Public education exacerbates today’s toxic youth subculture.  The combined forces of advertisers, television, teen magazines, and internet spammers have lured our nation’s youth into lives of promiscuity.  Government schools add incompetence and dependency to the mix—all wrapped in a façade of “learning” and “testing” packages.

Government education, unfortunately, never quite met the promised ideal.  Even so, as late as 1950, public schools were mostly “creating unity out of diversity and nationalism out of particularism.”  Historian Henry Steele Commager noted in a piece for Time that year that the goal of American schooling was still centered on passing along a “common body of knowledge,” which children could then take into whatever profession or avocation they fancied:

Poets like Bryant, Longfellow and Whittier; painters like Trumball, Stuart and Peale; historians like Jared Sparks and George Bancroft; schoolmen like Noah Webster with his Spellers, William H. McGuffey with his Readers—these and scores of others popularized that common group of heroes and villains, . . . images and values, of which national spirit is born.

How many graduates today recognize even half of these famous Americans?  And why do government educrats not view it as necessary that they should?

Many youngsters no longer know enough about America’s past to value ideals like “national spirit.”  Worse, vast numbers of immigrant children are not assimilating as they once did—and they have no desire to do so.

Apologists for today’s government schools justify the de-emphasis on Western culture and English grammar by complaining that names from, say, Third World countries could have been added to Commager’s list of influential people.  Did that, make it necessary to denigrate the rest of them, however?

Beginning about 1965, the goals of public education made a U-turn.  Counterculture Marxists exploited their carefully planted Fifth Column forces to radicalize America’s government schools, couching their mission in terms of “social conscience” and “mental health.”

Nonstandard and substandard speech were held up as models to be emulated, instead of being respected for what they were: vanishing dialects that once were part of our culture and possibly worthy of study on their own merits, much as Latin used to be, but not intended as exemplars of social or professional communication.

Concepts about merit dissolved, save in sports—ostensibly to “level the playing field.”  This objective was articulated at the highest levels of government.  The definitive paper, “Measuring the Quality of Education,” penned by the National Institute of Education’s Archie LaPointe and Willard Wirtz, maintained that “[a] different kind of assessment would help correct the tilt in . . . educational standards . . . toward functional literacy and away from excellence”—i.e., functional literacy was deemed more realistic than the former ideal of a well-rounded, educated person.

Meanwhile, tasks that once belonged to home and church were usurped by the school.  Parents were encouraged to abdicate their childrearing responsibilities—first, via daycare centers (which did not exist, as such, until about 1977); then through extended kindergarten programs, pushed by “early-childhood education” advocates; and finally, by nonstop after-school activities that ran parents ragged.  Family meals became impossible, as parents chauffeured their offspring from one event to another, blindly accepting the experts’ view that socialization was the key to college admission—and to life itself.

By the time parents started trying to reclaim their authority in the 1990’s, they found themselves shut out.

Child-advocacy agencies started running amok under the cover of “protecting kids.”  Today, parents live in fear that even the most ordinary occurrence—as in Michigan, when a youngster remarked to his teacher that “Mommy dropped a thermometer last night in the bathroom”—may result in school staff alerting Child Protective Service agents to check out their homes and demand all kinds of expensive, excessive, and unnecessary “precautions.”  (In the Michigan case, the parents were forced to replace every single tile in the bathroom, even though it had been thoroughly cleaned.)  The implicit threat is that the child can be forcefully removed unless a parent fully—and cheerfully—complies.

Such intimidation sends a strong message to youngsters: Parents are incompetent, and their counsel need not be heeded.

Commager observed in 1950 that “[s]chools reflect the society they serve.”  “A society . . . indifferent to its own heritage cannot expect schools to make good the indifference.  A society that slurs over fundamental principles cannot demand that its schools instruct in abiding moral values.”

If the school can be transformed into a minisociety that substitutes the authority of peers and teacher/caretakers for actual parents, then the family will not be able to pass along its heritage or principles.  This, coupled with unsound teaching, is how the left facilitated inculcation of new, “preferred” values.

Today, when parents admonish their children to think for themselves, the school undercuts them by reminding youngsters that consensus is more important than whatever principle might be at stake.  When mothers and fathers tell their kids to be “true to themselves,” the school tells pupils to be flexible.  When clergymen expound upon timeless truths, educators say that change is the only absolute.

Moreover, students learn all about life’s “gray” areas before they understand the black-and-white ones.  So, what can parents expect later, when educators broach such topics as euthanasia, abortion, stem-cell research, fertility methods, DNA monitoring, and microchip tracking?  Free and thoughtful deliberation?

In November 2004, Time’s Michelle Cottle wrote that,

While the Bush White House may be on the side of social conservatives, time is not. . . . Day to day, liberals have the luxury of ignoring conservative America. . . . Social conservatives, by contrast, cannot escape the world view of blue staters.  Every time they go to the movies or turn on the television or open their child’s schoolbooks they’re reminded that traditional values ain’t what they used to be.

Meanwhile, the left is pulling out all the stops—frivolous lawsuits, appalling textbooks, and mandatory mental-“health” screening—in an effort to assure an emerging generation of easy targets for demagoguery.  Even the new college-entrance exams (SAT’s and ACT’s) require essay questions that probe student’s worldviews (see “Federal Plan to Keep Data on Students Worries Some,” New York Times, November 29, 2004).  Responses will become part of a pupil’s permanent record.

The left is doing what totalitarian elites always do: cutting off the escape routes.   The road to college and jobs is littered with obstacles, from deceptive “exams” to scavenging for parents’ viewpoints.  Homeschools are scrutinized for “child abuse.”

However, the sudden shrillness of the homosexual movement, together with increasingly lascivious sex education, has shocked even the most “progressive” parents to their senses.  “Gay” and lesbian incursions into government schools, in an era where AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are rampant, signal a full-scale assault.

Paul Simao on the Reuters News Service cited a federal study showing a precipitous rise in new cases of AIDS and HIV infection among homosexual and bisexual men (“HIV, AIDS Cases Rise Among U.S. Gay, Bisexual Men,” December 1, 2004).  The report by the Centers for Disease Control, released in connection with World AIDS Day, shows that new HIV and AIDS diagnoses in 32 states rose 11 percent among homosexual and bisexual men between 2000 and 2003.  “Men who have sex with men continue to constitute a substantial proportion of HIV/AIDS cases,” admitted the CDC.  Meanwhile, the New York Times reported (February 12) that a “rare strain of H.I.V. that is highly resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to lead to the rapid onset of AIDS” is suddenly showing up among men who engage in homosexual acts.  Additional dire warnings on the topic have since appeared in other newspapers.

The various newspaper clips have not been lost on parents.

Health departments nationwide report an upsurge in other sexually transmitted diseases.  This makes agitation for graphic sex talk and homosexual “tolerance” even more contentious.  The implicit message seems clear: Since the public continues to defeat countercultural causes at the polls, leftists are stepping up their campaign of bullying the nation’s schoolchildren into accepting sex as a purely recreational sport.

In the four weeks following the 2004 election, parents saw four hostile offensives by old-guard communist-front organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union: a lawsuit against Kentucky’s Boyd County School District over its failure to force students into attending “gender”-identity “tolerance-training” classes; intimidation of the Department of Defense into ending sponsorship of the Boy Scouts; a threatened lawsuit against an abstinence-education website; and support for a Missouri high-schooler wearing a “gay pride” T-shirt to class.

Sex “education,” of course, is the most notorious example of dishonest intellectualism in government schools.  Typically, it is folded into a course called Health.  Parents know that little about actual health is disseminated, even during those few weeks when sex and drugs are not the main topics of discussion.  General physiology, once a mainstay of middle- and high-school academia, is essentially reduced to a year-long focus on genitalia.

Today’s sex education is grossly biased toward indiscriminate behavior with multiple partners.  Montgomery County, Maryland’s school-board president, Sharon W. Cox, says that exposing eighth-graders to such topics as flavored condoms and sexual orientation is necessary because these represent “reality.”  The reality is that sex educators are contributing to the delinquency of minors and to child sex-abuse.  Dr. Judith Reisman, president of the Institute for Media Education and author of Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences, writes that some 58,200 children under age 18 were kidnapped in 1999, not by family members but from the streets.  Those who returned home were usually sexually abused.  Add to that a 418-percent increase in forcible rape and a 523-percent increase in unmarried births from 1960 to 1999.

Educator Donna Garner of Texas says that even “many of the multicultural novels, which have become a regular diet for today’s public school students, contain [vulgarity], graphic sex, and violence.”

Garner cites the example of a 2003 book entitled 33 Snowfish, which is used in Fairfax, Virginia, schools:

“On top of everything else, Boobie’s got the clap,” begins [this] dark tale about three runaways who understand hatred and violence better than love.  Custis, an orphan, is fleeing from his “owner,” a producer of pornography and snuff films.  Custis is accompanied by Curl, a child prostitute, and her boyfriend, Boobie, who has just murdered his parents and kidnapped his baby brother to sell on the streets.

The above is just a portion of the review in the Fairfax County Public Schools library catalog!  An excerpt from the actual book reads:

[We] made like four films together.  The best one was called Girl Eats Boy, where Bob Motley puts this black pillow case over his head and pretends like he’s cutting me with the electric saw.  Then he grinds up my legs in a hamburger maker and feeds me to this little girl who lives under the kitchen sink.  The little girl’s name was Wendy Sue.  She was like seven or some sh-t.  I think she belonged to one of Bob Motley’s boys, but I ain’t sure.

By the end of the book, two runaways are dead.  The word sh-t is used 163 times; n-gger, 55 times.  Yet 33 Snowfish won an American Library Association (ALA) award for “Top 10 Best Young Adult Book” of the year, a category that extends to 12-year-olds.

Another sample (also copyrighted in 2003), Boy Meets Boy, is found in 11 Fairfax, Virginia, high schools.  The FCPS library catalog summarizes it as a romantic comedy, a “gay love story” revolving around two high-school characters.  “A drag queen named Infinite Darlene” reigns as “both star quarterback and homecoming queen.”  The Boy Scouts are renamed the “Joy Scouts.”

Parents usually find out about such materials midway through the school year.  Of course, counterculture advocates know full well that, once children have seen something inappropriate, they cannot simply “un-see” it.  Youngsters may even be cautioned against discussing the content of a curriculum with parents, using the sex-abuse excuse.

Schools justify these offerings by pointing out that sex-soaked fare is ubiquitous, and, therefore, it is in the interest of students for schools to provide “accurate” information.  But government schools do not present accurate information.  If educators actually disclosed the particulars of homosexual activity and its consequences—internal bleeding, permanent incontinence, chronic diarrhea, and incurable mouth diseases—most youngsters, no doubt, would be turned off.  So schools gloss over the gross parts and incite youngsters to experiment.

Just how government schools can “worry” about child sexual abuse while instructing adolescents in the techniques of perversion and instituting “gay clubs” (there are now some 3,000 nationwide) is a mystery.

Well, not quite.  It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that an increased demand can be created for pornography, sex-“enhancing” products, psychological-screening instruments, and even psychotherapy through an aggressive campaign of legitimized sodomy and promiscuity cloaked in appealing packages such as health, tolerance, and diversity.

Moreover, under the cover of nonjudgmentalism, diversity, and the Establishment Clause, a hostile takeover of our country is under way—a kind of “final solution” by the forces of the left.  If our nation’s leaders are too blind or corrupt to acknowledge the fact, then government education has surely outlived its usefulness.