The Great Objective

Each child that comes to us for instruction, weak, ignorant, and helpless though he be, is charged with his part in the great program God has marked out for man to achieve. Each of these little ones is the bearer of an immortal soul, whose destiny it is to take its quality and form from the life it lives among its fellows. And ours is the dread and fascinating responsibility for a time to be the mentor and guide of this celestial being. Ours it is to deal with the infinite possibilities of child-life, and to have a hand in forming the character that this immortal soul will take. Ours it is to have the thrilling experience of experimenting in the making of a destiny!

Who Needs Spiderman??

My children have found a new "game" if that's what you want to call it.  The name of it is~See Who Can Hang Onto the Walls the Longest!!    Not quite sure who won but they all had a blast trying.  

Kids do the Strangest Things!!

Mary crashes in the strangest places.  Here she found a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor in my room.

 Here she is standing up with really wobbly legs  leaning next to the chair.  Just moments earlier I had been reading aloud to the kids when her head went "bonk!"  But I moved her quick after I took this picture before she collapsed right onto the floor!!

The "Greatest" Example of All

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

For God hath made them so;

Let bears and lions growl and fight

For 'tis their nature too.

But children, you should never let

Such angry passions rise;

Your little hands were never made

To tear each other's eyes.

Let love through all your actions run,

And all your words be mild;

Live like the blessed Virgin's Son,

That sweet and lovely child.

His soul was gentle as a lamb;

And, as his stature grew,

He grew in favour both with man

And God his Father too.

Now Lord of all, he reigns above,

And from his heavenly throne

He sees what children dwell in love,

And marks them for his own.

Prayer for All

"I leave it all with Jesus,

Then wherefore should I fear?
I leave it all with Jesus,
And he is ever near.
"I leave it all with Jesus,
Trust him for what must be;
I leave it all with Jesus,
Who ever thinks of me.
"I bring it all to Jesus,
In calm, believing prayer;
I bring it all to Jesus,
And I love to LEAVE it there!
"Each tear, each sigh, each trouble,
Each disappointment,—all
I love to GIVE to Jesus,
Who loves to TAKE them all."

Life of Jesus Christ for the Young

Restoring Family Worship

"If you would ensure your houses by the best policy of insurance, turn them into churches, and they shall be taken under the special protection of Him that keeps Israel...

A Church in the House~Restoring Daily worship to the Christian Household

Oh My Goodness This is Way Cute

Is this so precious. My husband had to work today on Valentines Day and he emailed this little "poem" to me. Isn't it just so cute?

Roses are red and violets are blue.

You wash the clothes

And make the dinners

You chase the kids

And straighten the dad

You polish the arrows

And raise the Maidens

You follow the example from above

And Ruby’s shine and so do you!!

And I should have bought a card

Because I will never hear the end.

I think you're special,

Vance

All Together

  "We are all here! 

  Father, mother, 

  Sister, brother, 

All who hold each other dear, 

Each chair is filled, we’re all at home! 

Let gentle peace assert her power, 

And kind affection rule the hour— 

  We’re all—all here! 

Even they—the dead—though dead so dear, 

Fond memory to her duty true, 

Brings back their faded forms to view. 

How life-like through the mist of years, 

Each well-remembered face appears; 

We hear their words, their smiles behold, 

They’re round us as they were of old— 

  We are all here!" 

Smoothies are the Best

Kefir is an excellent and very good for you drink.  Most of all it makes a great smoothie.  Here is the recipe we normally use.

3 C. Kefir

About 1/2 C. Milk

2 Bananas

2 T. Coconut Oil

Throw all in a blender and blend.  Adding some ice cubes makes a nice slushy drink.  Following is a recipe for making Kefir.  

One gallon milk.  Preferably raw if it's accessible but if using store bought milk heat to about 180F.  Mix in 2 packets of yogourmet freeze-dried kefir starter and store in a warm spot for 24-36 hours.  That's it.  Then keep it in the fridge for up to 3 weeks.  Oh and don't forget to keep out 1 cup for your next batch.  No need to use a new packet for about the next 6 batches.  Note, we go through about 1 gallon of kefir every 2 days for our family.  

Five Resolutions to Live By

Resolved~To live with all my might while I do live.

Resolved~Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possible can.

Resolved~Never to do anything which I should despise or think meanly of in another.

Resolved~Never to do anything out of revenge.

Resolved~Never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.

Jonathan Edwards

Our Little Boys

That Little Chap That Follows Me

A careful man I want to be.

A little fellow follows me.

I do not dare to go astray.

For fear he'll go the self same way.

I cannot once escape his eyes.

Whate're he sees me do he tries.

Like me he says he wants to be.

That little chap who follows me.

He thinks that I am big and fine.

He trusts in every word of mine.

The sin in me he does not see.

That little chap who follows me.

Lord, let my that little chap to see.

A follower leaning hard on Thee;

That as he grows he'll be inspired.

To seek the one whom I desire.

Things Only the Heart of a Mother Knows

Mother Knows

Nobody knows of the work it makes

To keep the house together,

Nobody knows of steps it takes-

Nobody listens to childish woes,

Which kiss's only smother;

Nobody's pained by the naughty blows-

Nobody, only mother

Nobody knows of the sleepless care

Bestowed on baby brother;

Nobody knows of the tender prayer-

Nobody knows but mother.

Nobody knows the lessons taught

Of loving one another,

Nobody knows of the patience sought-

Nobody, only mother.

Nobody knows the anxious fears

Lest darlings may not weather

Storms of life in coming years-

Nobody knows but mother.

Nobody knows of the tears that start,

The grief she gladly smothers;

Nobody knows of the breaking heart-

Nobody, but mother.

Nobody clings to the wayward child,

Though scorned by every other,

Leads it so gently from pathways wild-

Nobody can but mother.

Nobody of the hourly prayer

For him, Our erring brother,

Pride of her heart, so pure and fair-

Nobody but mother.

Pointed in the Right Direction

A certain gentleman was a member of the Presbyterian Church. His little boy was sick. When he went home his wife was weeping, and she said:

“Our boy is dying; he has had a change for the worse. I wish you would go in and see him.” The father went into the room, and placed his hand upon the brow of his dying boy, and could feel that the cold, damp sweat was gathering there; that the cold, icy hand of death was feeling for the chords of life.

"Do you know, my boy, that you are dying?” asked the father.

“Am I? Is this death? Do you really think I am dying?”

“Yes, my son, your end on earth is near.”

"And will I be with Jesus tonight, father?”

“Yes, you will be with the Savior.”

“Father, don’t you weep, for when I get there I will go right straight to Jesus, and tell Him that you have been trying all my life to lead me to Him.”

God has given me two little children, and ever since I can remember I have directed them to Christ; and I would rather they carried this message to Jesus that I had tried all my life to lead them to Him-than have all the crowns of the earth; and I would rather lead them to Jesus than give them the wealth of the world. If you have got a child, go and point the way I challenge any man to speak of heaven without speaking of children. “For of such is the kingdom of heaven.” -- Moody’s Anecdotes

Treasure's of the Heart

"The Bible calls debt a curse and children a blessing;

but in our culture, we apply for a curse and reject blessings.

Something is wrong with this picture." Doug Phillips

Race to the Finish

It's time for a quick update on who won the battle of week 1.  I hate to admit the loss but HE won by 1 pound.  I lost 2 and he lost 3.  And look at him.  Telling me  secretly (so the kids don't hear) that he would love to take me out for an ice-cream.   Yea right, lots of luck with that.  But today I managed to make a beautiful chocolate cake with chocolate icing and offered him a nice big piece of it.  He didn't cave, but the day's not over either!!  All I've got to say, is he may have won the battle but I'm going to win the war.

Dear Mothers

OH, MOTHERS OF YOUNG CHILDREN, I BOW BEFORE YOU IN REVERENCE. YOUR WORK

IS MOST HOLY. YOU ARE FASHIONING THE DESTINIES OF IMMORTAL SOULS. THE POWERS FOLDED UP IN THE LITTLE ONES THAT YOU HUSHED TO SLEEP IN YOUR BOSOMS LAST NIGHT, ARE POWERS THAT SHALL EXIST FOREVER. YOU ARE PREPARING THEM FOR THEIR IMMORTAL DESTINY AND INFLUENCE. BE FAITHFUL. TAKE UP YOUR SACRED BURDEN REVERENTLY. BE SURE THAT YOUR LIFE IS SWEET AND CLEAN.--JR MILLER

We are in the midst of a war

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

This Gave Me the Chills

Click on the red and purple for links.

This is very disturbing to say the least.  As Christian parents this video is a MUST see if you want to know what is REALLY happening in our schools in regards to homosexuality.

I thought this video would be a perfect "follow up" from the previous.  In it we find the solution to the problem our nation is now facing.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

Blessings on the hand of women!

Angels guard its strength and grace,

In the palace, cottage, hovel,

Oh, no matter where the place;

Would that never storms assailed it,

Rainbows ever gently curled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Infancy's the tender fountain,

Power may with beauty flow,

Mother's first to guide the streamlets,

From them souls unresting grow--

Grow on for the good or evil,

Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Woman, how divine your mission

Here upon our natal sod!

Keep, oh, keep the young heart open

Always to the breath of God!

All true trophies of the ages

Are from mother-love impearled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Blessings on the hand of women!

Fathers, sons, and daughters cry,

And the sacred song is mingled

With the worship in the sky--

Mingles where no tempest darkens,

Rainbows evermore are hurled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Character in the Home

God's first institution for society is the home.  The home forms the character of the nation.  We know that the character of our Founding generations was formed in the Christian homes of America.  To restore that character to its full productive capacity we need to first restore the home to its educational goal in our republic.  HOme is the first sphere of government in our society.  "The principle of home-government is love, - love ruling and obeying according to law".   Every area of our society is affected by what the home builds or does not build in character.  If American Christians expect to restore the Biblical principles of government which established our nation, these principles must first be restored in our homes.  Home is the first area of local self-government-and it is demonstrated in the lives of all family members.  Establishing the family reading circle is not just a time of each member of the family to be reading independently.  It is a time for reading together.  It is a time for parents to read aloud those wise and wonderful books which helped form the character and ideals of America.  

Rosalie Slater

Education of Children

Over 100 years ago R. L. Dabney said:  "The education of children for God is the most  important business done on earth.  It is the one business for which the earth exists.  To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God - this is his task on earth.  Deuteronomy 6:7---And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

But, What About Socialization????

Socialization: Homeschoolers Are in the Real World

By Chris Klicka, Senior Counsel for the
Home School Legal Defense Association

Academically homeschoolers have generally excelled, but some critics have continued to challenge them on an apparent "lack of socialization" or "isolation from the world." Often there is a charge that homeschoolers are not learning how to live in the "real world." However, a closer look at public school training shows that it is actually public school children who are not living in the real world.

For instance, public school children are confined to a classroom for at least 180 days each year with little opportunity to be exposed to the workplace or to go on field trips. The children are trapped with a group of children their own age with little chance to relate to children of other ages or adults. They learn in a vacuum where there are no absolute standards. They are given little to no responsibility, and everything is provided for them. The opportunity to pursue their interests and to apply their unique talents is stifled. Actions by public students rarely have consequences, as discipline is lax and passing from grade to grade is automatic. The students are not really prepared to operate in the home (family) or the workplace, which comprise a major part of the "real world" after graduation.

Homeschoolers, on the other hand, do not have the above problems. They are completely prepared for the "real world" of the workplace and the home. They relate regularly with adults and follow their examples rather than the examples of foolish peers. They learn based on "hands on" experiences and early apprenticeship training. In fact, the only "socialization" or aspect of the "real world" which they miss out on by not attending the public school is unhealthy peer pressure, crime, and immorality. Of course, the average homeschooler wisely learns about these things from afar instead of being personally involved in crime or immorality or perhaps from being a victim.

For full article click HERE

Calling ALL Mothers

"Praying mothers, teaching mothers, faithful mothers---the Church needs you. She needs mothers who will crave children, and love them and bless them to be the warriors of the next generation.

Motherhood! Blessed motherhood! The time has come to once again sing the praises of this calling. Though bloodied by the barbs of feminism, Christian motherhood will not be vanquished.

---by Beall Phillips, Verses of Virtue

A SHORT ANGRY HISTORY OF American Forced Schooling

John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board -- this is their first mission statement: "In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, (he's really covering the whole gamut of employment isn't he?) statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply (whoever the pronoun we is meant to stand for there). The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in an perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way".

For full article click HERE

Against Schools

John Taylor Gatto has positively got to be one of my favorite authors. He is very candid, gets right to the point, and has no fear of being "politically correct" in his work.  The first book I read of his was years ago called Dumbing us Down.   Since that reading I have waded my way through The Underground History of American Education and in the future I look forward to reading Weapons of Mass InstructionAGAINST SCHOOL.

How public education cripples

our kids, and why

By John Taylor Gatto

 

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the

Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American

Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill,"

which appeared in the September 2003 issue.

 

 

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

 

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

 

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

 

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

 

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

 

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

 

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

 

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

 

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

 

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

 

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

 

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."

 

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

 

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

 

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

 

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

 

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

 

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

 

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

 

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

 

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

 

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

 

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

 

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

 

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

 

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

The Way of Pride

I found this on article over at A Wise Woman Builds Her Home and I look forward to going back and reading more of her inspirational words of wisdom.
Pride

My name is Pride. I am a cheater.

I cheat you of your God-given destiny...because you demand your own way.

I cheat you of contentment...because you "deserve better than this."

I cheat you of knowledge...because you already know it all.

I cheat you of healing...because you're too full of me to forgive.

I cheat you of holiness...because you refuse to admit when you're wrong.

I cheat you of vision...because you'd rather look in the mirror than out a window.

I cheat you of genuine friendship...because nobody's going to know the real you.

I cheat you of love...because real romance demands sacrifice.

I cheat you of greatness in heaven...because you refuse to wash another's feet on earth.

I cheat you of God's glory...because I convince you to seek your own.

My name is Pride.

I am a cheater.

You like me because you think I'm always looking out for you.

Untrue.

God has so much for you, I admit.

But don't worry...

If you stick with me,

you'll never know.

-Broadman & Holman