See Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

” In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”

Indeed. An eye-opening test: Read passages from Mussolini’s speeches to your “liberal” friends, and be amazed at how much they agree with the old fascist.

In the meantime, our children’s education begins at home. It worked to preserve our heritage in the Soviet Union, the so-called “evil empire”, and it is capable of preserving our principles and heritage in America.

It’s a choice. Each individuals needs to decide how and where they perceive the value of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We do not all share the same dream.

I think the word is industriousness. A mindset almost as ostracized by pop culture as wholesomeness and mild mannered.

You aren’t educated in America until you make big bucks shuffling paper so you can afford the latest gadgets that you have no idea how they work.

I don’t agree. I think all until high school it is futile.

I even remember an indoctrination attempt in junior high. It totally backfired and sent me the other direction. They made us do a group project and no one else pulled their weight. It gave me the notion that if I needed things done I needed to do them for myself…. and contempt for collective work / unions et all.

Thus, childhood education–as Bill Ayres well knew–is the foundation upon which all other education is built. So, getting children out of corrupting/dumbing down public schools and into home schooling or carefully selected private schools is a necessary and essential beginning if we want to take back the country.

However, my generation of those born in and around WWII is passing from the scene and our power and influence are correspondingly waning. We were raised in a much more traditional environment and imbued with a basic mind-set and set of values that has, over the decades since the end of WWII, been superseded, eclipsed, chipped away at and deliberately drained of its power, and what our generation perceived and saw as of supreme value—things like personal freedom and corresponding personal responsibility, independence, fairly strict morality, strong work ethics, family values–may not be perceived, defined as we defined them, or so highly valued by the generations that have come after us, who have been subjected to two generations more, now, of leftist “education.”

Thus, the question becomes what percentage of the current generation in power or about to come into power see as essential the kinds of things, the values we valued and see as vitally important? The Left has tried mightily to whittle down that number, and my guess is that they have pretty well succeeded.

We think it imperative that we have a massive and fundamental revolution in education as the precondition for a return to some approximation of traditional mind-sets, values, and behavior in all areas of our society, to set this country back on the right track but, after many decades of very successful Gramscian attacks and subversion against every fundamental aspect of our bourgeois society there may be fewer and fewer who are able to perceive that today’s society and its citizens are in deep trouble, and in need of the kinds of fundamental reforms, the “fundamental transformation” that we are arguing for.

As the nation has become increasingly urbanized, and the economy globally integrated, we as a people are losing the sense of what it means to be producers of tangible things. We no longer tinker, or fix and repair broken items. We simply buy and replace.

While consumerism makes economic sense in terms of maximizing comparative advantage, I think it dilutes the experience of the causal link between laboring and reaping the fruits of one’s labor.

Having been deprived of the experience of producing the things that we ourselves use in our daily lives, we are no longer developing the sense of self-reliance that was the hallmark of the nation when it was more rural and more conservative.

The negative effects are twofold. On the one hand, people feel their lives are at the mercy of powerful corporations and forces beyond their control, which leads to the call for more government protection. On the other hand, because they no longer have a firm understanding of the connection between the products they use and the cost and effort required to produce them, a magical entitlement mentality arises that wants whatever it wants now and preferably for free.

Now, taking a shop class isn’t going to turn someone into a conservative. But in my own experience, it was only when I began to see that my own efforts could better my life and that government was a hinderance rather than a help to those efforts that I began to at least hear what conservatives had to say.

http://circeinstitute.org

When we talk about it in homeschooling circles, we come to the conclusion that it has to be totally rebuilt. Many of us often talk of opening our own charters/cottage schools. There is nothing worthy of saving within such a broken system.