February 1st, 2025
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him-
A threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Ecclesiastes 4:9,10,12
February Meeting
We are proud to announce that Katie Fetzer of Empower The Fight will be our guest speaker at the February WTP of Cass County meeting on Thursday, February 13th! We will be starting the meeting a little early that night at 6:30, to give Katie plenty of time to teach us some practical skills to recognize and prevent child exploitation locally. The class is free, but donations are welcome and appreciated.
Please plan on attending that night, and help us spread the word!
REPACCMO Training in February
Our friends at REPACCMO will be conducting a training session in February, in Jefferson City, that is designed to empower grassroots activists to be more efficient and effective in making a difference in Missouri. If you have not been through this training, please consider attending. It is very valuable, and helped me personally to be a better activist.
PLEASE NOTE: There is a $20 suggested donation to attend this training.
For The Education of Children
“Like many other people, I have long been appalled by the low quality and continuing deterioration of American education. However, after doing the research for this book, I am frankly surprised that the results are not even worse than they are. The incredibly counterproductive fads, fashions, and dogmas of American education - from the kindergarten to the colleges - have yet to take their full toll, in part because all the standards of earlier times have not yet been completely eroded away. But the inevitable retirement of an order generation of teachers and professors must leave the new trends (and their accompanying Newspeak) as the dominant influence on the shaping of education in the generations to come.”
This is the opening paragraph from the Preface of Thomas Sowell’s book, Inside American Education. If you are not familiar with him, Thomas Sowell is easily one of the greatest minds of the last 50+ years. He has expertise in areas such as affirmative action, child development, discrimination, domestic economics, economic development, economic history, ethnicity, and political sociology. He has researched and written on education repeatedly, especially as it relates to minorities, and the deterioration of the American educational system.
Sadly, this is where we are. American education is broken. If you do not agree with this proposition, the rest of this article is probably not a valuable use of your time, nor is it a valuable use of mine to try to convince you otherwise. Additionally, our world views are likely so diametrically opposed that there really is no starting point for a conversation. Feel free to move on and enjoy the rest of your day.
For the rest of us, nothing of what I have pointed out thus far is any surprise. This is actually old news for most of us. In fact, Inside American Education was originally published in 1992. Consider that for a moment. It was written over 30 years ago! I was a junior in high school, and I remember just how broken the system was, because I lived in it. Little did I know how bad it could really get. The point being that the terrible condition of the American education system did not spring up overnight, and fixing it also won’t happen overnight. We have to get back to the foundational, general principles of education, because it is those foundations that are crumbling. We need to answer the question, “Why does American education exist?” I would submit that the best answer to that question was actually provided by Thomas Sowell as well (not surprisingly), in his book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, p.130:
“Perhaps the most important of these general principles is that schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators. Those who want to see quality education remain available to youngsters in low-income minority neighborhoods must raise the question, again and again, when various policies and practices are proposed: ‘How is this going to affect the education of children?’ A surprisingly large proportion of policies and practices cannot answer that question.”
THAT, simply and succinctly, defines both why American education exists, and why American education is broken.1 Whether you are discussing the money being spent, the people involved, the requirements being established, or the oversight of all of it, none of these other things place any priority whatsoever on the education of children.
What is the solution, according to Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, and others? The original idea proposed was called “School Choice”, and this initiative was intended to give parents the ability to leave the broken government school system behind, along with the poorly educated and indoctrinated teachers and administrators, the power hungry teachers unions, the woke curriculum, the onerous regulations, stupid certification requirements, and leftist ideologies, and take their money with them. It was a brilliant idea, and when properly implemented, the reforms had exactly the kind of outcomes parents desired.
Unfortunately, School Choice opponents did everything in their power to sabotage the new reforms every chance they got, and eventually hijacked the movement, and gutted all the most important aspects of it. The New York Charter School movement is a perfect example. Now, when people talk about “School Choice”, the only thing being included in these weak legislation packages are confusing money shifting practices that do not address any of the other problems with American education. Across the country, “School Choice” initiatives are taking the country by storm, with much bluff and bluster, including Missouri. The sad truth is that in the vast majority of cases, these efforts are not addressing any of the real problems, but they are laying the groundwork to push everything that is wrong with government education out to the only categories of schools that have thus far avoided most of these problems. Private schools are in immediate danger, and homeschools will be targeted in secondary phases.
School Choice is a Trojan horse, structured in such a way that it throws some money at parents and private/charter schools in order to get control. Once that control is established, the broken system will invade and take over. The worst part about all of this is the fact that otherwise conservative republicans are championing this travesty. I understand why weak politicians support it. There is a lot of money behind these efforts, because financially, everyone wins but parents. However, for the life of me I cannot understand why strong conservatives with principles refuse to see what is right in front of them. Please pray with me, that we can help them understand what they are doing before it’s too late, because “they know not what they do”. I believe Thomas Sowell summarized the task before us better than I ever could (emphasis mine):
“The problems are fundamentally institutional. Changing those institutions is the key to changing behavior and attitudes too long insulated from accountability. The political task is enormous, but no more so than the task of others before who have made vast changes in the social landscape of the United States, or who created this country in the first place. The stakes today are our children’s future- and nothing should be more worthy of the effort.”2
There is an argument to be made that government education in the US has always been suspect, meant to create a certain kind of people that will fit into a controlled system. I do not dispute the nefarious origins of government schools, but neither does the average person know any of this history, nor consciously ascribe to those nefarious ideals. In other words, crawling comes before walking, comes before running.
Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education, Pg. 303