Two laws you cannot break are Newton’s Third Law of Motion and …
The Law of Unintended Consequences
Author: Tony Colle Thought: Education or Indoctrination? Perhaps one of the areas that best illustrates the Secular Golden Rule (“He who holds the gold makes the rules”) with its negative consequences is in the area of education. Education is important. An ignorant populace is easily manipulated by powerful overlords and can be more easily lured or cajoled into doing their bidding than people who are taught to reason properly. Education helps societies advance both culturally and technologically. Education is also the vehicle by which values are instilled in a people. Centralized education has many advantages. It can make sure that poorer areas get the same quality of education as more wealthy areas by equalizing the per capita expenditures. This can bring well qualified teachers into less advantaged areas and provide adequate books and supplies for the students. Disadvantaged students can receive adequate nutrition to help their brains and bodies develop properly by providing government-provided meals at school paid for by the wealthier taxpayers. It can standardize curricula across school districts and could ensure a well-rounded learning experience for all students. However, grants and programs come with strings attached to them. The programs also don’t always operate the way one would hope. Equal expenditure should yield equal outcome but when disproportionate numbers of students are not passing and thus not moving from one grade to the next, the program looks bad. Is the solution to find out why some students are not learning what the system should do to fix the problem? No. On the contrary, the solution is to lower the bar so more students are marked as passing and move on to the next level. Do we need some proof? A few years ago the SAT exam for college entrance automatically started students with an extra 50 points to artificially raise the scores and make more students meet the minimum requirements for college entrance. A couple of years ago there was a bit of a hoopla when it was announce that in North Carolina, students only needed a 36% correct score to pass the end of year math test. (Shouldn’t the “educators” be given a failing score for those results?) In another year, the end of year results were not announced until the next school year had started. I suppose once you’ve moved a student to the next grade it would hurt his or her self esteem to reveal that the grade really wasn’t passing and so, back one year you go! Is there any wonder that in a recent survey of countries and their student’s abilities, the US tied for 10th place (with about 5 other countries)? In another study, the US ranked 18th. To many, education procedures and social promotion are more important than real learning for the student. School breakfast and lunch programs are big money for the schools that profit from them. It is therefore in the best interest of the schools to have as many students receiving free or almost free meals as possible, regardless of the student’s family’s ability to feed its children. Granted many parents neglect the dietary needs of their children and would send them to school without adequate nutrition to carry them through the day, but the success of such programs is measured not on the health and improved learning of the children they feed but by how much the program grows year to year. Schools need these meals that are mandated by breakfast and lunch programs. Could their cafeterias survive on voluntary lunch programs? In fact, schools can be penalized for not having “enough” students on their rolls that receive free or reduced price meals. How many students are bussed miles and miles away from home and spend hours on busses that burn gasoline or other carbon-based fuels? Has anyone measured the impact on school budgets or the effect on Global Warming from all of these busses that take students far from their local schools to another one simply to balance demographics? Children who need to get a proper night’s sleep are forced to get up in the dark of night to meet a pre-dawn school bus that won’t return them home until just before dinner time. Then we wonder why they can’t get their homework done. They ride on busses for hours and then we complain that they don’t get enough play time and exercise (like that from walking to school). They can’t get enough sleep and we complain that they are falling asleep in class. So we have sleep-deprived, obese children driven far from home to satisfy a government mandate on nutrition. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul! How does this affect a family and what consequences are there to families as a result of this bussing? Parents are now miles from their children’s schools. How many parents cannot afford a car and can take time from work to drive to a far away school? It may be that the worst consequence is that parents now have little or, in many cases, no control or influence over what their children are taught or how they are taught. How can they make it to parent-teacher conferences? How can they meet with teachers to find out how best to help their children learn when they cannot get to school during the work day and talk with the ones best suited to tell them? Can a disadvantaged, often single, parent afford to take a day off from work to go to their child’s school to discuss the curriculum to which their child is being subjected? Centralized education is subject to the mandates of those writing the centralized education laws, rules and regulations. Those mandates are subject to the personal philosophies and values of their authors. The US Constitution was written with the concept of checks and balances so no one group could take control of everything at the expense of others. When we remove local and parental oversight of these education programs, we lose those checks and can all too easily begin the steps to a police state. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” we’ve been told. However its abuse is a greater sin. We’ll examine a few more ideas in the next essay.
Education or Indoctrination? Part 2 Copyright © 2009 Tony Colle. All rights reserved. Permission to use this material is granted provided that the copyright information is preserved and proper attribution is given to the author and to MOBResistance.org | 
