American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.”
Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference took a look at the way an education system that produced citizens who understood the values that existed before “progressives” took over the nation’s school system, turning it into a one-size-fits-all system of indoctrination. Continue reading
The deadly serious decline and fall of U.S. Public Schools got its ‘official’ christening with the advent of the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. The resulting decline eventually led to the Clinton 1994 Goals 2000, which set the stage for Bush’s nearly complete federal takeover of education with No Child Left Behind. NCLB, among other things, brought on the ‘teaching the test’ frenzy, the teaching U.N principles trump those of the U.S., and a Constitution textbook which left out the 2nd, 9th, & 10th amendments. Now comes the final nail in the coffin for the nationalization of ‘education’, Obama’s Common Core Standards (2010) which is in the process of being implemented in all but 5 states as of this date.
Joseph Califano, secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration declared that “in its most extreme form, national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.” That was in 1977. This month, syndicated columnist George Will cited Califano’s warning in a column bemoaning the Obama administration’s latest education intervention through the Common Core Curriculum State Standards Initiative.