Tune in, turn off, drop out

It seems everyone is searching in all the wrong places for answers regarding the rash of U.S. school shootings.

I have radical idea for parents and students in government schools — drop out.

That’s right. I know this idea goes against the grain of what you’re being told by establishment politicians of the left and the right. I know it will make the National Education Association very angry. I know I will be called “irresponsible.” I don’t care.

The simple truth is clear. Government-run schools are not educating our kids. At best they serve as day-care centers. At their worst, they are the moral equivalent of prisons and political indoctrination camps.

C. Bradley Thompson, an associate professor of history and politics at Ashland University, said it best in a piece that found its way into the Bangkok Post, of all places: “The explanation for all these shootings might very well be found in the destruction of the minds and souls of America’s young people by an education establishment bent on using our children as guinea pigs for their bizarre experiments in schooling. The fact of the matter is that most U.S. public schools today are intellectual and moral wastelands.”

Thompson relates a familiar theme heard from others who teach recent high school graduates:

• students don’t believe in much and are unwilling to make moral judgments;
• students are taught to have artificially inflated opinions of themselves and are unwilling to tolerate criticism;
• they are poorly educated;
• they hate their high school experience;

“The result is an explosive mixture of nihilism, narcissism, ignorance and resentment,” Thompson writes.

The solution is not more testing, more spending on schools, more centralization of authority, requiring students to spend more time in schools, nor repeating the mistakes of the past.

It’s time to begin pulling the plug on government education –beginning with Washington’s role.

But privatizing education is a long-term process. If you want to save your kids, you need an alternative now. Almost any alternative is better than warehousing your children in government facilities and abdicating your authority over them to the state.

Encourage your kids — especially those in high school — to just drop out. I know this sounds crazy to many of you out there. But until parents and students just start saying no, there’s no hope of extricating America from state control of every aspect of our lives.

Sure, you might be able to find a good private school in your area. But be warned: Many of them have become mired in the politically correct claptrap of the NEA and the government-education blob. The starting point for change is dropping out — then searching for the right alternative.

I believe home-schooling is the best route. Many parents are afraid of it. They don’t feel equipped to teach their own kids. Believe me, you can do no worse than the government — and you will save your kids’ minds and souls.

“When I talk to high school students they tell me, virtually to a person, the same thing: that high school is boring and unchallenging. It’s not that they don’t want to learn or that they find subjects such as algebra or history intrinsically boring,” writes Thompson. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite. When I press a little deeper, I learn that for most students the problem is that they have teachers who aren’t particularly good at what they do: the teachers don’t seem to know their subjects very well and they don’t have a passion for teaching.”

You can do better than that for your children. You have an obligation to do better than that for your children.

Don’t wait for vouchers. Don’t wait for George W. Bush to save you. Don’t waste your time trying to work within the system. The system is corrupt from top to bottom, and you will only end up frustrated and burned out.

Start with your children. Make them examples of what parents can achieve without government intervention and meddling.

You can start by teaching them right from wrong — something they will never learn in government lockup.