Wisdom is not finally tested in schools

Wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible to proof, is its own proof

Walt Whitman

For millennia childhood education consisted of learning how to become a well functioning member of the family and the tribe by doing one’s share of the necessary work and looking after its members in a caring and considerate manner. With the destruction of the family children no longer receive training in these values and thus arrive at school with a relatively blank slate of functional ability and moral standards. The educational system has not made any attempt to compensate for this loss and has set as its goal the training of children to be production workers. Teachers do not use the term “training to be production workers”, instead they substitute the term, “You must have an education so that you can get a good job and make money and become somebody”; the inference being that children are nobodies, and through a grossly materialistic approach they will be made into somebody’s.
The feminine materialistic approach of the educational system abounds in malpractice; however, nothing has had a more devastating effect on the development of children than the practice of coed education, especially during the post maturation and puberty ages. Of the many gender characteristics, it is the difference in thinking that most significantly affects the ability of instruction to be compatible with one sex or the other. Since females think visually and males think both visually and conceptually, in order to accommodate both sexes in the one classroom, education has been geared to visual thinking, an unnatural environment for males.
The most common phrases of females in the classroom, “I don’t see” and “Not always” in response to what they don’t understand, constantly nettles the males. The self-evident first phrase requires the breaking down of the subject matter into seeable bits. The “not always” phrase serves as a frequent reminder that they do not understand the concept of generalities (remember the feminine principle thinks personally). A steady diet of communication and inter-action in a manner not natural for males causes them to want to leave the academic environment. At the college level men have free choice as to whether to continue their education, and many have chosen not to continue. Male college enrollment at this time has dropped to 35% and is expected to drop to 25% within three years. High school males do not have the choice of dropping out but truancy rates and disciplinary problems have risen. At the grade school level boys do not even have the luxury of truancy to escape from their environment and are drugged so that they can better endure it. Close to one million boys receive the drug Ritalin on a regular basis in order to sedate them, their big crime being that they don’t behave like girls.
One grade school boy who didn’t behave like a girl was Thomas Alva Edison. Al did not take well to rote learning and at the age of eight his teacher considered him to be a little mixed-up. His mother took him out of the school that found him defective and read classics to him and put him into another school, which he left for good at the age of 13. Thomas Edison was not only an inventive genius but also an entrepreneurial genius; companies such as General Electric and Con Edison owe their existence to him. If Edison had attended school in today’s environment he would have been given Ritalin. How many Thomas Alva Edison’s has the educational system destroyed?
In addition to the un-natural academic environment thrust upon boys, they must also deal with an athletic environment that forces them to compete with girls. Since the beginning of time males have been trained to protect women, for they brought life into the world and nurtured it; now males are forced to compete physically with those whom they were designed to protect. This policy is beyond ignorance; it is madness.
This madness is compounded by the intense sexual tension of the coed academic environment. Gender exists for the purpose of reproduction, which is done by mating, and most teenagers readily arrive at an understanding of how this mating takes place. In a society that raised girls to become wives and mothers and boys to become husbands and fathers, care was taken to prevent premarital sex, or at the least delay it. Girls were protected from the sexual advances of boys by parental supervision, the chaperoning of social events, and the minimizing of contact between the sexes by having single sex schools. However, with materialism being the sole motivation of the liberal wimp and his feminist camp followers, and the equalization of the sexes a part of their dogma, the only preventive procedures taken were to inhibit the natural assertiveness of males by enacting sexual harassment codes. Beyond that, the only instruction for youth were pregnancy preventive measures, and if they didn’t work, the availability of abortions without parental consent. This is evil.
Children denied a natural home life and thrust into an un-natural learning environment have little potential to absorb academic material; however, the Western culture relying on the three material powers of money, information, and police authority, attempts to force-feed information into our children. Yet Johnny can’t read. More money is budgeted for higher salaries for teachers, more modern classroom equipment, and smaller class sizes. Yet Mary can’t count.
Talking about an issue and throwing money at it, doesn’t work with education. The Washington, DC school system serves as an example. In the early 1990’s it had the highest per pupil expenditure for education, the lowest pupil/teacher ratio in the nation, the sixth highest paid teachers in the nation, and a per capita aid for education that surpasses the national average by 250%. The results of these expenditures were that on time graduation rate ranked 49^th in the nation, math proficiency for 2^nd and 8^th graders ranked last in the nation, reading proficiency for 4^th graders ranked last in the nation. More money spent on education had no noticeable effect on academic performance in DC.

There are other factors that affect academic performance, such as the child’s environment. DC has the highest national rates of crime, assault, aggravated assault, larceny theft, vehicle theft, murder, and robbery. Also, in 1990 the percentage of one-parent families was the highest in the nation at 54.7, and the percentage of births to unwed mothers was the highest in the nation at 64.9. Both of these statistics have gotten worse.
The DC school system exemplifies what happens to student performance when fathers are absent from the home. Conversely, when children have fathers at home the school drop out rate is cut in half, the teen-age pregnancy rate is cut in half, truancy decreases, academic performance rises, and juvenile delinquency decreases. Money is an ineffective substitute for fatherhood. The DC school system could not fool the children.
The information on the DC school system was taken from the text “DC By The Numbers: a state of failure” by Thomas H. Edmonds, but other sources come to the same conclusion that Mr. Edmonds did. Author Susan Meyer conducted research with the intent of proving that children from poorer environments would do better in school if the expenditures for education were increased, and her findings showed this premise to be wrong. In her book “What Money Can’t Buy” she indicates that the factors that resulted in positive academic performance were the home environment, the value structures that it promoted, and the motivation of the children. Strong and loving families provide the environment and motivation for children to learn well and behave responsibly.
This penchant for relying on absolute materialism to educate our children has caused me to reflect upon my youth when I knew an immigrant couple that settled in the mountains of Pennsylvania and started a small farm and a large family. They had 11 children and were so poor that the boys and girls alike wore dresses because they were easier to make and alter. The children, six girls and five boys, were educated in a one-room school that had only one teacher. They received no special educational training from their parents at home because their parents were not well educated. As adults all of these children were employed, some in their own businesses, and one became a nurse. They were all literate and functioned well socially.
What these 11 children had that the majority of children do not have was a mother and father at home with a sense of ethics and morality that became inherent in their lives. They saw their mother and father work, an activity that illustrated a relevancy between what they were taught in school and what was necessary to accomplish the tasks of their parents. Those children knew how to milk cows, churn butter, raise vegetables, cut wood, hunt, fish, water and groom the horse, cook, bake, clean and do a host of other activities that required judgment, decision making, and the use of what they learned in school.
Compare the environment of those farm children to the average child today, who only rarely has two parents at home, and even when they do, finds them functioning as production workers rather than as men, women, mothers, and fathers. Well functioning school children come from well functioning homes. Money cannot buy that and legislation cannot enact it.
I have not gone into the specifics of school instruction because at this point it should be clear that the damage done to our children by the destruction of the family coupled with the un-natural school environment makes them incapable of absorbing a meaningful education. For those who desire more specifics of classroom instruction John Taylor Gatto’s book, Dumbing Us Down might be considered a bible of the failure of compulsory schooling. He and his associates such as Thomas Moore and David Alpert, who respectively wrote the forward and introduction to the second edition, recognize the necessity of mixing young and old people together, the importance of family, and the dehumanizing effect of our compulsory schooling system. Mr. Gatto not only points out what is wrong with compulsory schooling, but also offers many alternatives. His promotion of home schooling has motivated many families to give it a try and with various levels of success. However, how can home schooling be conducted when there is no home? With only 18% of children 18 years old living in a home with both their natural parents that means 82% of children come from a broken or altered home; an environment not conducive to home schooling. Of the 18% of households that still remain in tact, many have both parents working outside of the home, a situation not conducive to providing home schooling. Mr. Gatto and all his competent and well meaning associates fail to get at the heart of the matter, and that is that family can only exist without government interference when it is an extended family and that can only occur in a patriarchal polygamous structure.