Proper Legislation
Proper Legislation
Tim O’Connor – Center for the Preservation of Humanity – 2/21/2023
We live in a terrifying world full of baby murder, DNA-shredding ‘vaccines’, and lie after lie after lie. We are waiting to be committed to a nuclear war to hide the fact that a certain political agent has his hand stuck in the cookie jar. Everything is getting more expensive. The United States taxpayer is on the hook for Ukrainian pensions. All of this is buried inside of bills which are thousands of pages long. In these tough times, one of our House members , routinely demonized by the mainstream media, has given cause to fix a small part of this misery.
On February 9, 2023, Kentucky House member, Thomas Massie introduced bill HR 899. It has no text listed under it because of how simple the concept is. The title suffices and it reads, “To terminate the Department of Education.” Not only should Massie’s bill be copied in terms of brevity and getting to the point, it should be voted on, passed, and signed into law. The effect would be no more US Department of Education by December 2023.
To begin with, nowhere in the Constitution is it acceptable for the federal government to be doing anything with education. Thus, under the Tenth Amendment, public education would be administered wholly by the several States. If a State doesn’t have provisions for public education, the job would fall to the county, municipality, or the people themselves. The Department of Education is one of the capstones on how to abridge the US Constitution and it is far past time to rectify the situation.
While the Department claims it doesn’t set curriculum, it routinely withholds funds if it believes public education boards are not following their educational requirements. This makes public education a top-down one-size-fits-all application of educational standards set at the federal level. If state education boards want the federal funding they will follow the rules set down by the Department. This, too, is a violation of States rights as well as the rights of parents and taxpayers.
Parents are forced to send their children to school. If parents fail to provide a DoEd-approved education to their children, they can be charged with neglect. Education by force is not education, it is brainwashing and indoctrination. Sometimes this definition of indoctrination is necessary because a child doesn’t want to participate in math or reading but it is vitally important to have them able to do the math to balance a checkbook or figure out a paycheck and be able to read at a level adequate to understand a newspaper or the Bible. The DoEd, being an agent of government, is, by definition, force.
At the end of the day our children are being forced to comply with DoEd edicts flowing from force. Getting rid of the DoEd would place that force at a more accessible level – the state, county, municipality, or, ideally, home-schooling. Schooling our children in the necessary academic fields could result in a return of the schoolhouse in Little House on the Prairie. It could result in groups of family, friends, and neighbors instructing the children of those families. The parents could even rotate the duties if they so chose. The result would be more tightly woven communities, increased trust within those communities, and children who are capable of reading, writing, and mathematics at levels superior to anything the public education system with the DoEd could ever dream of.
Education is not about the money being spent per child. It is about finding ways to engage children to get them to learn the lessons we are trying to teach them. The DoEd wants to base their ‘success’ on how much money they can spend but they don’t spend any time with children. They don’t teach them anything. As a result our children have received worse and worse marks on a range of standardized tests over time. Coupled with that decline is a focus on forcing social and religious (or anti-religious) positions upon our children. They aren’t learning how to do math and read and write, our children are being taught to question their gender, the lies of Charles Darwin, racial superiority and inferiority, science based on Malthusian scarcity, and how to deal with violent peers. While some states would persist in teaching our children this harmful and disempowering curricula even without the Department of Education, the source of the evil would be at the state capitol. The state capitol is, in every case, much more accessible than anything in Washington DC.
When a state or school board decides to do something incredibly stupid in education like Whole Reading and Whole math, parents can pay attention and make complaints which will be heard far more regularly than the bureaucrats at the DoEd. In second grade I was attending school in southern New Jersey and moved to a different school district in the northern part of the state for a short time. In the southern NJ school, I learned phonics and could sound out words. In the northern NJ school the kids were taught Whole Reading.
The principal of the school (who, even to seven year old me, seemed to be dressed as a street-walking prostitute) came in with copies of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, passed them out to all of us, and we started reading. There were a lot of difficult words in the text. The principal called upon the class to pronounce the word. I raised my hand and bludgeoned whatever the word was but managed to pronounce it. The scenario replayed again. On the third difficult word, I rose my hand and she looked at me and said, “not you, someone else.” She called on someone at random. The kid had no idea how to pronounce the word. None of the kids could figure out how to say the word as she began calling on others. In a huff, she closed her copy and stomped out of the room. NJ eventually dumped Whole Reading but it should have been clear after about 10 minutes the idea should have been recognized as a failure. Instead of completely abandoning the idea of Whole-teaching, other states have modified the programs to make sure their pupils learn nothing as well.
The Department of Education was still sending funds to this school. Actually, the Department of Education is still spending money on school districts ‘teaching’ in this way. The Department of Education could have easily have stated that public school districts teaching whole-learning methods to non-special education students would have their federal funding shut off. They didn’t do it because they aren’t there to develop kids into adults capable of success. They are there to reinforce the idea that individuals are stupid and should just stay in the lane they dictate we are supposed to be on. Again, it’s more about indoctrinating kids buying the government’s idea about what their role in life is supposed to be. The result is millions of adults who cannot fathom ever doing anything different from what they are doing.
When 12 years of this crap wasn’t seen as enough reinforcement of the indoctrination, we were all encouraged to go to college. Before I attended college myself (I received a Master’s in Criminal Justice in 2010) I would constantly claim that it is a stupid, useless, piece of paper. Now, I’m living the life proving that it is a stupid, useless, piece of paper. So are millions of others. After graduation millions of us have massive student-loan debts. These debts are now held by the Department of Education. Their payment schemes are completely asinine and designed to prolong the life of the loans. When Massie’s bill (or a similar version) finally gets signed into law, these loans will need to be sold off to other institutions wishing to purchase our debts. Those other institutions will want to get paid and may be willing to structure repayment plans, with better interest rates, in a way to make it possible to actually pay them off.
Finally, the budget for the Department of Education in 1980 was $14 billion. In 2021 it was appropriated $95.5 billion. It wouldn’t save a whole ton of money on average – $60.00 per employed taxpayer. Of course, not all people pay the same amount of taxes because of the stupid way we tax labor in the United States. Also, the federal government never seems able to balance a budget forcing the debt ceiling to be reached constantly, demands to increase it, and all US citizens’ labor to be subjected to being used to pay the borrowed money back. Reducing the federal budget by $100 billion dollars and forcing those employed there to find productive work sounds like a win-win to me.
If you think that getting rid of the Department of Education sounds like a good idea because it will empower parents, force states to be accountable for public education results, result in a more capable US population please, and reduce federal spending contact your US House Representative and let them know you support Massie’s bill, HR 899. If you do not know who your representative is, you can find them here. You can easily find your representative here as well, which provides their address in Washington as well as their phone number. Let them know you support HR 899 and want to see your representative’s name as a cosponsor on the measure.
Bless God and God bless.