A system designed to create "a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
A system designed to create "a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Part 1 is here.
Lesson 3: The oppression and the lies that were accepted by the public showed a profound lack of critical thinking and exposed the level of cowardice and corruption of many social institutions. Even now, the COVID jabs continue to wreak havoc on our people. The evidence is overwhelming and easily found by anyone who cares to look, but it is still suppressed by corporate media.
Romans 12 calls us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Sadly, the opposite occurred with the vast majority of churches. Perhaps part of that problem is the politically convenient misinterpretation of Romans 13 where we are called to be obedient to authority. Any government that rewards evil and punishes good should obviously be resisted. Any government that violates the Constitution through demands that people submit to injections, close businesses and restricts assembly, movement (and even breathing!) for a concocted “emergency” has lost its delegated authority from God in those areas.
Where are the calls for justice and the warnings against the continued genocidal “recommendations” and remaining mandates? In the future, how will our churches respond to proposed climate lockdowns or other “emergencies?” I think we have a fairly good idea.
Lesson score on resisting a sociopathic government: Fail
Homework: The original structure of our government was given to us through the providence of God and the sacrifices of our ancestors. As government corruption becomes more evident and flagrant, we are told to simply accept it and be good citizens—with “good” being defined by state actors who betray the Constitution. So, what shall we do?
For those of us who have recovered from our public school indoctrination, it would seem obvious at this point that we should not look to so-called “leaders” wherever they may reside and instead look to our collective power of “do not comply.” It takes courage to be among the first to say no to unlawful government actions. The New Testament presents our ultimate role model and He was fearless. Jesus practiced civil disobedience and so should we when our government violates our laws and our civil rights.
Lesson 1: “Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded – and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.” Friedrich Hayek.
It should be apparent by now that both state governments and the federal government were not acting with constitutionally permissible authority regarding COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns. In the state of Texas, citizens are ostensibly protected from the predations of a coercive state government by the Texas Bill of Rights. You will search in vain to find any section of the Texas Constitution that allows the kind of actions taken by the governor to restrict, threaten and harass citizens through his ex cathedra dictates prompted by a supposed emergency. However, Article 1 Section 29 of the Texas Constitution prohibits such actions:
To guard against transgressions of the high powers herein delegated, we declare that every thing in this ‘Bill of Rights’ is excepted out of the general powers of government, and shall forever remain inviolate, and all laws contrary thereto, or to the following provisions, shall be void.
Although a few Republican Party committees in Texas at the county level censured the governor for his egregious actions, there has been mostly silence from the political class that rules the state. Bills attempting to put limits on the governor’s emergency authority have failed. And that is the first lesson not learned. We cannot rely on politicians to “save” us from actions taken by the state that are effectively unlawful and harmful. At this point, there is nothing impeding future draconian, constitution-violating restrictions and, in fact, there is now a politically uncontested precedent.
Lesson score on understanding and enforcing the constitutional limits on government: Fail.
Lesson 2: It has been well known for many years that the CDC and FDA have been “captured” by the pharmaceutical industry. Here are just two examples from the long, sordid history of the government-pharmaceutical industrial complex: in 2000, a U.S. House Reform Committee report disclosed the serious conflicts of interest with the CDC’s and FDA’s vaccine advisory committees; in 2004 the US Office of Special Counsel urged Congress to take action on evidence of scientific fraud in the CDC’s vaccine division. Many such events have occurred over the years but nothing substantive has been done. All of these findings, of what is essentially criminal conduct, are in the public record. Yet, COVID-19 arrived on the scene and our naive former president (who remains unrepentant to this day) charged ahead with Operation Warp Speed and issued a national emergency proclamation that set in motion the tyranny that we all endured.
Would citizens have been so willing to accept all of this fearmongering and oppression had they known that the “advice” and mandates issuing like bovine residue from the FDA and CDC was scripted to line the regulators’ personal pockets and please their corporate masters? I hope not. Since the mainstream media happily reports whatever their Big Pharma advertisers want, there is “nothing to see here.” Has anything significant changed in the reporting on the FDA or CDC and therefore, the public’s general understanding of the FDA/CDC criminal cartel? I don’t think so.
Lesson score on understanding the corruption of the so-called regulators: another Fail.
Part 2 is here.
The Texas legislature does not convene until January 14, 2025, but some school choice bills have already been filed. The Senate (SB1) and House (HB1) versions both provide funding for tuition, materials and other approved expenses for certain eligible learning environments (other than public schools or charter schools) using an Education Savings Account mechanism.
In HB1, Texas will fund each account in an amount “equal to 75 percent of the estimated statewide average amount of funding per student,” while HB1 has a hard cap of $8,000 for eligible students. Homeschoolers are capped at $1,000 under both bills.
It is interesting to see the expansion of the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) influence in these bills. Private schools are not required to be accredited in Texas. However, if they want to be “approved education service providers,” they will have to be accredited now. That means undergoing accreditation by an approved (ultimately by TEA) accreditation organization. In Texas, the entity that directly oversees accrediting organizations is the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission (TEPSAC). Among various requirements, accredited private schools “must annually administer a national norm-referenced test approved by the school’s accrediting agency.”
Home school enrichment programs (termed “pod learning” in the bills) are excluded, as expected. However, costs otherwise allowed for homeschooling appear to be covered under such a program, i.e. books and other materials etc., since they are specific to the home schooled student. Any private tutor must be an accredited or licensed public school teacher (or retired as such) or an “educator” at an accredited school.
Some initial thoughts regarding these bills:
I realize that such restrictions will likely be necessary to overcome some of the complaints of the public school lobby and these bills are subject to amendment, of course. But there is no doubt that there is increasing regulation imposed by this funding mechanism. Whether it is worth that concession is certainly debatable. In any case, it just proves the old English axiom “He who takes the king’s shilling must do the king’s bidding.”
There is a new report published by UCLA titled The Costs of Conflict, The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflict on Public Schools in the United States. It could be renamed “School Boards are Spending Too Much Money Fighting Troglodytes.”
The main message that an education freedom advocate will quickly see in this report is that people who disagree with the current narrative are simply dangerous nuisances. The reports states that “There always will be different viewpoints in a diverse society about the purpose of public education and how schools should advance societal goals.” But what if a sizeable portion of the parent population has a different view of the purpose of education and does not agree with the educrats’ “societal goals?” Ignoring such people has led to school boards dealing with supposed “disrespectful speech, misinformation, violent rhetoric, and threats.” Given that many ordinary families cannot afford a typical private school (especially with multiple children) and may not have the confidence or physical ability to home school, the government school system is effectively a monopoly. It is a unique monopoly since it can take your children and your life if you resist with sufficient vigor.
Apparently, the cost of fighting these dangerous nuisances in the 2023-2024 fiscal year was $3.2 billion. So their answer is to reduce the ability of “conflict entrepreneurs” to get on school boards or influence the public:
But rejecting this small number of conflict entrepreneurs would help ensure that community members communicate their disagreements in a manner consistent with democratic principles. This means upholding norms of respect, evidence based reasoning, and civil deliberation that embraces the well being and dignity of all.
So democratic principles require suppression of people whom they find disagreeable. That seems to be the practice of many political school boards and government schooling in general.
It is obvious to education freedom advocates that there can never be peace and tranquility when there is compulsion in education. As noted elsewhere in this blog, compulsory schooling is certainly unconstitutional (but ignored by the courts) and is a civil rights violation in the same sense that compulsory attendance at a state church or a tax to support it are egregious violations of the Bill of Rights.
Several years ago, I had reached a point in my blogging about coercive schooling where I was satisfied that my cumulative body of posts were sufficient to cover most of the the issues fairly well. I didn’t want to simply keep posting information that was documenting the most recent outrages and excesses of the “evil empire.” The next logical step was trying to find out how to reach a broader and mostly younger audience who needed to hear the truth about the false god of government schooling. I initially wanted to put together a more academically-oriented anthology of essays by different authors—essentially an update to Rickenbacker’s Twelve-Year Sentence. However, that book was not read by a wide audience and I concluded that a new version would not do much to promote education freedom. In the end, I decided to write a fictional account of a high school student who fights back against the oppressive system. The pre-release feedback has been positive so perhaps it will reach that younger, wider audience that needs to read it.
Here is the first paragraph of the book description:
Stronghold of the Enemy is both a warning and a possible road map to education freedom. Battling the government education system and the sinister forces that support it, Andrew and his fellow teen friends challenge one of Satan’s biggest and oldest strongholds in America. Initially using his natural gifts of a keen intellect and persuasive arguments, he later turns to the supernatural to fight forces beyond the temporal world that have enslaved millions of young minds and bodies.
It may offend some conservatives and progressives alike due to the arguments against government control of education, criticisms of qualified immunity for government employees, “law enforcement” oppression and other “sacred cows” of modern America. The story also follows the main character’s transition away from government schooling’s naturalistic worldview to a Christian perspective. My hope is that the book provides some solace and encouragement to those unfortunate souls trapped in the government school gulag. And maybe it will encourage some parents to do the right thing.
The ebook can be found on these platforms: https://books2read.com/drmcfadden
See here for an update.
As I have examined the phenomenon of government controlled schooling, it has been a continuing mystery to me why this type of totalitarian enterprise could have been imposed on a country that was ostensibly founded on the primacy of individual liberty and freedom of conscience. I can understand why today’s citizens are generally oblivious to freedom of conscience issues due to the indoctrination and psychological conditioning that are essential components of government schooling – but why would such a system be accepted by citizens who had not been programmed to accept it? As noted in my previous posts, that system was imposed through propaganda and false promises and was often met with resistance, but due to the police power of the state it was ultimately imposed top-down by special interests. However, even considering political manipulation and the raw power of the state, there still seemed to be something missing.
My recent explorations of the history of the 1st Amendment have helped provide some clarity on the issue. One important fact to remember about our nation’s history is that there was very little religious freedom in colonial America. Yes, it is true that the establishment of some of the colonies was driven by people escaping religious intolerance in England but the rulers of those colonies wanted freedom only for their particular brand of Christianity and had little tolerance for presumed heretics such as Quakers and Baptists. In fact, persecutions of varying degrees of severity were the norm for those dissenters. Civil and criminal laws were heavily based on Old Testament theology so punishments were very harsh by modern standards. Frankly, looking back from the 21st Century, it seems difficult to find Christ in the “Christianity” that was dominant at the time. The only colony with true religious freedom was Rhode Island. That colony was founded by Roger Williams who was banished from Massachusetts for preaching his Christian beliefs.
Unfortunately, with the advent of government schooling in America in the 19th Century, the country began to return to its pre-revolutionary intolerant roots. Where there were once tax-supported churches and clergy, there were now taxes imposed for schools and teachers. Compulsory church attendance laws were replaced with school truancy laws. Laws enforcing the Sabbath became curfews imposed on school age children. In early America, Baptists were accused of child abuse since they refused to baptize infants. In modern America, anyone not schooling their children in a government approved manner is presumed guilty of the same charge. It seems that government schooling has become the modern version of an intolerant religion. As time has progressed and the religion of schooling has grown in power, the penalties for dissenting have grown more harsh with the preferred punishments of heretics being fines, incarceration and the state seizing children from otherwise exemplary parents.
Just like most colonists in early America, today’s citizens accept (and often embrace) the modern equivalent of those unjust laws. As before, dissent is seen as dangerous heresy that must be crushed. The terminology and the mechanisms of control have changed but the result is the same: oppression. Unlike colonial America, we have a Bill of Rights that is supposed to protect us from oppression by our government. Will we ever be able to reassert our rights and constrain government to its proper role in this area? All I know is that such a question will not likely receive serious consideration in any high school civics lesson – even if a young heretic manages to raise the issue.
I suspect that most people in America don’t realize that the constitution of the former USSR provided for “freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations” (Article 50), and “freedom of conscience” (Article 52). How well those rights were upheld can be best illustrated by a common joke from the Soviet era: In the USA and the USSR there is freedom of speech but in America you have freedom after speech.
Unfortunately, many of the rights that we have enjoyed in the past are being steadily eroded by new laws, regulations and court decisions. We are seeing some of the same legal fictions and obfuscations that the Soviet people endured. A citizen’s civil rights in the USSR were not absolute but were contingent as noted in this blog post by Ilya Somin, Professor of Law at George Mason University:
….Article 59 emphasizes that “Citizens’ exercise of their rights and freedoms is inseparable from the performance of their duties and obligations,” and those duties include “comply[ing] with standards of socialist conduct” (Article 59) and “safeguard[ing] the interests of the Soviet state, and …. enhanc[ing] its power and prestige” (Article 62). Thus, the individual rights in the Soviet Constitution could be overridden in any cases where they conflict with “standards of socialist conduct” or somehow threaten the interests of the Soviet state or its “power and prestige.” …. A careful reading of the Soviet Constitution – or even just the individual rights sections – leaves little doubt that it was written for a totalitarian communist state.
It is not difficult to see that restricting our individual rights because of “national security” concerns is just a variant of “safeguarding the interests of the Soviet state.” Similarly, the denial of civil rights has been part of the governmental control of education since the 19th Century in America. In the Supreme Court case Wisconsin vs. Yoder, the court used fallacious reasoning to make this audacious statement: “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.” The court simply made this assertion without reference to constitutional authority since this assumed power over education violates a number of provisions of the Bill of Rights (the 1st, 4th, 14th Amendments and arguably others). So, once again, you have all these rights - unless they have to be denied to safeguard the perceived interests of the State.
The Supreme Court has, on more than one occasion, affirmed that parents have the right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” (e.g. Troxel vs Granville , 2000). Yet we have compulsory schooling laws in every state that regulate education and impose serious limitations on the exercise of that illusory right. For citizens who don’t have the financial means to pay for both public schools (through taxation) and private alternatives, it is clear who is in total control of their child’s education (and it isn’t mom and pop). Even if you have the money to use other alternatives, the state is ultimately still in control through their education statutes.
As under the Soviet system, some rights are more equal than others. We can see a good example of the reasoning that justifies suppression of education rights in a quote from a paper titled Why homeschooling should be regulated by Robert Reich, Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University:
Strictly enforced regulations ensure that parents do not wield total and unchecked authority over the education of their children. What is at stake here is not a question of social utility or stability, whether home schooling could threaten democracy. What is at stake is the justice that we owe children, that they receive an education that cultivates their future citizenship, their individual freedom, and that teaches them at least basic academic skills, skills that are necessary for ably exercising both their citizenship and their freedom.
The underlying assumption appears to be that the job of education is too important to be left to “unchecked” potentially unreliable parents – so we must defer to government control. Exactly how government schooling is better able to meet his stated requirements is, of course, not addressed. There are also many other questions that are raised by his assertions. For example, what kind of citizens would the government like to create: independent thinkers or obedient taxpayers and employees? Anyone who has attended government schools knows the answer to that question. Exactly how do you teach children about freedom while they are incarcerated in prison-like institutions? It’s like beating children to teach them about nonviolence.
Denying individual and parental rights on the pretense of “justice for children” or an ill-defined “right to education” is something that we would expect in a totalitarian society. If we are to slow the march toward that society, we need education freedom. It would certainly help the cause if our courts actually defended our civil rights rather than (in Soviet style) subverting them to satisfy the “interests of the state.”
In his Age of Reason pamphlet (1807), Thomas Paine declared that “Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.“ Thomas Jefferson’s famed letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut mentions how the First Amendment effectively establishes a "wall of separation between church and state." These men, plus the many others that influenced or participated in the founding of the United States, were very familiar with the dangers of state religions and wished to prevent establishing such a religion in America.
Underlying the First Amendment is the concept of freedom of conscience. It can be defined as: ”The right to follow one’s own beliefs in matters of religion and morality.“ Freedom of conscience is normally considered a human right, which is ”any basic right or freedom to which all human beings are entitled and in whose exercise a government may not interfere (including rights to life and liberty as well as freedom of thought and expression and equality before the law).“
Unfortunately, most of the debates in the public square tend to focus on a narrow definition of religion when discussing the influences of "religion” on government policy. If we consider “religion and morality,” we will find that they are essentially elements of a worldview. A worldview can be defined as “a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it."
When worldviews attempt to explain the "big questions of life” they are essentially indistinguishable from religious thought. For example both worldviews and religions attempt to deal with these four issues: 1.) origin of man and the universe, 2.) the meaning of life, 3.) morals, and 4.) a person’s destiny.
What does all this have to do with public schools and the state’s ultimate control over the education of our children?
First, there is a widely held belief that public schools are “secular.” In a narrow definition they are “ secular” (i.e. without an affiliation with any specific religion) but a more fundamental (and honest) definition shows that they are no more free from “religion” than the local Roman Catholic private school down the road. How the state attempts to answer the four issues above may not be based on any particular religion but the answers they provide are informed by various worldviews that are popular today among the people that establish curricula and approve the textbooks. Since these people have a very significant influence in the development of children’s worldviews, one could argue that we have a state religious system and the thousands of public school buildings are the temples of that religion. In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of the Imperial Cult of ancient Rome where that set of beliefs was seen as a politically useful and necessary unifying force of the empire.
Second, I know of no way of providing an education without some sort of coherent system of thought that is directly founded upon a worldview. This raises several important questions. Given the above, should the government (or if you prefer, “society”) impose a worldview on its youngest citizens? Should every parent, under the force of law (i.e. the threat of violence), be required to ensure that his or her child is “educated” in the government-approved way? Should taxpayers be forced to pay for so-called secular schools that in the course of their instruction, either directly or indirectly, year after year, send messages to their captive audiences about origins, meaning, morality and destiny that are essentially private matters (and beyond the realm of science as classically defined)?
Thomas Jefferson clearly favored promoting education. He said that regarding the “diffusion of knowledge” that “…no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.” He is often quoted by the education establishment when defending the government education monopoly. However, being sensitive to freedom of conscience issues, he also said this: “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation [removal] and education of the infant against the will of the father” (Note to Elementary School Act, 1817).
As with other “religions established by law," our state-controlled schooling system is no stranger to persecution. Anyone who follows homeschooling news will find plenty of accounts of government agents ensuring that temple attendance is enforced or at least the state liturgy is practiced in the form and place acceptable to the government. Disobedience is costly.
Although some of the priests and acolytes of our state religion may wish it to be so, the state has not yet taken complete control of the feeding, clothing and housing of the majority of our children. However, it has taken possession of their bodies for much of their waking hours while attempting to control their thoughts. It is difficult to think of a more egregious violation of our founding principles. Yet it continues. Perhaps Justice Louis Brandeis’ observation provides some insight into to why that is so:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
We are often told that a solution to the various problems of public schools is to “bring education back under local control." Prior to the advent of the Common Core conflict, I had not infrequently encountered the argument that education is locally controlled. The folks that hold such a position are getting harder to find these days. In this brief essay, we will look at what this "local control” really is all about.
School districts are the governmental bodies that are supposed to provide the local control of education. However, that control is extremely limited. For example, the Texas Education Code specifies the purpose of school districts:
The school districts and charter schools created in accordance with the laws of this state have the primary responsibility for implementing the state’s system of public education and ensuring student performance in accordance with this code.
If you read the list of requirements and duties of school district board members, you will see that school districts are simply the local administrators of the state’s policies - as we are told at the beginning of that Code section. They have virtually no important policy development role at all: no meaningful choices on curriculum, student attendance, total hours in the school year etc. They are essentially like the local soviets (councils) in the former Soviet Union. They provided an appearance of giving the proletariat a say in local governance but were, in fact, simply servants of the central communist party.
If the state is in control of education, then where does the state get its grand ideas about what must be taught? A recent post on the EdWeek blog titled Who Decides What is Taught in Our Schools? provides some clues as it relates to Common Core:
The “deciders” in the Common Core process were those who set the process in motion at the Gates Foundation and Department of Education, and the testing companies who were involved in crafting the standards so they would be testable.
The Gates Foundation, Pearson, the Department of Education, and a host of allied corporate reformers have dominated our classrooms long enough. This need NOT be a permanent state of affairs. It is time for students, teachers and parents to take back our schools.
The problem with the last statement is that parents have had almost no control of government schools since their establishment in the 19th Century. In fact, that is one of the design features of the system. Public schools were created, in part, to distance children from the “superstitions” and “inferior” world views of their parents while creating a more uniform herd of employees to serve large corporate interests and provide docile taxpayers for an ever expanding government. [For evidence of these motives please see the three earlier posts regarding the history of public schooling: In the beginning, The Prussian model and The resistance]
The current oligarchy of educrats (including private foundations, universities, teachers unions , the Dept. of Education and state education agencies) have controlled the important aspects of “public” school policies for many, many years. It appears that the uproar over Common Core is simply because the federal government is in the driver’s seat. I do agree that the federal government is exceeding its constitutional authority (through the backdoor in this case) but that problem is not the most fundamental issue. The individual states, through their compulsory education laws, have exceeded their legitimate authority for a very long time.