Statist Problems

• Youth Indocrination Update
  - Walter Williams, March 15, 2006 [Capitalism Magazine]

• Academic Freedom and Classroom Brainwashing
  - Thomas Sowell, March 13, 2006 [Capitalism Magazine]

• Driver's ed for blind kids?
  Students wonder why city schools make them take course. - Tracy Dell'Angela, March 10, 2006 [Chicago Tribune]

• The Jay Bennish 'Diatribe as Geography'
  - Nicholas Provenzo, March 6, 2006 [Capitalism Magazine]

• The Savage Battleground of Our Public Schools
  - David Gulbraa, February 27, 2006 [Capitalism Magazine]

• Indoctrination of Our Youth
  - Walter Williams, February 22, 2006 [Capitalism Magazine]

• Education's Dunces and Whipping Boys
  - Linda Schrock Taylor, May 23, 2005 [LewRockwell.com]

• Government Can’t Run Schools Like Businesses
  - Thomas L. Johnson, May 6, 2005 [The Future of Freedom Foundation]

• State Schooling
  Government schools are non-market entities. The government enforces attendance, curriculum and financing. Praxeologically (looking at the logical implications of human action), compulsory attendance is abduction, compulsory curriculum is indoctrination and compulsory financing is theft. - Benjamin Marks, October 20, 2004 [LewRockwell.com]

• Teen Suspended for Fighting in Self-Defense
  - Hena Daniels, April 8, 2004 [WTOC - Savannah, GA]

• Allegiance to Government Schools
  Ludwig von Mises understood that the education of children was an issue so important, and valued so highly by so many parents, that it could not be solved through political means. - Robert P. Murphy, June 30, 2002 [Mises]

• The System’s Failing Grades
  - Anonymous NYC teacher, April 17, 2002 [New York Press]

• Bold New Vision of the Same Old Thing: Bush's Education Program Repeats Past Failures
  - Marshall Fritz, January 14, 2002 [sepschool.org]

• Education fraud in Philadelphia
  Education in Philadelphia's public schools is so rotten that the state government is threatening a takeover. - Walter Williams, December 19, 2001 [WorldNetDaily]

• They Can Never Meet the 'Demand' for Free Sandwiches
  "There’s been much piteous mewling of late about an ongoing 'teacher shortage' in the government schools." - Vin Suprynowicz, August 8, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Inept Teacher Training
  "American education will never be improved until we address a problem seen as too delicate to discuss. That problem is teacher philosophy and incompetency." - Walter Williams, July 14, 2001 [Capitalism Magazine]

• Public Schools = Hitler Youth?
  "No rhetorical devices are necessary. Look only at our own government schools, in and of themselves, to see how bad they are. While we don’t want to forget history, we don’t need the Hitler Youth as a yardstick. All we need is good sense." - Brad Edmonds, June 23, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Tales from the Crypt: Public Education Survivor Stories
  - Brad Edmonds, June 12, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Zero Tolerance, 100 Percent Control
  "From the suspension of a third grade boy in Monroe, Louisiana, for drawing a picture of a soldier to the high school honor student kicked out of school because someone saw a dull table knife in her car, we are treated to accounts of 'education' bureaucrats running amok." - William L. Anderson, June 7, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Education College Brainwashing
  "They have succeeded not only in dumbing down three generations of Americans; schools of education have managed to attract consistently the weakest college students and dumb even them down as well." - Brad Edmonds, June 7, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Public Educators Hate Your Children
  "I’m using an archaic meaning: to abandon someone deliberately in the pursuit of your own goals." - Brad Edmonds, June 4, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Math Ebonics
  You have to see this actual test. [Larry Elder]

• Not A Good IDEA: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
  "IDEA has failed to integrate the most severely disabled students into regular public schools, redefined "disabled" to encompass incorrigible troublemakers, hamstrung school districts trying to enact effective discipline and encouraged frivolous litigation." - Michelle Malkin, April 12, 2001 [Capitalism Magazine]

• The Trouble with Public School
  "Our real hopes for education reform are with individuals and families making their own educational decisions in a free society." - Tibor R. Machan, March 7, 2001 [Mises]

• Another Shooting in the Public Prison System
  "This prison system, of course, goes by the name 'public school district.'" - Bob Smith, March 7, 2000 [LewRockwell.com]

• Don't fund dubious reading programs
  Fiscal and social conservatives should be up in arms over this left-of-Clinton proposal. Why allow the federal government to take money from homeschoolers, stay-at-home parents, and others who teach their kids to read on their own time, and give it to public schools that squander the funds on half-baked remedial reading programs? - Michelle Malkin, February 23, 2001 [TownHall.com]

• Education Presidents
  "It always makes me uneasy when politicians talk about education. And they talk about it a lot." - Joseph Sobran, February 16, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Public School Pandemonium
  "My experience as a public school teacher" - Rachel Baxter, February 2001 [LP News]

• The Disaster of Government Schools
  "The government schools, in their continuous attempt to thwart children’s educations, do exactly the opposite of what works." - Greg Perry, January 8, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Like Nails on a Chalkboard - Faulty Grammar in Metrobus Ad Makes District School Officials Cringe
  "Go To Class -- It' a Blast!!!" - Justin Blum, January 4, 2001 [Washington Post]

• Losing the race
  One study asked middle-class black, white and Asian high school students what was the lowest grade their parents would tolerate their bringing home? - Walter Williams, November 15, 2000 [WorldNetDaily]

• New poll: One-third of voters crave "alternative" to government schools
  "A new study shows that more than one-third of Americans now support an alternative to public schools -- which is good news for Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne's ambitious goal of a complete 'separation of school and state.'" - released October 23, 2000 [LP Press Release]

• Our lobotomized children
  "...we ought not to expect politicians to solve our education problems. They will have to be solved by parents willing to make the necessary sacrifices to send their children to decent private schools or educate them at home, for the only true reform of education will take place when the government gets out of the education business." - Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, October 2, 2000 [WorldNetDaily]

• More money, less education
  - Tanya K. Metaksa, September 7, 2000 [WorldNetDaily]

• The Coming Voucher Failure
  "Like all other voucher bills before it, Proposition 38 won't create alternatives to the public schools. It will force the present alternatives to public schools to behave more like the public schools." - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., July 24, 2000 [LewRockwell.com]

• What About Socialization?
  "Through a tyrannical compulsory school system, through relentless propaganda throughout this culture trivializing parenthood, parents have suppressed their most primeval drive – the fierce protection of their young." - Cathy Cuthbert, March 9, 2000 [LewRockwell.com]

• How Not To Fix Higher Education
  "So where are all the conservatives? Like Kurtz, they’re out there trying to solve society’s problems by electing more Congressmen and crafting public policy. When it fails to stop the creep of cultural Marxism, rather than try another approach, they dump all the more effort into politics." - Daniel McCarthy, February 27, 2000 [LewRockwell.com]

• U.S. Schools Have Abandoned Knowledge for Emotionalism
  "Bernstein said that it will take nothing short of an intellectual renaissance to save our schools. A renaissance that will reclaim what the schools have discarded: the mind." - reported by Chris Wolksi, January 2000 [LewRockwell.com]

• Losing the education race
  "An entire generation of children has been indoctrinated into mind-sets that resonate with hedonistic socialism. When these children come of age, what choices will they make? What will be their view of government? When they assume positions of leadership, how will they change America?" (by Linda Bowles, August 31, 1999 [WorldNetDaily]

• Should high school students be bar-coded like industrial widgets?
  "Bar-coded high school students: Is it the 'Mark of the Beast' -- or just another example of the failure of public education? And could your local high school be next?

  That's what Libertarians are asking after controversy erupted at a high school in Elkins, West Virginia, where school officials now require students and faculty to wear a bar-coded ID card on a cord around their necks, visible at all times." - released January 29, 1999 [LP Press Release]

• Twenty-one ways "public schools" harm your children
  - R. C. Hoiles, February/March 1997 [Education Liberator]

• Teachers Unions: Are the Schools Run for Them
  - James Bovard, July 1996 [FEE]

• The Crazy Theory Behind School Vouchers
  "The two key questions are: who will get the vouchers, and how will they be financed?" - Michael Levin, November 1996 [LewRockwell.com]

• Public Education and the Global Failure of Socialism
  "Some years ago I asked Nobel economist Milton Friedman why it was, given the appalling and obvious failures of socialism every-where in the world contrasted with the stunning successes of market capitalism, that most American students still graduated from high school with such a surprisingly socialist perspective."- Warren T. Brookes, 1990 [Liberty Haven]

• Governors' Role in Supporting Standards-Based Education Reform - includes some goals made during the 1989 National Education Summit - goals like: By the year 2000, the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent. Oh well...maybe by 2010...

• Invading Education
  Chapter 10 from the book, "The Techniques of Communism" (1954) by Louis F. Budenz. - "IN UNDERMINING a nation such as the United States, the infiltration of the educational process is of prime importance. The Communists have accordingly made the invasion of schools and colleges one of the major considerations in their psychological warfare designed to control the American mind."

Libertarian Solutions

• A lesson from the Third World
  The evidence from India and Africa can do for today’s school-choice debate what West did for the same debate in the 1960s and 1970s. If the evidence reveals that the poorest worldwide are achieving better educational outcomes without the state, then this should inspire and buttress appeals for increased school choice in rich countries. - James Tooley, January 18, 2003 [The Spectator]

• Anti-public school movement grows
  Dobson, Maddoux, Dr. Laura radio broadcasts boost grass-roots campaign. - Julie Foster, April 16, 2002 [WorldNetDaily]

• Ten benefits of School Liberation
  - Marshall Fritz and Cathy Duffy, March 2002 [sepschool.org]

• Return Choice
  - Mark D. Valenti, January 20, 2002 [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Letters to the editor]

• Arizona Tax Credit Provides New Hope for Parents ... and for School Choice
  "School choice supporters should renew their efforts to put choice back in the forefront of the education debate by highlighting the success of Arizona's education tax credit." - Carrie Lips, August 27, 2001 [CATO]

• Tax Credits, Not Vouchers
  - David Dieteman, August 27, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Bring Back the One-Room Schoolhouse
  "Libertarians and anarchists of various persuasions are accused by mainstream conservatives of being unrealistic and rigid. Oh, and we live in the past. Well, here I’ve proposed a practical, creative, and effective solution (one already being implemented by some enterprising families, apparently). That the idea was around generations ago doesn’t render it invalid – after all, freedom of speech is a thing of the past, but we still should try to reinstate it." - Brad Edmonds, June 28, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• "Let My Children Go": A Christian Exodus from Government Schools?
  "In an era when many freedom-believers of various shades and stripes often bemoan how terrible things are, it is always refreshing to encounter someone who has a definite plan and the will to pursue it. That someone is E. Ray Moore, who founded and developed the Exodus Mandate Project (formerly known as Exodus 2000) under the auspices of his Frontline Ministries based in the Columbia, South Carolina area. Exodus Mandate, like the name suggests, proposes something no one has previously attempted on any large scale: inspiring a mass departure on the part of Evangelical Christians from the government-controlled 'public school' system – or, as Moore frequently calls it, Pharaoh's school system." - Steven Yates, June 8, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Parents teach us real school choice
  "...they will choose education for themselves and their children, and there is nothing that the government can do to stop them." - Jim Lesczynski, April 9, 2001 [liberzine.com]

• More Guns, Less School Shootings
  - Brad Edmonds, March 17, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• The Key to Education Reform Is "Parent Power"
  "The Republican Party would do well to return to its earlier, sounder belief that parents are better qualified to fix the education system than Washington." - Sheldon Richman, March 12, 2001 [CATO]

• Private Schooling on the Reservation
  - Ryan McMaken, February 24, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• De-worshipping Public Education
  "It’s high time that the public resist the inherent dangers of continuing on a path toward a more socialized, bureaucratic, and just plain immoral taxpayer-funded public school system. Taxpayers need to reject the public education nipple and look toward the same market they covet for their goods and services – the free market." - Karen De Coster, February 15, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]

• Privatize American education
  "Such nations are conquered eventually; they do not remain leaders of a free world. This "education thing" is that important, and only our free-market capitalism will bring out the best in our children because such an approach would bring out the best education system." - Jon E. Dougherty, February 7, 2001 [WorldNetDaily]

• More Than Grades: How Choice Boosts Parental Involvement and Benefits Children
  "Research shows that parental involvement in a child's education is a strong predictor of student achievement: typically, the more involved the parent, the better off the child." - October 26, 2000 [CATO]

• A lesson on vouchers from a public school teacher
  "...for my friend to be a public school teacher yet say that she'd put her children into private schools is the biggest lesson for us all." - James N. Markels, August 7, 2000 [liberzine.com]

• Freedom Is The Solution For Quality In Education
  - David Holcberg, August 2000 [Capitalism Magazine]

• An 8th Grade Education [Larry Elder]
  "Most Americans actually believe they're smarter than their parents and grandparents. But the fact is the average person was more well-educated 100 years ago--before government secured its virtual monopoly on schooling in America, and most parents paid for their children's education." See if you can take this 1895 8th-grade final exam from Salina, Kansas.

• Libertarian Solution: Learning from the miraculous achievements of St. Adalbert
  "...this school of 400 kindergarten through eighth-grade students operates on a budget of $565,000 as compared to the $3,000,000 budget of a comparably sized publicly funded school. But the most impressive numbers coming out of St. Adalbert's are the zeros: ZERO drugs, ZERO pregnancies, ZERO gangs, ZERO violence, ZERO guards, and ZERO metal detectors. There is also ZERO toleration for truancy." - October 1998 [LP News]

• School Values, Public and Private
  "Values such as integrity, rectitude, truthfulness, honor, honesty, reverence, responsibility, and other building blocks of character have a better chance to grow in private schools. That's because, in this case, the medium is the message. Consent is the key." - William H. Peterson, April 1997 [Mises]

• Education: What About the Poor?
  "In various forms, the question 'what do we do about the poor?' outstrips all others as the most frequently asked question about separating school and state. The implicit assumption, only natural after 60 years of the welfare state and 150 years of government control of education, is that government is the only entity capable of looking out for the poor and educating them. Both the historical record and present conditions invalidate this assumption."- Chris Cardiff, July 1996 [The Freeman]

• The Spread of Education Before Compulsion: Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century
  - Edwin G. West, July 1996 [FEE]

My Thoughts

More spending per student per year...where are the results? Oh yeah, most students can't identify the United States on a world map.