The debate rages on. Do we open schools in the face of the threat COVID-19 poses or do we keep schools closed? There are compelling arguments on both sides of the issue and ones not strictly based in politics. But those concerned with the quality of education in the United States, and especially those who believe our educational institutions have become indoctrination mills, are viewing this debate with a stunning amount of short-sightedness.
To say that the Progressive ideology is prevalent in our education system is to state the obvious. All you must do is utter a favorable statement about one of our nation’s Founders on any campus and you will be assailed as a heretic. “How can you glorify a slave owner,” you will almost instantly hear as you are pressured off the campus. Or bring up the name Christopher Columbus in any high school and you will immediately be confronted with the false narrative that he slaughtered legions of Native Americans. You will be castigated as a racist.
The truth of the matter where both of those points are concerned is this. Our Founders, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – two of those who crafted the Declaration of Independence, were abolitionists and laid the groundwork for the United States to be one of the first countries in the world to abolish the slave trade (as an aside, the slave trade thrives in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East still today). Columbus? All this Italian explorer did was to unwittingly expose Native Americans to the same diseases that the Mongols unwittingly brought to Europe during their campaigns of conquest.
But we don’t hear the full stories about these issues because our education system has become agendized politically to the ideological Left and in that realm the United States – and all Americans – are colonizing bastards who have sucked the wealth from every culture they have ever engaged. Never mind that the American Capitalist system created – created for the world – what we now recognize as the Middle Class; a way for people to break out of the class culture that before the American advent was impossible. Never mind that technology from the United States has revolutionized life for every person on the face of the planet. Ignore the medical, agricultural, engineering, and communication advances that the United States has brought to the world. As the Left believes it, we are horrible people who should be in a constant state of apology.
And why do so many from Generation X to present think this way? They believe because that’s what they were taught in school.
The Progressive movement, with a genesis circa the turn of the 20th Century, understood as fundamental that to erode the truth of what the United States has to hold they needed to change the narrative about the United States; from opportunity to hopelessness, freedom to oppression. To achieve that goal, they knew they had to capture both the education system and the media complex. Today, they have succeeded, and we are seeing the fruit from this poison tree.
But from the ashes there is an opportunity for a phoenix to rise and this phoenix would be the recreation of the American education system courtesy of the Coronavirus.
As the politicians and ideological activists disingenuously debate whether schools should re-open in the Fall, there is a gigantic opportunity for the private sector to destroy the union-owned, Progressive-captured, state-run education system. This opportunity won’t last long so those who love our country who have deep pockets might want to stow their megalomania for a bit and realize the two-fold opportunity presented by this moment in time.
Never before have so many parents been exposed to the idea of home schooling and/or remote learning outside of a formal school setting. School children across the country have been out of the formal school system since Spring break of last year and many in several states face the prospect of continuing this existence.
Never before have so many parents been in need of educational materials with which to engage their children. They are in need of easy-to-use albeit potent educational vehicles and curriculum that will allow them to both effectively educate their homebound children and execute their duties to either their households or employers or both.
And, never before has there been a transformative moment in time when a need and a market were so obviously presented along with an opportunity for the private sector to achieve influence and wealth even as it did a tremendous public service in the immediate while saving the Republic for the future.
The opportunity that presents is one in which a non-politicized, non-ideological, modular educational curriculum software is created. This easy-to-administer educational curriculum and software would, no doubt (and with the appropriate marketing) save our children from another quarter in which education was sacrificed to political opportunism. It would also super-charge the question of why we allow others to have control over our children’s education when we can more efficiently do so, at a fraction of the cost, and with a more desirable outcome: the institution of critical thinking skills without the indoctrination.
After the pandemic sequestration is exhausted, this curriculum could continue to be executed either in the home (bolstering the numbers of the home school demographic) or be instituted at public libraries or learning annexes, administered by librarians and/or technical aids with a clear instruction aid only with the technical execution of the lessons via the software.
By engaging one opportunity we eliminate:
- The ideological indoctrination of our children
- The stranglehold the school textbook industry has on the historical narrative
- The radical influence the teachers’ unions have in politics
- One of the more intrusive taxing bases in our tax bills
By engaging one opportunity we achieve:
- An education system that allows a student to succeed at his/her own pace
- The independence of our education system from the tyranny of the minority
- The reduction of education debt over a student’s lifetime
- The preservation of history in a fact-based, unmanipulated manner
- A new industry where costs will be mandated by product superiority and market-based competition
Today’s “deep thinkers” and “deep pockets” of the political Right are missing an opportunity to set Progressivism back a century, but to date not one of them has had the vision or the courage to execute. One must wonder, with the immense level of wealth and influence that executing on this issue would achieve, why isn’t there a race to this market?
It was once said to me back in my non-profit days, “No one invests in ideas anymore.” The more I contemplate that reality, the more I am delivered to this fact. That’s exactly what is wrong with our country today.