FEW AMERICANS HAVE MUCH FAITH IN OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM…

Apparently, there is some new survey by Gallup that tells us pretty much what most of us already knew about our pathetic public school system.  And it shows how only 36% of Americans are confident in our public schools, which is the highest level of confidence since 2009.  2009?  Now let’s see, what happened that year?  Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s the year a devout Socialist became the 44th president of the United States.  Luckily my daughter, who graduated high school in 2011, came out relatively unscathed.  But that was only because her mother and I worked very hard to either undo, or to counter, all of the misinformation she was ’taught’ in school every day.  And believe me, it was no easy task.  And whenever I met with any of her teachers, the very first question that would always pop into head was, “How did you get this job?”  They always seemed to be in over their head. 

Anyway it was according to this most recent poll that only 36% of U.S. adults expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in public schools and that is a six-percentage-point increase from 2016 and marks the highest confidence rating in eight years.  Gallup started this survey back in 1986 and the highest percentage of confidence since then was in 1987, at 50%.  It was in gathering information for the poll that Gallup asked, “Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in each one [institution] -- a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little.”  For 2017, the "confidence" response was 36%.  So what we have is that roughly a third of the American adult population is able to trust that those involved in our public school system are actually interested in ‘teaching’ our children and not in ‘indoctrinating’ them.  That’s really pretty sad.  

And it’s by political party that the percentage of “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in the government schools was 41% for Democrats and 30% for Republicans.  Which, for Democrats, is up from 36% last year and up from 21% for Republicans.  According to Gallup, “The boost in public school confidence this year is part of an uptick in the average confidence rating (35%) across all institutions that Gallup measures.”  The polling group went on to report, “Public school confidence ranked second in positive year-over-year change among 15 institutions tested in the June survey.”  And said, “Eleven institutions received a confidence boost from 2016, largely attributable to rising confidence among Republicans, which might be ascribed to the election of President Donald Trump.”  So by simply getting himself elected, Trump may have already had a positive impact.

In speaking for myself, I’m pretty darn confident in our public school system!  I am confident that the majority of teachers ‘teaching’ our children today come from the lowest ranks of college and university graduates.  I am confident that more money will be spent on trade unions and administrative costs than will ever be spent on actually educating our children.  I am confident that subjects like fuzzy math and ‘Common Core’ will greatly hinder the ability of our children to be successful in a global marketplace.  And I am confident that the average test scores and global comparisons have steadily diminished in the U.S. since the advent of the National Education Association and the Department of Education federalized the educational system.  The federal government should have no role to play in the education of our kids other than to mandate that it takes place.  

Frankly, I’m not the least bit surprised that people don't like what they are getting in return for the amount of taxpayer money we spend each year to ‘educate’ their children.  After all, we spend nearly $15,000 per student every single year, or roughly $650 Billion, and what exactly do we get in return?  Generation after generation of mind-numbed robots.  More people are going to have to get involved in their schools to make sure that the books that they pay for are accurately portray our history and that teachers are not teaching a bias toward the liberal world view.  It comes down to every community watching out for themselves if they want a good education for their children and not what the liberals want to stuff down their throats.  It's the only way that children, as they become responsible adults, will be able to elect responsible leaders who will “Make America Great Again.” 

U.S. students consistently fall well behind other international students in math and science proficiency.  And recent decades have shown that spending increasingly amounts of taxpayer money on public schools tends to have a poor return on the investment.  Betsy Devos cited lack of school choice and failure of top-down policies dictated by Washington.  She said, “This department just invested $7 billion trying to improve failing schools, and there were literally no results to show for it.”  And yet we are always told by those in the Democrat Party that, like everything else, all we need to do is to spend more money and things will improve.  Which begs the question, how much money is enough money?  Because I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone that it’s that kind of mentality that has gotten to the point where this country is now $20 Trillion in debt.    

And let’s face it, it’s from the very first day they enter into their local public school to the day they graduate from one of our illustrious institutions of ‘higher learning’ that our children are ‘taught’ from a curriculum that consists of nothing more than leftwing propaganda.  It would seem that our ‘education’ system becomes more about indoctrination, and less about teaching our children, every single year.  I am 100% confident that the only thing schools are ‘good’ for is to turn our children into good little obedient communists, with all the moral values of alley cats in heat, holding their hands out to get everything they can for ‘free’.  I think most reasonably intelligent Americans will agree that U.S. public education HAS NOT been about ‘education’ for a very long time.  And that’s the problem.  We need to decide, as a nation, how best to actually educate our kids.

And Hitlery’s rather bizarre, and yet classically leftist, interpretation of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ notwithstanding, I think that it was he who said it best when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”  Because what better way than through the controlling of our public, and to a certain degree our private, education system is there to accomplish just that?  If we are never ‘taught’ what our history is, and are instead ‘taught’ what is nothing more than a complete fabrication when it comes to our past, how is it that we can prevent making the same mistakes.  There’s an old adage that goes something like, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”  But if we’re never taught about our past, our future becomes far more uncertain.  We must be taught the mistakes, as well as the triumphs, of those who came before us.