Peg Luksik: 'Who Controls Our Children?

Educational activist Peg Luksik discusses how the federal government got the States to adopt essentially the exact same curriculum while masturbating the naive citizens into thinking that they were actually developing the curriculum themselves.

5 Outdated Concepts to Remove From Public Schools

5 Outdated Concepts to Remove From Public Schools

Bohemian Mom
Activist Post

In a previous article, I offered 5 Ways to Improve the Public School Experience with Unschooling Techniques.

As an unschooling parent, I often struggle with the thoughts of what happens to all the other children that are still in the public school system. While we believe very strongly in the benefits of having our children at home and following an unschooling lifestyle, I know that it is simply not possible for everyone.

I feel that the public school system is a completely inefficient model for gaining knowledge. Our public school systems are deeply rooted in an archaic mindset that we should consider updating to be in step with current technological and societal advancements. 

With the foundational goals of happiness, confidence, safety, and encouraging children to seek out their own passion, I think it is time that we look at what we should remove from public school philosophy, so that we prepare our children better for the real world that awaits beyond the orchestrated schoolyard experience.

Separation of children by age
The practice of separating children by age only fosters the idea that we cannot work with others that are different.  This couldn't be further from the truth.  Not only is working with different age groups good for development, but it also keeps in mind the highly variable rates at which young children develop. Not all five year olds are on the same level. Why not offer them the opportunity to learn from older children, or to help younger ones?

Having a wide range of ages in a classroom will do a couple things. For starters, young children seem to benefit greatly by learning from older children, as they love to emulate older siblings and peers. Older children gain a confidence and pride in helping others and learn to be more tolerant and considerate of others when they are helping younger children.  It benefits everyone and can easily be arranged.

Mentoring programs are wonderful and they work well. But why not offer that same type of interaction in school?  Institute an age range of possibly 3-4 grade levels together, at least for certain subjects and activities.  Play with it and see what best works for the students.  Montessori schools are already doing this and it works well to foster creativity and self-esteem.  Two things that seem to be falling by the wayside in our school system at the moment.

Testing
When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores. - Alfie Kohn

Testing our children is sold to us under the auspices of accountability. How on earth will we know what our children know and if the teachers are doing their job without the tests, they tell us. Accountability should come from parents' and children’s happiness. Not everyone will be pleased, but if the overall sentiment is positive and the children enjoy their days, that should be enough.  Again, if parents had choices, they could simply choose a school that emphasizes testing or one that does not.

Universal testing of children is no longer an accurate measure of ability.  Book smarts and ability are not universal. Additionally, many teachers complain that they are losing any autonomy they once had in the classroom in an effort to teach to the tests.  The quality and flexibility of education drops as the focus is solely put on what the test makers think is important. Meanwhile, kids are having creativity and diversity sucked out of their lives.  Finally, every answer to the questions on these so-called tests could be found or calculated with a tablet in seconds.  So, really, what's the point?

Busy work
Busy work is a huge component to homework and the need for children to be in school so many hours a day. Relaxation or free time is not appreciated at all, yet we all need it.  Playing games and interacting with parents and siblings is a far more useful way for children to spend their time.  If they are done with their work in the classroom, allow and encourage them to do what they want.  They will still be busy, but busy working on what has value to them.  Isn't that important enough?  Even forcing them into full-time extracurricular activities can be harmful.

In my opinion, homework should be done away with altogether (I can hear all the children cheering now).  When a second-grader is in school all day, five days a week, why on earth do they need to do more school work?  It's madness! Mindless worksheets just to have the appearance that they are always working or always learning.  I have news for you; they are always learning, and usually most effectively through play.  Get rid of homework all together, and allow children time to be with friends and family, play, and view the world on their own terms.

Long hours away from home
We ask children to do for most of the day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.  - John Holt

Simply put, our children are overworked and separated for far too many hours from their family. Family ties are extremely important for child development, especially when children are young. Interaction with their siblings, parents, extended family and pets is vital to their formation of identity. At this point, we see our children for a very limited time during the day, and that time gets quickly eaten up with duties like extracurricular activities, homework, baths, dinner, and sleep.

Cut back the hours that they are in the classroom spent on traditional means of educating.  If we have smaller class sizes, then 4 hours per day should be plenty to gain what currently is achieved in 7 or so hours.  If parents struggle with work commitments, then use that other time to allow children creative outlets to explore their world.  Plant gardens, allow computer time, set up apprenticeships for older children, etc.  Let children decide what they want to do and get them involved in it.

Institutional feel of classrooms
If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom. - John Medina

Schools and classrooms are overly institutional feeling, which is cold and unhealthy.  The oppressive rules are increasingly prison-like. This stifles creativity and curiosity and makes our children accept the life of living in a box.  I know building all new schools is not possible, but bringing the outdoors inside, allowing classroom time to be outdoors, colorfully painting, and encouraging ideas from children are all things that can be done to help this.

When a new school is being built consider what would foster your own creativity, what would help allow you to see the world and all its possibilities.  Isn't that the best we can give to our children?

The bottom line is that no matter what you think of homeschooling or unschooling, the public education system needs a massive paradigm shift. How can it hurt to incorporate new ideas into the classroom? I know many of you reading will probably question how to fund these changes.  But again I would argue that it may not be about increasing funding, but rather a simple change in how and what we are funding.

You may say I am a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.  - John Lennon.

I know there are more people out there that see the pitfalls in the way our children are being educated. Let’s stand up together and make a change! 

S.S.R.Lies music video - 2012 edition - exposes the psychiatric drugging of children - YouTube

How the Public Schools Keep Your Child a Prisoner of the State

by Karen De Coster

Public education, in its current state, is based on the idea that government is the "parent" best equipped to provide children with the values and wisdom required to grow into intelligent, functional adults. To echo what former first lady Hillary Clinton professed, these public school champions believe "it takes a village" to cultivate a society of competent human beings.

As Hebrew University historian Martin van Crevald points out in his book, The Rise and Decline of the State, nineteenth-century state worshippers who wanted to impose a love of big government ideals upon the youth popularized the archetype for state-directed education. Additionally, there was an overall appetite for discipline of the "unruly" masses that reinforced the campaign to take education out of the hands of individuals. After all, the self-educated masses might resist government decrees, and this kind of disarray would be undesirable in the move toward building a powerful, controlling state apparatus. Prussia's Frederick William I and France's Napoleon discerned this, as did a legion of other despotic rulers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In a recent article published on the American Daily Herald "Dumberer and Dumberest," Glenn Horowitz writes:

If you're not familiar with it, the Prussian system was a teaching methodology designed to stamp out good little worker bees assembly-line fashion, trained to be complacent with their station in life and compliant with every demand of the State. An elite of those better educated but still proven unquestioningly loyal to the State were promoted to lead the proletariat, rewarded with elevated status and material success commensurate with their skills and the zeal they demonstrate in supporting the system. It specifically avoided developing creativity and independent thought, reasoning these were skills the worker classes didn't need in their roles as mass produced labor.

Modern education is built upon a foundation set forth by tyrants. What is most disquieting about the public education mindset is that those who believe most strongly in it are convinced that there are no other suitable alternatives to the compulsory schooling provided via the public domain. The egalitarian core belief of these public education proponents is that society is responsible for obtaining, maintaining, and paying for the process of equally developing young minds.

Since the laws of the modern state that control the educational system lean heavily toward equality, federal compulsory schooling is necessarily a bias against the best and brightest of America’s children. Federalized education sustains the philosophy that schools have the obligation to treat all students as pure equals – equal in intelligence, work ethic, performance, and desire.

Such nonsense is refuted by H. George Resch in his article "Equality vs. Equity" on the Separation of School and State website. Mr. Resch contends that compulsory, government-controlled education is trying to achieve ends that are not possible due to the fact that general equality is not only impossible to define, but that biological, environmental, and cultural differences among us are so vast that a compulsory, standardized public education poses difficulties that cannot be overcome, and certainly not by a government-run school system.

It's obvious that public schooling is neither beneficial to most students, nor is it efficient. Education is an acquired good, a good that has to meet the needs of the consumers or else face rejection in the free market. Accordingly, there is a necessity for unique, private educational institutions that cater to the urgencies of the marketplace, or home schools that provide a quality environment for each student's direct needs.

In a blog titled "Farmville USA," writer Skip Oliva presents the idea that public schooling is organized along the same principles as factory farming.

Public schooling is based on the same organizational principles as factory farming. They are both modern procedures designed to replace ancient methods of child-rearing and rural farming, respectively. Both rely on a core principle of confinement. In factory farming, animals are generally kept indoors in confined pens for duration of their lives. If we’re talking about male cattle raised for veal, they are literally confined to a small box and denied any exercise whatsoever. With public schooling, children are confined indoors for the majority of daylight hours and, in lower grades, generally restricted to a single classroom. They are expected to sit quietly at desks – analogous to a factory animal cage – with only limited exercise approved for limited, scheduled intervals. Animals and children alike are deprived of the ability to fulfill their natural desire to exercise and explore their outdoor environments.

The confinement of children on the part of authoritarian figures who demand mandatory attendance illustrates how the federal public school system has become a security garrison with satellite detainment facilities. Moreover, yanking children from their parents and assimilating them into dumbed-down, draconian learning pools based on age and collectivizing their learning experience in a quasi-prison environment hasn't worked, and it will never be ideal for the vast majority of the children. Skip Oliva continues:

There is also the issue of socialization. Many farmed animals, including cows, pigs and rabbits, are naturally sociable and psychologically require healthy contact with other members of their species, particularly with their mothers during adolescence. Factory farming largely ignores those relationships. Young cattle are often denied any maternal contact, in order to preserve the mother’s milk for human consumption. Animals are often caged or together in inadequate indoor facilities which promote the spread of disease, aggressive fighting and even cannibalism. Similarly, when children are confined in large classrooms, they are more exposed to communicable diseases and subject to anti-social behaviors such as bullying.

Of course, proponents of schooling claim socialization is a primary benefit, especially compared with continued instruction from a parent (aka "homeschooling"). Yet as is true with most high-order mammals, human children require an extended period of exclusive access to a parent, ideally the mother, who serves as a model for proper social behavior. Children of the same age are inadequate substitutes. They cannot model behaviors that they themselves have not learned. Nor is a teacher in a position to do so, as one person is incapable of developing the necessary relationship of trust with several dozen children during normal "business" hours.

The reality of public schools in America is that they resemble prisons, holding children captive and subjecting them to monitoring, authoritarian supervision, arbitrary rules, prescribed conformity, coerced abstinence, zero tolerance insanity, irrational fears, invasion of privacy, prison-like security, unlawful searches, mind-controlling drugs, and the police state. John Taylor Gatto, in his essay, "Some Reflections on the Equivalencies Between Forced Schooling and Prison," noted that America’s public schools and its penal system are alike because within each environment an individual’s movements, thoughts, and associations are regarded with great suspicion and are therefore controlled. Gatto explains:

Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch television or punch buttons on a keypad.

Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there isn't any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we've been trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They're like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don't have minds of their own, they are predictable, they won't surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic patent – or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.

In 2009, a compelling documentary was produced that focuses on the control and containment that is the government’s compulsory school system: The War on Kids . This documentary has not received the attention it deserves, but every parent who has a child that has received a sentence of thirteen (or more) years in the compulsory schooling environment should watch this film.

Note in Part 2 where the filmmaker visually shows how so many of the public schools look exactly like prisons. Some of the footage you will see throughout the film is staggering, and some of the interviews with public school bureaucrats are remarkably creepy. Here is the website for the movie, and this is the general information presented for the film (it is shown in six parts on TagTélé).

In 95 minutes, THE WAR ON KIDS exposes the many ways the public school system has failed children and our future by robbing students of all freedoms due largely to irrational fears. Children are subjected to endure prison-like security, arbitrary punishments, and pharmacological abuse through the forced prescription of dangerous drugs. Even with these measures, schools not only fail to educate students, but the drive to teach has become secondary to the need to control children. Not only do school fall short of their mission to educate, but they erode the country’s democratic foundation and often resemble prisons.

School children are interviewed, as are high school teachers and administrators, and prison security guards, plus renowned educators and authors including:

Henry Giroux: Author of Stealing Innocence Corporate Culture's War on Children

Mike A. Males: Sociologist, author of Scapegoat Generation

John Gatto: New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year

Judith Browne: Associate Director of the Advancement Project

Dan Losen: The Civil Liberties Project, Harvard University

The War on Kids, Part 1: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/47708
The War on Kids, Part 2: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/47730/1/
The War on Kids, Part 3: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/47711/1/
The War on Kids, Part 4: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/47734/1/
The War on Kids, Part 5: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/47846/1/
The War on Kids, Part 6: http://www.tagtele.com/videos/voir/47945/1/

Karen De Coster, CPA [rothbardiancpa@yahoo.com] is an accounting/finance professional in the healthcare industry and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about libertarian stuff, economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the Corporate State, health totalitarianism, and other essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings. When she has a few moments of spare time she prefers to do functional fitness, kayak the Detroit River, and drink hot toddies. This is her LewRockwell.com archive and her Mises.org archive. Check out her website. Follow her on Twitter @karendecoster.

28 Signs That U.S. Public Schools Are Rapidly Being Turned Into Indoctrination Centers And Prison Camps

It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being "educated" in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, "education officials" and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction. Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think. Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state. Today, nearly everything that children do in public schools is watched, monitored, recorded and tracked. Independent thought and free expression are greatly discouraged and are often cracked down upon harshly. If students get "out of line", instead of being sent to see the principal they are often handcuffed, arrested and taken to the police station. In addition, law enforcement authorities are using weapons such as pepper spray and tasers against young students in our public schools more than ever before. Children in U.S. public schools are not learning how to live as strong individuals in the "land of the free and the home of the brave". Rather, they are being trained how to serve a Big Brother police state where control freaks run their entire lives. If we continue to allow all of the liberty and freedom to be systematically drained out of our school children, then there is not going to be much hope for the future of this nation.

The following are 28 signs that U.S public schools are being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps....

#1 All 50 U.S. states are now constructing federally-mandated databases that will track the behavior and performance of all public school students in America throughout their entire school careers. According to the New York Post, the Obama administration wants to use the information that is gathered for a wide array of purposes....

The administration wants this data to include much more than name, address and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the government should collect information on health-care history, family income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.

#2 All over America, school children are being immersed in the radical green agenda. In fact, in many areas of the country children are actively trained to watch how their parents behave and to correct them when they are being "environmentally unfriendly". The following is from a recent New York Times article about this phenomenon....

“I have very, very environmentally conscious children — more so than me, I’m embarrassed to say,” said Ms. Ross, a social worker in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. “They’re on my case about getting a hybrid car. They want me to replace all the light bulbs in the house with energy-saving bulbs.”

Ms. Ross’s children are part of what experts say is a growing army of “eco-kids” — steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through scouting and even via popular culture — who try to hold their parents accountable at home. Amid their pride in their children’s zeal for all things green, the grown-ups sometimes end up feeling like scofflaws under the watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police, whose demands grow ever greater, and more expensive.

Later on in that same article, a district superintendent is quoted as saying that they try to inject the green agenda wherever they can into the curriculum....

“We’re trying to integrate it into anything where it naturally fits,” said Jackie Taylor, the district’s superintendent. “It might be in a math lesson. How much water are you really using? How can you tell? Teachers look for avenues in almost everything they teach.”

#3 One 13-year-old student down in New Mexico was recently handcuffed and forcibly removed from a classroom just because he burped in class. In all, over 200 students in Bernalillo County "have been handcuffed and arrested in the last three years for non-violent misdemeanors".

#4 All over America, students are being taught that the First Amendment does not apply in public schools. Expressions of free speech in school are often cracked down upon very hard. For example, one group of high school athletes was recently suspended for "Tebowing" in the hallways of their school.

#5 Many public school sex education classes have totally crossed the line. Instead of just "educating" children about sex, many sex ed courses are now "indoctrinating" children about sex. One recent example of this was detailed in the New York Times....

IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?

That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.

#6 Sadly, this "sexual indoctrination" appears to be working. According to one recent study, sexual conduct between teen girls in the United States is now at the highest level ever recorded.

#7 Putting kids in jail has become standard operating procedure in the United States. Today, nearly one-third of all Americans are arrested by police by the time they reach the age of 23. At this point, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe, and yet our society just continues to become more unstable.

#8 In some U.S. schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school. The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California....

Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they're only recording information they're required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.

#9 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes. For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.

#10 Even 5-year-old children are now being handcuffed and arrested by police in public schools. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year....

Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.

#11 A teenager in suburban Dallas was recently forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using bad language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.

#12 It is not just high school kids that are being ticketed by police. In Texas the crackdown extends all the way down to elementary school students. In fact, it has been reported that Texas police gave "1,000 tickets" to elementary school kids over a recent six year period.

#13 Our children are being programmed to accept the fact that they will be watched and monitored constantly. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending large amounts of money to install surveillance cameras in the cafeterias of public schools all across the nation so that government control freaks can closely monitor what our children are eating.

#14 If you can believe it, a "certified TSA official" was recently brought in to oversee student searches at the Santa Fe High School prom.

#15 Last year, a 17 year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father's lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.

#16 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....

Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.

So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure "lockdown" and "active shooter" drills? To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.

#17 In some U.S. schools, armed cops accompanied by police dogs actually conduct surprise raids with their guns drawn. In this video, you can actually see police officers aiming their guns at school children as the students are lined up facing the wall.

#18 The U.S. government is now encouraging children to spy on their parents as part of the "war on terror". If a school official hears that a parent has said the "wrong thing" at home, that parent could potentially get labeled as a "potential terrorist".

#19 The U.S. government has also been increasingly using "polls" and "surveys" as tools to gather information about all of us. In previous articles, I have noted how government authorities seems particularly interested in our children. According to Mike Adams of Natural News, the CDC is starting to call parents all over the U.S. to question them about the vaccination status of their children....

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which has been comprehensively exposed as a vaccine propaganda organization promoting the interests of drug companies, is now engaged in a household surveillance program that involves calling U.S. households and intimidating parents into producing child immunization records. As part of what it deems a National Immunization Survey(NIS), the CDC is sending letters to U.S. households, alerting them that they will be called by "NORC at the University of Chicago" and that households should "have your child's immunization records handy when answering our questions."

You can see a copy of the letter that the CDC has been sending out to selected parents right here.

#20 Last year, a high school student in Southern California was suspended for two days because he had private conversations with his classmates during which he discussed Christianity. He was also banned from bringing his Bible to school ever again.

#21 In early 2010, a 12 year old girl in New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. "I love my friends Abby and Faith" was what she reportedly wrote on her desk.

#22 Back in 2009, one 8 year old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.

#23 A little over a year ago, a 6 year old girl in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.

#24 Other students in Florida have actually been arrested for bringing a plastic butter knife to school, for throwing an eraser, and for drawing a picture of a gun.

#25 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced that school officials can search the cell phones and laptops of public school students if there are "reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school."

#26 Increasingly, authorities are using "pre-crime" technology on our children in order to identify potential problem individuals. For example, the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders" in specific prevention and education programs.

#27 At one public high school in McAllen, Texas earlier this year, students were ordered to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance. School authorities have failed to explain how reciting a pledge of allegiance to a foreign nation has any educational value whatsoever.

#28 All over the United States, tasers are increasingly being used to "subdue" high school students. The following are two very shocking examples of this that were cited in a recent Alternet article....

On September 29, Keshana Wilson, 14, was shocked in the groin with a Taser while shoved against a parked car by Allentown, Pennsylvania police officer Jason Ammary, just outside her high school. The incident was captured on surveillance footage. Allentown police argue that the officer’s behavior was justified because “Wilson was cursing and inciting a group of people” as well as resisting arrest. While defending his fellow officer, Allentown Assistant Police Chief Joseph Hanna argued, “officers are trained to use the justified amount of force dictated by the actions of the resister, not their age or gender.”

Zahrod Jackson, a 17-year-old student, “was eligible to receive free lunch” at Middletown High School in Connecticut, according to a June report in the Middletown Press. Last September, Jackson exited the cafeteria line with a slice of pizza, but returned for a beef patty after spotting both pizza and a beef patty on the tray of a student who also receives free lunch. A screaming match ensued between Jackson and a cafeteria worker who accused the teen of stealing. The commotion quickly caught the eyes of SROs Kurt Scrivo, who “threw Jackson onto the cafeteria floor,” and Alex Rodriguez, who Tasered him five times.

So is all of this brutal repression helping our children get a better education?

Of course not.

The truth is that the American population is rapidly being "dumbed-down".

Today, American 15-year-olds do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy.

Not only that, our public schools are also producing kids that are woefully unprepared for college. The United States once had the highest proportion of young adults with post-secondary degrees in the world. Today, the U.S. has fallen to 12th.

Our public education system absolutely stinks and it is getting worse all the time.

I went to public schools all of my life, but I would never want to send my children to public schools now. They are going downhill really, really fast.

Just sending different politicians to Washington D.C. is not going to change the course of this nation. We need a complete political, economic, educational, moral, spiritual and philosophical renewal. Right now America is becoming a little more like North Korea every day. If we continue on this path there will be absolutely no future for our children and our grandchildren.

It is absolutely disgusting that our public schools are being transformed into indoctrination centers and prison camps. This is not what America is supposed to be about.

If we do not choose to stand up and fight for the future of this country, then we are going to get the future that we deserve.