As mentioned on the page "What's In This For You", today's government school system is Marxist from top to bottom; and that's the key to the entire problem.Control has been removed from You the parent and given to Them the government bureau-rats and politicians; control of the twelve most formative yours of yourown childrens' lives. Let me help you take back the minds and lives of your children!
Of course, there's no plan here to discontinue schooling! On the contrary, my great hope is to get government out of schooling so that true education can take place. When parents alone decide individually how to spend their own education dollars, education will become as good as it can get - whether they choose to spend them on home-schooling or on schools, whether for-profit, for charity, or for religious purposes.
The appalling failures of the government school monopoly to deliver quality education are fast becoming better known: the fact that Nationwide, 40% of HighSchool graduates are too functionally illiterate to read their diplomas being just one symptom. John Taylor Gatto, a highly-honored veteran of the NY school system, has written extensively of his conclusion that the entire industry is a make-work program for teachers and administrators that deliberately tries to "dumb down" the population so as to be more easily manageable by the ruling classes. I think he's very perceptive.
Dreadful though these failures are, they should come as no surprise. Marxism has never delivered anything of value; it has failed miserably wherever it has been tried. Seventy years of it in the Soviet Union brought that vast empire to economic ruin; and that was predictable and predicted, for (in the words of 1996 Presidential Candidate Harry Browne) "government doesn't work." Of course it doesn't work! Why should we ever suppose it would; human beings cannot function when decisions are made for them, when control is taken away!
The marvel of schooling, rather, is that the government's monopoly ever produced any valuable result at all! Yet many older people can recall a time when schools were much better than today; and I attribute that not to the system at all, but to the dedication of individual teachers, struggling to operate in spite of the increasingly deadly, bureaucratic System.
Occasional eruptions of violence like teacher rape, fifth-graders toting handguns for much-needed self-protection, shootouts by students going berserk (even in rural Arkansas!) out of sheer boredom no longer tolerable, are only the tip of the iceberg. Children are inquisitive learning machines: when they are forced to sit still for 30 hours a week and listen to something in which, during those hours, they have no particular interest, they will and do, quite understandably, seek some kind of relief - in drugs, violent thrills, etc.
Children form perhaps the greatest pleasure in life, and certainly provide the greatest responsibility. It is utterly outrageous that the politicians have taken away that responsibility and that pleasure, of bringing up our own kids - at least for the best hours in those 12 key years. The most important, learning hours of their lives. You have to take that back!
The leaders of the Collective determine that our children "need" its services, and furnish them "according to" that need. Just as Marx desired. And they then require to be paid - by us, the victims - for those services, "according to [our] ability" - again, providing a perfect fit for the Marxist model. Okay, it's true that tax-funded government schools were thought of a few decades before Karl Marx polluted the Earth (the idea came from Prussia in the early years of the 19th Century) but they do fit his benighted philosophy to a tee.
So here we are: Town or local schools form a series of small Collectives, which the Republican Marxists want to preserve, while the Democratic Marxists want tomake it all into one giant New Hampshire Collective with our tax money being laundered through Concord first. Same difference. The entire so-called "Claremont" controversy is designed to distract us from the main issue, namely that what we really need is neither of the above; that instead, full control, including the money, should be returned to parents. That you, and every other parent, should take back your life, and your childrens' lives.
That's exactly what I'll help you do.
So how, faced by these massively powerful interest groups (Republican Marxists and Democratic Marxists), can one lone Governor terminate New Hampshire's Marxist school monopoly? - here's how.
First, if anyone is prosecuted for failing to make their children attend a government school (though I know of no law under which that might happen) AND if the jury convicts (unlikely; see under "Justice") then I will simply issue an automatic Governor's Pardon. That's the easy part.
The hard part, but central to the solution I will follow, is to cut off the funding spigot; for when they don't have your money any longer, they may huff and puff all they wish, but they will have to go away and find productive employment. Their whole monstrous system will collapse like a punctured balloon. You'll have your children back. You'll be free to educate them in the proper and literal sense: to "lead out" their minds into whatever fields of understanding they want to explore, each hour of every day.
You'll be able to do that yourself - I do think "Home Schooling" is the best sort - or you'll find that dozens of local, inexpensive private schools spring up like daffodils in April, competing for your business to perform that vital task for you, responding of course to your wishes as a sovereign Customer. Yourlife, your children, your money, your choice.
One of the organizations set up to help parents looking for better education isthe Alternative Education Resource Organization which catalogs thousands of Private- (and even some of the better Government-!) Schools nationwide and provides addresses for local, home-schooling support groups. An Infoseek search on "Alternative Education" will yield a wide variety of other home-schooling links.
You may like to read the newspaper article I wrote in 1997 about taking your children out of government school - then use your browser's BACK button to return here.
What that article does not mention is that doing that need not cost an arm and a leg, because you've no longer any need to pay the Federal Income Tax, as shown here. And once I'm elected, you'll not have to pay State taxes either. So taking your children back is not as expensive as it sounds.
Lastly, let's look at the very tough problem of how to zap your property taxes,or at least the 75% of them that fund the government schools you never needed. They are imposed not directly by State Law but by Towns whose governments grab your house if you don't pay. Read here how you can break the property-tax tyranny once and for all.
For Further Reading
For the books named here, check your local bookstore or library, or order from Laissez-Faire Books or Amazon.com After using the Net links,
hit your browser's BACK button to return here.
"Is Public Education Necessary?" by Samuel Blumenfeld, ISBN 0-8159-5826-9
"Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto, ISBN 0-86571-231-X
"Separating School & State" by Sheldon Richman, ISBN 0-9640-447-2-2
My published articles "Bad News for N.H. Children" and"The Future of Government Schools"
Lastly, do visit the Web site of the Separation of School & State Alliance.
