cards and horoscopes, students learn to experience other cultures and tap into secret sources of wisdom. Students in Texas were told to create a vision in their minds and “describe in your best soothsayer tones the details of your vision.”

5. “Spiritism: While pagan myths and crafts show students how to contact ancestral, nature, and other spirits, classroom rituals actually invoke their presence. California third-graders had to alter their consciousness through guided imagery, invoke or “see” their personal animal spirits, write about their experience . . . and create their own magical medicine shields to represent their spirit helper.”

6. “Magic, spells, and sorcery: Many parents consider magic and spell-casting too bizarre and alien to pose a threat, yet gullible students from coast to coast are learning the ancient formulas and occult techniques.”

7. “Occult charms and symbols: Dreamcatchers, Zuni fetishes, crystals, and power signs like the quartered circle and Hindu mandala are only a few of the empowering charms and symbols fascinating students today.”

8. “Solstice rites: After seating themselves “according to their astrological signs,” Oregon students who traded Christmas for a Winter Solstice celebration watched the “sun god” and “moon goddess” enter the auditorium to the beating of drums and chanting. “Animal spirits” . . . . followed.”

9. “Human sacrifice: Students are given lessons on death education with assignments like the “Fallout Shelter.” Other lessons advocate the cultural endorsement of abortion and euthanasia as a way to prepare the new generation to accept many new forms of human sacrifice, such as the notion of sacrificing oneself for the “common good.”

10. “Sacred sex: Students get lessons about pagan societies’ appreciation for the “unifying power of promiscuity.” By studying these pagan notions on sexuality, children get the idea that promiscuity is normal and acceptable.”

11. “Serpent worship: Many ancient or primitive cultures throughout history have worshipped snakes, which have symbolized occult power, wisdom, and rebirth. Public school multicultural history classes that celebrate these primitive societies can idealize cultures that worshipped serpents.”

Dreams, visions, magic, spells, sorcery, astrology, spirit worship, divination, solstice rites, human sacrifice, sacred sex, and altered states of consciousness? Is this what our children should be learning? Should schools turn children into Earth-and spirit-worshipers? Should parents pay property taxes for public schools that promote pagan religions that can affect their children’s ability to tell facts from spirit dreams?

Teaching pagan beliefs and religions can harm children. Author Aldus Huxley wrote about ‘new-think’ indoctrination in Brave New World, his frightening novel about a future totalitarian society. In his book, school authorities molded children’s minds so that as adults, they lost their ability to think critically or judge the policies of their leaders.

Indoctrinating children with pagan beliefs in our public schools could have a similar effect. If a child believes he or she can turn into a bird or pass a math test by rubbing a voodoo necklace, then facts, reason, hard work, and dedication go out the window.

Pagan mysticism can warp a child’s ability to think critically and to grasp and deal with reality. Are state-controlled public schools deliberately trying to cripple children’s ability to reason and deal with facts? School authorities would say that they are simply trying to get children to appreciate other cultures and religions. What they are really doing is to indoctrinate children with the notion that all cultures and religions are “equal” and “harmless,” when they are not.

Parents, I can think of no better way to corrupt your children’s mind’s than by keeping them in government-controlled, public-school indoctrination centers. When was the last time you visited your children’s classrooms and heard what they are really teaching your children?

Contact Information:
Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com

Email: lbooksusa@aol.com Article Copyrighted © 2007 by Joel Turtel.

In the year 2000, the five states whose students got the highest SAT scores were North Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota. Yet, per-pupil spending in North Dakota ranked forty-first among the states, in Iowa twenty-fifth, Wisconsin tenth, Minnesota sixteenth, and South Dakota a lowly forty-eighth.

In contrast, the District of Columbia had the fourth highest per-student spending of all the states but ranked almost at the bottom of the list (50th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia) in student achievement. Clearly, there is little correlation between money spent per student and student achievement.

A 1990 Rand Corporation study showed that private Catholic schools do a better job educating children than public schools. The study compared thirteen New York City public, private, and Catholic high schools that had many minority students.

Yet, the average annual tuition costs for Catholic and Protestant-affiliated schools for the 2002-2003 school year were approximately $3500-$4000 per elementary-school pupil and $5500-$6000 per Secondary school pupil. The average public-school cost per pupil was approximately $7500. Catholic and Protestant-affiliated schools therefore give their students a better education for less money than public schools spend.

When we compare the academic record of home-schooled vs. public-school students, the cost vs. achievement differences are even more startling. In 1998, the Home School Legal Defense Association commissioned Larry Rudner, statistician and measurement expert at the University of Maryland, to do a study on the academic achievement levels of home-schooled students. The study tested 20,000 home-schooled students on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS).

The study found that home-schooled students did extremely well on the test compared to public school students. Home-schooled kids scored in the 75th to 85th percentile range, compared with the 50th percentile national average for public-school students across the country.

The study also found that in every subject and grade level of the ITBS battery of tests, home-schooled students scored significantly higher than public and private school students. On average, homeschool students in the first to fourth grades performed one grade level higher than comparable public and private school students. By the fifth grade, the gap began to widen, and by the eighth grade, the average home-schooled student performed four grade levels above the national average.

Home-schooling parents not only give their kids a superior education, but spend far less than public schools. For example, some excellent phonics reading programs cost less than $150. Even if we assumed that an average homeschooling parent spent about $1500 a year on learn-to-read or learn-math books, computer learning software, and other learning materials, that is about one-quarter the average $7500-a-year that public schools spend per student. Clearly, once again, it is obvious that more money does not guarantee a better education.

Pubic-school authorities’ constantly repeated excuse that lack of money causes poor education in public schools, therefore does not hold water.

Why do we need compulsory-attendance laws? Why compel parents to send their children to public schools? Wouldn’t parents naturally educate their children without compulsion? Human nature and history prove this to be the case. All over the world, parents push to educate their children, with or without public schools.

In Japan, school is compulsory only up to the equivalent of junior high school (ninth-grade level). High schools in Japan, like colleges in America, are privately owned and charge tuition. Middle-school students compete fiercely for a place in high schools even though their parents must pay to get them in. Yet most Japanese parents push their kids to apply for high school and scrape up the money for tuition, without the Japanese government’s pressuring them to do so.

In America, millions of parents voluntarily pay thousands of dollars a year in tuition to send their young children to private kindergartens, and their older children to a private college. Obviously, most parents think that educating their children is very important. So why do we need compulsory attendance laws for first through twelfth-grade education?

Compulsory-attendance laws imply that government has to force parents to educate their children. Common sense and history prove this notion false. Up to the 1850s, before we had public schools in America, the literacy rate was over 90 percent. Yet most parents taught their children to read at home. They did not need town officials to force them to educate their children. All over the world, most parents’ want to give their children a good education so they can have a secure future.

Compulsory-attendance laws also imply that some parents are too ignorant or indifferent to their children’s welfare to educate their kids. If this was not the case, then why compel parents at all? Local governments therefore believe they have to force these “bad” parents to deposit their kids in public schools, for the alleged good of the children.

In effect, local governments and public-school authorities don’t trust average parents to have the decency and common sense to educate their kids, unless public-school authorities force them to. That notion is as absurd as claiming that parents would not feed their children unless government authorities forced them to.

There is a saying that if you want to know the real purpose of a law or social system, follow the money. Who benefits the most from our public schools? Certainly not our kids. I submit that the real purpose of compulsory-attendance laws is to enforce a public-school system that benefits public-school employees.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

Public-school defenders often argue that school choice would destroy the public schools. Almost 90 percent of children in this country attend public schools. If we had vouchers, no compulsory attendance laws, and an unregulated education free market, millions of parents might transfer their children to private schools. This would drain hundreds of millions of tax dollars from public schools. Those children left behind in the shriveled public schools would then get an even worse education than they do now. Therefore, the argument goes, we have to fight school choice to protect the public schools.

School authorities use the same argument against charter schools. Charter schools are public schools controlled by parent-teacher boards, not central school authorities. School authorities claim that charter schools, like vouchers, divert millions of taxpayer dollars from regular public schools, and can therefore undermine these schools. Public schools may have serious problems, school authorities say, but almost forty-five million American children attend these schools. Allowing school choice would “threaten” these children’s education.

Public-school apologists argue that, despite these schools’ never-ending failure and betrayal of our children, we should just keep using the same old failed solutions — spend more money, hire more teachers, and reduce class sizes — and hope we get better results (which of course we never will).

In the meantime, what happens to forty-five million public-school children? In effect, school authorities’ don’t care about what happens to children who are forced to stay — but rather what happens to the public-school system if they are free to leave. By this reasoning, no matter how bad the schools get, we must not help children leave because that might make the public schools worse. That is like asking a parent to stop her child from escaping from a prison because doing so would upset the warden.

The question therefore is, do our children exist to serve the public-school system or should our education system exist to serve our children?

It seems that school authorities and public-school employees would rather protect an irreparably broken, failed system, than risk the security of their jobs by giving parents real school choice. We can certainly understand public-school employees wanting to keep their guaranteed job security. However, should we sacrifice our children’s education to keep failed public schools in business?

The argument that vouchers, charter schools, and other school-choice alternatives might destroy the public schools is one of the best arguments for school choice. Government-controlled public schools, not school choice, can cripple our children’s education and banish millions of inner-city kids to a lifetime of poverty and ignorance. We need to scrap the public school system, once and for all, and the sooner the better.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

The notion that only state-approved, licensed teachers can guarantee children a good education is proven wrong by history. In ancient Athens, the birthplace of logic, science, philosophy, and Western civilization, city authorities did not require teachers to be licensed. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle did not have to get a teaching license from Athenian bureaucrats to open up their Academies. A teacher’s success came only from his competence, reputation, and popularity. Students and their parents paid a teacher only if they thought he was worth the money. Competition and an education free market created great teachers in ancient Greece.

Parents in America gave their children a superior education at home or in small grammar or religious schools for over two hundred years before we had public schools or licensed teachers. School authorities’ claim that teachers have to be licensed for our children to get a quality education, is therefore false.

Today, in millions of companies across America, bosses or their managers teach new employees job skills, from the simplest to the most complex. Private schools and trade schools teach millions of students valuable, practical skills. Thousands of college professors with masters or doctorate degrees in the subject they teach, instruct hundreds of thousands of college students in subjects ranging from philosophy to electrical engineering. Over a million home-schooling parents teach their children reading, writing, and math with learn-to-read or learn-math books, computer-learning software and other teaching materials. All these teachers are not licensed yet they often give children a far better education than licensed public-school teachers.

Teacher licensing laws are simply a bureaucratic invention of our government-run public schools, an invention that we can do without, thank you.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

Low taxes meant that workers or business owners kept most of their wages or profits to spend on themselves or their businesses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had the right to keep what they earned. The combination of a free economy, political liberty, strict protection of property rights, and a small federal government was the spark plug that turned America into the most productive nation on Earth.

The Founding Fathers created a brilliant political structure, but they also made some serious mistakes; there were holes in the dam right from the start. Unfortunately, the Constitution gave the federal government the right to coin money, ‘regulate commerce,’ and ‘promote the general welfare’ of the nation. At the time, these phrases were strictly interpreted and government
interference in the economy was minor.

But gradually those general phrases took on an ominous new meaning as the country’s moral-political philosophy took a sharp turn to the left. Over the years, like a spreading malignant cancer, government’s right to ‘regulate commerce among the states’ and ‘protect the general welfare’ turned into government’s right to strangle our economy with hundreds of thousands of regulations, and create the Welfare State.

The dominant political doctrine ruling America today is socialism. Socialism rests on the idea that compassion is a moral and political duty, not a personal choice. Under the socialist Welfare or Entitlement State, government forces us to help others, whether we like it or not. Compassion has been turned into compulsion. As a result, the guiding principles of our Founding Fathers have been all but forgotten. Limited government and the scrupulous protection of our property rights are just a fading memory. In their place, government is again telling us that ‘society’ or the collective is more important than you and I. Socialist liberals tell us that the ‘public good’ and the economic ‘rights’ of the needy are more important than our liberty.

Need, not individual rights, has become the ruling principle of our time. Government uses regulations and entitlement programs to allegedly protect the common good and create a safety net for everyone. Our government now forces us to live by Karl Marx’s dogma of socialism and communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

That’s what a welfare state is all about. And when I say welfare I don’t mean simply for the poor, but for everyone. Most government subsidy, insurance, and entitlement programs are a form of welfare. Government taxes us to pay for food stamps, Medicare, bank bailouts, rent subsidies, farm subsidies, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and handouts to corporations. There’s an endless list of programs that benefit every conceivable pressure group.

Three entitlement programs are the powder keg behind exploding federal deficits: Medicare, Social Security, and federal pensions. In 2005, they accounted for over 75 percent of all federal entitlements. These programs’ millions of beneficiaries are not welfare recipients — they are middle-class retirees. Almost 75 percent of federal benefits are paid with no regard to a person’s financial status, and only about 17 percent of these benefits help Americans get out of poverty.

If we add up all the taxes we pay, including sales taxes, property taxes, Social Security taxes, city, state, and federal income taxes, and hundreds of business taxes passed on to consumers, we’ll find that government takes anywhere from 35 percent to 50 percent of our income. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords took about 20 percent of their serfs’ crops to pay for the lords’ protection. The medieval serfs of Europe were taxed less than the new middle-class serfs of America.

It doesn’t matter that we voted ourselves into serfdom. If government confiscates 40 percent of your salary or profits, it doesn’t matter if your ruler is a dictator, a medieval lord, or the ‘will of the majority.’ Our Founding Fathers didn’t base our government on unlimited majority rule. They had a healthy fear and scepticism about human nature, and men’s lust for power. Instead, they designed a political structure to protect us against majority rule. For example, freedom of speech and religion protects us against a majority mob that may not like what we say or who we pray to. That’s the purpose of the Bill of Rights and Constitution — to protect us against the whims, greed, or stupidity of the majority.

Majority rule doesn’t sanction or guarantee personal liberty. Instead, it usually violates personal liberty. A majority of the German people voted the Nazi party into office and approved most of its policies. Our own government has become dangerous precisely because it uses majority rule to justify violating our individual rights.

Our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves if they saw what has happened to the Republic they so carefully crafted in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They would be horrified that the monster they feared most, unlimited majority rule, has been unleashed and holds sway over our country and our future.

This policy simply justifies stealing from those people who earn more than others. And since there’s always someone richer or poorer than you, the progressive income tax leads to universal looting, on a massive scale. Through the progressive income-tax system, everyone steals from the next victim above him on the economic ladder. Paying your “fair share” of taxes appeals to looters or parasites who have no idea how wealth is created or why it’s wrong to steal. To see what fair share really means, imagine the following. You have $10,000 saved in your local bank. You worked for ten years to save this money. The bank then gets a new “progressive” manager. The manager finds that most of the bank’s customers have less than $500 in deposits, which he thinks is grossly unfair. So he makes new rules for the bank. He sends you a letter telling you that he is going to “redistribute” your $10,000 to all his poorer depositors so that everyone has their “fair share.”

Do you think the bank manager should be arrested or sent to the loony bin? What if the government passes a law that lets him get away with this theft? You know that the bank manager has no right to “redistribute” your money. Does the government? Yet progressive income taxes and entitlement programs do exactly the same thing the bank manager did.

In 2005, if you earned $80,000, you now pay a 28 percent income-tax rate, or $22,400 in Federal income taxes. A person who earns $28,000 a year now pays a 15 percent income-tax rate, or $4200 in Federal income taxes.

If you pay $22,400 in income taxes, do you get five times more in services from the Federal government than the person who paid only $4200 in taxes? No you do not–you get the same “services.” In effect, those who earn higher incomes are looted far more than low-income earners to pay for Welfare/Entitlement programs that are now devouring our country. By what right?

What is the excuse that liberals make to justify this legalized looting of people who earn more than others. Simply this, that low-income earners need more money for all the goods and services they are “entitled” to. Since higher-income earners have more money, they claim, these higher-income earners have a moral “duty” to hand over their “excess” money to the “less fortunate.” In other words, they say “you have the money, we want it, so we’ll take it from you, and we’ll use the progressive income tax to do this.

In effect, the federal government becomes a fence for stolen property. Well, any mugger does the same thing when he puts a gun to your head and says, “your money or your life.” The mugger sees that you have money, he wants it, so he has decided to take your money at the point of a gun. Our government income-tax collectors are simply legalized muggers who loot our money through the progressive income tax. In a free society, the taxes a person pays should depend on the services he gets from government, his agent.

We should only pay for services that we personally use or benefit from. We could devise a system where each of us paid taxes for government services we bought — a voluntary trade between a citizen and his agent. But this system would be possible only if America had a small, limited government.

This goal is entirely possible. In 1914, the entire federal government’s budget was only $725 million. The 2005 fiscal-year
budget was over $2 trillion, a 2000-percent increase from 1914. Why the incredible difference? The income-tax revolutionized the
role of government from limited agent to safety-net builder. It gave government the income-raising tool it needed to create our devouring Welfare/Entitlement State. We could have a contractual tax system if we reduced government to its size in 1914. A
contractual system would be easy then, because the budget would be so small.

Imagine that the annual federal budget is $750 million because we phased out regulations and entitlement programs. To be more realistic, let’s increase the budget to $75 billion (one hundred times the amount in 1914) to account for inflation, defense costs, and the general increase in population. The United States today has a population of about 250 million people. If we had a simple flat tax calculated by dividing the total budget of $75 billion by the population of 250 million, the tax per person would be $300 a year. Do you think you could afford $300 for taxes?

This figure also excludes money the federal government collects from other taxes, such as excise, tariffs, and user fees, which were its primary taxes before 1913. These extra taxes would further reduce the income taxes needed and give government more funds to work with. Most of us would be so happy about our low tax bill that we wouldn’t want to bother with a complicated contractual tax system. We would be happy to pay the $300 and be done with it.

Except for this small tax, you could keep everything you earned. Add up all the taxes you now pay and then subtract $300. Everything else would be yours. But low taxes are possible only if we totally reject the philosophy behind the Welfare/Entitlement State. We pay heavy taxes only because we have thousands of regulations and entitlement programs and millions of government bureaucrats. The Welfare/Entitlement State and out-of-control government can be swept away only when we reject the idea that helping others is a moral and political duty instead of a personal choice.

Until then, the Welfare/Entitlement State forces us to help others at the point of a legislative gun. Our paychecks and savings accounts are no longer private property to be scrupulously protected and used for our own benefit. Instead, liberals assume that your salary, profits, and property are collectively owned. They assume that your income is a national resource they can give away to anyone who “needs” it. They assume that the only person who has no right to your money is you, the person who earned it. Are they right? Should you let them get away with that? Does your hard-earned money belong to you, or to any looting moocher who wants to steal it from you?

The next time you go into a voting booth, ask yourself these questions. Every liberal, most Democrats, and too many Republicans believe in the welfare-state philosophy. Vote only for those who don’t believe this.

Compulsory education means that in America, contrary to the common view, we no longer live in the land of the free. Local and state governments that claim the right to control our children’s education also claim, in effect, that they own our children’s minds and lives for twelve years. That is an appallingly arrogant claim, especially in America.

One reason public schools get away with educational murder, year after year, is because local governments violate parents’ liberty and parental rights with impunity. Local governments don’t own or run food stores, auto showrooms, office-supply stores, or pre-schools and private colleges in America. Yet they own the public schools and control 1st through 12th grade education in America.

Do government officials have any right to dictate how we should educate our children? To answer this question, we have to examine what our Founding Fathers understood to be the real function of government. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson clearly stated the moral nature and purpose of government:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”

The Declaration of Independence affirms that we have natural rights as human beings to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It establishes the principle that we, the people, acting individually and by free consent, created our government only to protect and secure our natural rights as human beings. That is government’s sole legitimate function.

Look again at the phrase from the Declaration that says, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The “governed” means all the people, not just some, not a minority, and not a majority. It means that all citizens, including parents, have the same inalienable rights.

That phrase also means that government is our agent, not our master. It means that we, as free human beings, voluntarily grant limited powers to government for a specific purpose, to protect our natural rights. It means that government should only have those powers we specifically grant to it for that purpose.

Yet, nowhere in the Constitution is the word “education” mentioned. The Constitution did not give the federal government any right or power to control how parents educate their children. By implication, state governments do not have any such right or power either, because such a power would violate our fundamental liberties.

Nature and justice confirm that parents have the right to decide who educates their children. Like parents of all species, most human parents protect and nurture their children and teach them the skills and knowledge they need to survive. Parents in all cultures make teaching their children a first priority. Since reading, writing, and arithmetic are skills needed to prosper in a modern society, it stands to reason that most parents will find a way to teach these skills to their children if the means are available.

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.

About the author:
Joel Turtel is the author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children.” Website:
http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com, Email: lbooksusa@aol.com, Phone: 718-447-7348.

However, many studies show that smaller class size does not guarantee that children get a better education. The pupil-to-teacher ratio in public schools in the mid-1960s was about 24 to 1. This ratio dropped to about 17 to 1 by the early 1990s, which means the average class size fell by 28 percent. Yet, during the same time period, SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test)
test scores fell from 954 to 896, a decline of 58 points or 6 percent. In other words, student academic achievement (as measured by SAT scores) dropped at the same time that class sizes got smaller.

Eric Hanushek, a University of Rochester economist, examined 277 published studies on the effects of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. He found that only 15 percent of these studies showed a positive improvement in achievement with smaller class size, 72 percent found no statistically significant effect, and 13 percent found a negative effect on achievement.

It seems to go against common sense that student academic achievement could drop with smaller class sizes. One reason this happens in public schools is that when class sizes drop, schools have to create more classes to cover all the students in the school. Schools then have to hire more teachers for the increased number of classes. However, public schools across the country are already having trouble finding qualified teachers to fill their classrooms. As a result, when reduced class sizes increase the need for more teachers, schools then often have to hire less-qualified teachers.

As we might expect, teacher quality is far more important than class size in determining how children do in school. William Sanders at the University of Tennessee studied this issue. He found that teacher quality is almost twenty times more important
than class size in determining students’ academic achievement in class. As a result, reducing class sizes can lead to the contrary effect of hurting students’ education, rather than helping.

Similarly, a study on class size by policy analyst Jennifer Buckingham of the Sydney-based Center for Independent Studies found no reliable evidence that students in smaller classes do better academically or that teachers spend significantly more time with them in these classes. Buckingham concluded that a 20 percent class-size reduction cost the Australian government an extra $1,150 per student, yet added only an additional two minutes of instruction per day for each child.

Reducing class sizes can’t solve the underlying problems with public schools. No matter how small classes become, nothing will help if the teachers are ill-trained or their teaching methods are useless or destructive. For example, if teachers use whole-language or “balanced” reading instruction, they can cripple students’ ability to read no matter how small the classes are. Even if classrooms had one teacher for every student, that child’s ability to read could still be crippled if the teacher used these reading-instruction methods.

Here’s an analogy on this issue of class size vs. teaching methods: Suppose a horseback-riding instructor was teaching one little girl to ride. This instructor’s teaching method was to tell the bewildered girl to sit backwards on the horse, facing the horse’s rump, and control the horse by holding its tail. Does it matter that the student-teacher ratio in this horseback-riding class is one-to-one if the instructor is an idiot or uses bad teaching methods?

Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.