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Public education is in such a free fall in America that local school officials are out in the neighborhood knocking on doors trying to convince families to send their children back to the public schools.
An honest look at the "roots" and the "ruin" of public, government-run schools.
Karla Loria, the new school superintendent in Colorado's Adams District 14, has launched a $43,500 marketing campaign, followed by her and others in the community knocking on doors, trying to convince parents to register their kids before school starts in a few days.
Why is the public moving away from public schools?
No, it isn't because of COVID.
Parents and grandparents, heads-up.
Be informed, not misled.
The "roots" of public education.
Noah Webster, an American Founding Father, is also considered the father of public education in America.
Volumes have been written about the commitment to education in early America, but Webster's own "History of the United States," published in 1832, explains the roots of public education.
Webster wrote,
"In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed...No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
He also believed this:
"The brief exposition of the Constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government; and it is the sincere desire of this writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion."
Webster said often that America, a nation he helped found, owes our free Constitutions of Government to genuine Christianity.
In fact, he once said, "Education is useless without the Bible." And he said this: "The Bible was America's basic textbook in all fields."
"Theocracy," the so-called "progressive" would shriek. Not so, the thoughtful person would answer. The Bible gives us the most dependable, proven basis for civil constitutions and laws ever offered to mankind. Our Founders were smart enough to recognize that truth.
And for generations that followed Webster's dream of "public education" flourished because educators, like McGuffey and his "McGuffey's Readers," followed basic fundamental disciplines such as reading, writing, and civics---using Scripture and scriptural principles as the basis.
Children were educated. Not indoctrinated. Including the atheists. America flourished. And so did "public education."
Privately funded schools began to appear across our nation---most founded to produce ministers, not necessarily intellectuals.
Harvard was our first college---later university. It was founded by Rev. John Harvard in 1636 when he donated his library and property for the purpose to "train a literate clergy."
Harvard, Princeton, originally named "College of New Jersey," and Yale became the headwaters of education for the colonies. Initially, ministers and pastors taught in these schools, incorporating biblical principles into fundamental education.
In fact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was our first college not chartered by Christian educators and leaders. Rather it was chartered by atheists in 1861---72 years after our America's founding.
It was at Columbia University that John Dewey and his disciples produced so-called "progressive education," which turned out to be the beginning of the end for education in America. Particularly public education.
Through Dewey's humanist, so-called progressive ideology, education would be changed and devalued---absent of moral and principled thought and discipline. By the 1960s prayer, the Bible, and anything else religious were being expelled from schools.
Even Thomas Jefferson's promise that the government could never interfere in the business of the Church because the Founders had put a wall of separation to protect the church, had been inverted to mean something very different than Jefferson intended,
The ruin of public education.
One week before school opens in Colorado's Adams District 14, new school superintendent Karla Loria went knocking door to door in her district looking for kids who had not yet been registered for public school.
She found the twelve on her list, but other door knockers in the district weren't so fortunate.
Public educators are panicked. Enrollment numbers are directly tied to public school district funds.
To boost her district's numbers, Loria launched a $43,500 marketing campaign that includes 5 billboards urging students to come back to Adams 14.
She told the school board, that unanimously approved, "It's asking or inviting our families outside the district to enroll so we can start capturing students and attracting students from other districts as well."
But despite their efforts, the district started school a few days ago with 5% fewer students, adding to the decline made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.
At a Dallas, Texas district, about 12,000 students failed to show up for the first day of school.
The list is long. In fact, it's almost the new normal.
Preliminary enrollment numbers for Oregon's largest school district show a 3.1% decline. Those numbers follow a 2020-21 school year enrollment drop, not only in Portland but the state as a whole.
East to west---north and south this same picture is emerging across the nation.
The urgency by public school districts seems to be more driven by economics, than a passion to educate. That's reinforced by the fact that public education is miserably failing to educate while soaring in indoctrination.
Planned Parenthood is teaching our young children how to put on condoms, get an abortion without parents knowing about it, and having safe sex---and calling it education.
The LGBTQ campaign is pushing the idea in public schools that little boys may, in fact, be girls, girls may be boys, and you may have been born homosexual or even transgender---all a lie foisted on kids, in some cases so young they have never even considered such things until so-called "enlightened progressive educators" began the indoctrination.
And now Critical Race Theory is indoctrinating our children to believe America is evil and racist, not good and benevolent. All whites are racist and supremacists, while all blacks are oppressed. And our Founding Fathers must be canceled from our history.
And your tax dollars are paying the bill.
Too often, more time is spent in the classroom preparing to demonstrate on the street, than in a legitimate textbook preparing to "hit" the street in pursuit of one's dreams and goals.
Every student lost to public, government-run schools in Oregon cost that district about $10,000. Washington, on average, is about $11,500.
Remember when communities revolved around their local church and local public school? This generation of educators would call it "community." They are always stressing "community." It's what they had before they were highjacked by the far left.
We now find some states spending as much as $25,000 (New York) per student.
Parents are becoming aware of the catastrophic failure of what Noah Webster had in mind for America, and they are choosing alternatives to a failed public education system.
Home-schooling has shown its staying power after starting as a temporary approach to education during the lockdown.
Typically, a little more than 3% of the nation's school-age children are home-schooled in any given year, according to federal data. However, a significant surge has been confirmed by the US Census Bureau which reported that in March, the rate of home-schooling rose to 11% by September 2020.
In Texas, the number of parents choosing to home school nearly tripled, going from 4.5% in 2019 to 12.3% in 2020.
We'll see what this school year holds.
I strongly encourage you to reconsider putting your children or grandchildren in a failed, highjacked education system that is systematically stealing the hearts and minds of our children, while failing to educate them.
Noah Webster warned,
"The moral principles and precepts contained in Scriptures ought to form the basis of all of our civil constitutions and laws...all the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."
This, not burning, looting, and breaking under the guise of "mostly peaceful demonstrations" is the way to make our family, our community, our nation, and our world a better place.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Engaged. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful.