05.06
Obama’s Universal Pre-School Smokescreen
On the education front, Obama has already shown that he favors the impersonal state machinery over what actually works. The dismantling of the Washington D.C. voucher program was an outright disgrace. Juan Williams dressed him up one side and down the other for it. It sacrificed a better education for those children on the altar of teacher’s unions. Well, that’s not the only educational disaster he wants to move on. The so-called “universal pre-school” or “0-5 plan” may be off the radar at the moment in the midst of all the other stuff going on, but we best not forget about this little nugget from The One. J. Michael Smith weaves an excellent piece about this over on the HSLDA website:
The presumption by Mr. Obama is that the earlier children start formal education, the better chance they have of being successful in life and being competitive in the global market. Sounds good, but is this policy backed by evidence that government involvement in child rearing from birth actually works?
The answer is “No!” In a 2005 Stanford University/University of California study that focused on children attending preschool, it was confirmed that attendance in preschool centers, even for short periods of time each week, hindered the rate at which young children developed social skills. These findings refuted the assertion by many that for children to develop socially, they must be involved in a classroom setting at a very early age.
The Southwest Policy Institute concluded: “Contrary to common belief, early institutional schooling can harm children emotionally, intellectually and socially, and may later lead to greater peer dependency.”
Child psychologist and author David Elkind, who has researched early childhood education, wrote: “When we instruct children in academic subjects … at too early an age, we miseducate them; we put them at risk for a short-term stress and long-term personality damage. … There is no evidence that such early instruction has lasting benefits, and considerable evidence that it can do lasting harm.”
If the government schools can’t successfully educate children in 10 years (some states’ compulsory attendance laws end at 16, although many states require attendance until age 17), then why do we believe they would be any more successful if we add four or five years?
This president has mounted an all out attack on common sense and personal liberty. I mean, excuse me if I don’t want to turn my baby over, Borg fashion, to some beauracrat. This isn’t about simply giving political gifts to the education unions. This is an ideological commitment by Mr. Obama to the idea of institutionalizing. Put them in the conformity system at the earliest possible age. Stamp out all individuality. We’ve seen this before though. The so-called “Freedmen’s Bureau” that was created by the Radical Republicans after the War of Northern Agression had the purpose of helping newly free’d slaves get on their feet in society. In actuality it was a total political attack machine for Republican despotism. John Chodes sums it up nicely:
The Freedmen’s Bureau illegally confiscated millions of acre’s of private property to re-distribute to blacks, carpet-baggers and high ranking military officers. Then the Bureau relocated Southerners into the north to transform them away from being “rebels.” Yet the Bureau’s main concern was to re-educate blacks to make them loyal Republican voters. This was the first step toward nationalizing Southern schools.
The education these newly free’d slaves received was horrendous. It basically consisted of “vote Republican”. The education received was severely lacking in the three R’s. It was almost totally social and political teaching meant to institutionalize these people into the system and get them used to being controlled from the very start. Men who are naturally free will not relenquish it willingly. It’s much easier to never let them taste it than to let them have liberty and then try and snatch it from them. This was blatantly and directly admitted as the goal by the Peabody Education Fund in their 1885 report:
a larger proportion of the stocks of all the banks, railroad and
canal companies, factories, insurance companies, and other
moneyed corporations which are held by citizens of the
United States, are owned by capitalists of the Northern
and Eastern States. The people of the Southern and
Western States, and especially the colored people, own
very few of them, and have no further concern with them
than to bear, directly or indirectly, their share of the taxes
levied to pay the interest or dividends on them. What
security have the people of the United States that these
jarring interests of debtor and creditor, of numbers and
property, may not in the future give rise to serious con-
flicts? Very recently riotous commotions of this kind
assumed such formidable proportions as to render it nec-
essary to use military power to suppress them. If to
this turbulent element of the North there be added seven
hundred thousand untutored and non-property-holding
colored voters, whose interest is opposed to these kinds of ’
property because of the taxation which they entail upon
them, it requires no spirit of prophecy to foresee that the
danger will be greatly increased. Attempts have already
been made, and not without some success, to instil into
the minds of the colored voters the idea that they are
neither morally nor legally bound to pay any public debt
which was contracted before they were emancipated and
invested with the rights of citizenship.
Admonitions like these ought to teach the thoughtful
men of all parts of our country, those who desire to main-
tain the peace and order of society, that the time for vig-
orous action has come. Delays are dangerous. If the
corrective be not promptly applied, the evil may become
irresistible. That corrective is the diffusion of knowledge
among the people; and this can be accomplished only by
teaching every voter to read and write, so that he may be
able to have access to the best sources of information and
form an intelligent opinion on every question which may
arise.
Here we see the incestuous relationship between Northern business tycoons and politicians. By this time the Peabody Fund was accepting some government money into their coffers. They made it plain that their goal in educating free’d blacks was to put them in the right mind about the proper structure of society. In other words, we use the government to make lots of money and you sit down, shut up and pay for it. They tried to “instil into the minds of the colored voters the idea that they are neither morally nor legally bound to pay any public debt which was contracted before they were emancipated”, but evidently they didn’t seem to be buying the lie in sufficient numbers. They were savvy enough to know that all men, free’d or no, would share in the debts of the Federal government.
Government controlled schooling is about one thing: re-educating you away from your natural understanding of liberty and freedom and into a Kafka-esque machine state. Obama, as one of the few that manage to rise out of that system as a leader, which few do, knows this instinctively. Getting your children institutionalized as early as possible is in the best interest of all the progenitors of human helotry.
