Friday, October 22, 2010

Manchurian Education

Roger Simon over at Pajamas Media has proposed forbidding the government from funding any news organization. This is a nice start, but his proposal barely scratches the surface of what the government should not be doing. What about the Department of Education and all the public schools and universities? National Pravda Radio and the Pravda Broadcasting System merely broadcasts ideas you might disagree with -- you can turn the channel.

The government schools are doing something vastly worse: they force you to pay them thousands of dollars per year to support the dissemination of ideas that are genuinely destructive of yourself and your country -- Marxism in a rainbow of flavors, and a re-written history that condemns the founding principles of America, for just a start -- and they force you to send your children to these brainwashing camps (for K-12, at least) and threaten you with jail or the loss of your children if you don't. And along the way, your kids don't even get educated.

Ayn Rand said that it's evil to make someone pay to support ideas with which he disagrees. It's beyond evil to make him pay for the creation of his own destroyers. But even beyond that, imagine making his own family the agents of his destruction? That is evil.

It's time to affirm an underlying meaning of the First Amendment: the government shall make no law establishing an institution of education. Shut down the entire Department of Education -- it is a vast bureaucracy that serves no useful function whatsoever. Privatize every public school and university. Get the government out of indoctrinating people and create a true free market in ideas.

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