“What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for

Me, give me liberty or give me death!”

- Patrick Henry March 23, 1775

It wasn’t so long ago that this country had a firm grip on things. It certainly had a firm grip on its origins and character. America had origins and a character of which we were proud, and why not? They served the country well. We treated people pretty well. We respected them; we trusted them and we were a land of brave men. We weren’t bitter and angry. They didn’t feel deflated they didn’t feel deprived. They felt distinguished. If they were given an opportunity to die for their country their only complaint was that they could only die once. Think of some of the great men and women of America; if all names were printed, the list would be immense in length. Think of Thomas Pane, Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty of give me death” remember a Naval hero by the name of John Paul Jones, “I have not yet begun to fight”, Daniel Boone ‘pioneer, frontiersman”, Davey Crockett, “Remember the Alamo”. Think of our great authors Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe also our literary visionaries such as, Samuel Clemmons “Twain”, Hemmingway, and Steinbeck. More than likely these days a very politically incorrect history, but a history of inspiration and determination nevertheless.

I don’t think that there has been enough said about the lack of real education in this country. Education is the job of the individual states, so says the Constitution through its deference by the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Decisions on schools funding should be held accountable through state legislators and Governors. The states have become so dependent on federal money because of poor decision-making at the state level that education has become doomed in today’s society if nothing is done about it education may well be left up to those that would twist history and make it their own. Many things are not being taught effectively to children, classes like math and science have been dumbed down to make an “even playing field” for all students, even Civics the class where duties and patriotism are discussed is not being taught because more time is needed to be spent on more meaningful things “in our lifestyle”. More meaningful than how we as Americans have responsibilities and rights? This is not only Socialistic, but also a fraudulent abuse to the very nature and posterity of American values where the truth had been that the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. Those who are unaware of ignorance can only be misled by their knowledge.

“Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in Adversity.”

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

He helped to start the Transcendental Club in 1836 and published Nature (1836), a book showing the organicism of all life and the function of nature as a visible manifestation of invisible spiritual truths. In 1837, he delivered his address "The American Scholar," often called America's literary declaration of independence, before Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society; in 1838, his address before the Harvard Divinity School challenged the very foundations of conservative Unitarianism.^{^[1]}

The Swedish scientist, theosophist, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, b. Jan. 29, 1688, d. Mar. 29, 1772, pioneered in both scientific and religious thought. University trained at Uppsala, Swedenborg turned first to a scientific and technical career as a natural scientist and official with the Swedish board of mines (1710-45), concentrating on research and theory.^{^[2]}

A first-rate scientific theorist and inventor, Swedenborg, in some of his insights, anticipated scientific progress by more than a century.^{^[3]}

Idealism, the philosophical view that the mind or spirit constitutes the fundamental reality; has taken several distinct but related forms. Objective idealism accepts common sense realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things), whereas subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism.

Plato is often considered the first idealist philosopher, chiefly because of his metaphysical doctrine of Forms. Plato considered the universal Idea or Form for example, redness or goodness more real than a particular instance of the form a red object, a good action. According to Plato, the world of changing experience is unreal, and the Idea or Form which does not change and which can be known only by reason constitutes true reality.

The 18th-century epistemologist George Berkeley was one of the major exponents of idealism. He held that the object of knowledge is an idea and that ideas can exist only in the mind; therefore, objects can exist only as objects of consciousness. Berkeley's dictum esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived") has clear metaphysical implications. Indeed he called his theory immaterialism and intended it as a refutation of traditional materialism.

Immanuel Kant held that it is impossible to gain knowledge of the world by either reason or sense experience alone. Whereas in ordinary idealism the individual subject's awareness is the basic element of reality, in Kant's transcendental idealism the subject in general not a particular subject, but the universal structure of all subjects is the basic element of reality. This universal subject, the transcendental self, is the precondition of any knowledge of an objective world.

Kant's successor Johann Gottlieb Fichte postulated a creative Ego as the ultimate source of reality, which generates all change and all knowledge. Fichte's theory was elaborated in G. W. F. Hegel's absolute idealism. For Hegel reality is absolute Spirit or Reason, which manifests its development toward total self-consciousness in every aspect of experience from nature to human history. The English Hegelian F. H. Bradley argued that ordinary experience is fragmentary and contradictory and therefore appearance; reality, the Absolute, is a unified totality, which can be known only through a unique and absolute, perhaps mystical, experience.^{^[4]}

These were the people; this was the style that allowed young Americans to dream of similar possible achievements. History may be written by academics, but they rarely create it. Until now…

- Aristotle Greek philosopher BC 354 – 322

We the people have become, “Me and my peeps”, with many natural citizens unable to do the menial things like balance a checkbook, find a job, and hold a decent conversation. Our youth has become less charitable and have become angry out of frustration giving rise to the domestic unrest and civil disobedience causing alarming crime rates and overpopulated juvenile detention centers. The lies and myths that have been told to our youth in so many of our learning organizations have maimed the legacy of America so much that to change the course would take generations to turn around. Do we really want to leave a legacy of, “No Hope for the USA”, youths that have no understanding of their right as a citizen of the United States and are at the mercy of others that would do them harm because of their lack of confidence? For there is only one evil to our Republic and this is “IGNORANCE”, because he who is unaware of ignorance can only be misled by his knowledge.

I remember my first run in with the law and thus the reason that I became more aware of political endeavors of our supposed political guardians. It was the day that I got my driver’s license. I got a ticket. Still being a minor, I went to court with my Mom where I learned my first rule of law in a courtroom. I tried to explain my defense but to no avail, it fell on lady justices’ deaf ears. My Mom could only comfort me as the words rolled off the Judges tongue, ”Ignorance is no defense of the law”. What an education! I thought, “They didn’t teach me that in school”. The important lesson that I learned that day was that one should be attentive to know the rules and meanings of the laws so that the laws will not harm you. This changed my learning plan and made me aware that I needed to be more assertive with my search for knowledge and to scrutinize the sources of information more closely.

With all of the information and sources available in the past 30 years, what I still can’t understand is that in today’s day and age, the 21^st Century, the fact that there is such a high illiteracy rate among our nations population, not just children, but people as a whole, and that children are allowed to be pacified into the next grade level because of education board quotas, threats of discrimination lawsuits, or problems from some pro-active group; either through affirmative action or federal monies being granted for student based quotas.

Then it occurred to me that most Americans, mostly parents of this generation, probably have not read any of the great writings of this countries early history let alone heard of them, namely the Federalist papers, the Articles of Confederation, even our own Constitution and those writings that were written to argue against the patriot and Republican movements. For the Americans that have, they read it to learn how America is a solid enlightenment to social government and the freedom of this country’s people. Some of our enlightened educators have tried to hide these facts and essays from our learning students. Instead of preparing students for the defense of the republic’s political situations, they are letting a new history be written in the place of the factual in order to subvert the intention of our form of government.

In Thomas Jefferson's words, the States are "the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies”.

The State of education

Because the Tenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution reserves to the States all powers not specifically delegated in the national (federalist) government, public education in the united States is fundamentally a state responsibility. In 1794, the states began slowly, creating a department of education and enacting laws defining control and finance of public education within its own borders, beginning with the establishment of the board of Regents of the University of the State of New York. Although final authority resided with the state governments, the dominant American tradition has been one of a decentralized administration. The most significant unit of educational authority has been the local school district, the boundaries of which usually coincide with those of a city or town.

American education in practice has been mainly, although not exclusively, the responsibility of the state and local governments, in fact, the word education does not even appear in the U. S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush and others wanted the expansion of education because they knew that education was necessary to guarantee that the newly won freedoms would not be lost through a passive or ignorant citizenry. As the new American families moved to take advantage of free land, the old educational patterns broke down, and new forms were generated. As a result, Americans began to delegate greater than ever, educational responsibility to the schools. But aside from teaching knowledge and skills, reformers saw the schools as the logical place to indoctrinate the federal republican idealism. In the 1820’s, universal education was an idea that was held by only a few visionaries. But the United States in the 1830s had a greater diversity in social and economic status, as well as in religious and moral values. Enter Horace Mann, an educational reformer that wanted, through educational ways, to build a distinctive new society.

Horace Mann (1796-1859) is seen as the father of American Education. Mann had little formal education as a youth, gaining a lot of his early education by reading books at the town library, where he learned enough to be admitted to Brown University. After graduation in 1819, he taught for a while, studied law and then entered politics, where he soon became a rising star in the state assembly. Between 1837 and 1848, Mann became the best-known educator in America, and the best-known American educator throughout the world.

To the diversity of social and economic status, Mann wanted to introduce the "common school"; that is, a school common to all the people that would provide a common and unifying experience. Mann wanted to eliminate the religious and class distinctions implicit in this dual system. Mann saw the school system as a promulgator of class distinction where the students would be pitted against one another by their difference in curriculum in the schools. The common school would be commonly supported, commonly attended and commonly controlled; its ultimate goal would be sociological and national unity.

On the surface, this seemed good-natured but as we see now, that we are in the future, this has allowed the sociological to overpower the educational fundamentals.

Mann's faith was total. There were no restrictions, at least in his mind, to what the common school could do. He believed that the traditional curriculum could be universalized, and that culture, previously reserved for the upper classes, could be democratized or fairly balanced. In 1837, to the surprise of those around this rising star of the state assembly, Mann was appointed secretary to the board of education. Through his post on the board, he influenced the educational system not only of the state of Massachusetts but also of the entire United States. The basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic were just the start; over the decades, society has assigned many other skills previously learned in the homes to be taught in schools. Now we have the secular and morally dysfunctional “Department of Education”. Although the board’s powers were limited at the time, it was able to affect public opinion regarding school problems. Mann's only instrument was the Annual Report he wrote, Mann’s 12 annual reports when he was the secretary to the Massachusetts board of education are a record in which he set forth his vision of what education should be in a free society. This strongly influenced the evolution of modern education by meeting educational needs.

Mann, as a result of his scholastic agenda, was then elected to the United States House of Representatives to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Quincy Adams, where he served until 1853.

In Mann’s 12^th annual report, the culmination of the series, Mann contemplates the demise of the educational system in America.

“And hence it is that the establishment of a republican government, without well-appointed and efficient means for the universal education of the people, is the most rash and fool-hardy experiment ever tried by man. Its fatal results may not be immediately developed,--they may not follow as the thunder follows the lightning,--for time is an element in maturing them, and the calamity is too great to be prepared in a day; but, like the slow-accumulating avalanche, they will grow more terrific by delay, and, at length, though it may be at a late hour, will overwhelm with ruin whatever lies athwart their path. It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the republic that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, selfishness, and passion.”

Mann goes on to say that a republic may grow in numbers and in wealth; its armies may be invincible and its military power may strike fear in the heart of nations around the world, but if the Republic of America is “devoid of intelligence” it will eventually “rush with the speed of a whirlwind to an ignominious end”.

Mann also adds this to his contemplation of an ignorant United States of America.

“However elevated the moral character of a constituency may be; however well informed in matters of general science or history, yet they must, if citizens of a Republic, understand something of the true nature and functions of the government under which they live. That any one who is to participate in the government of a country, when he becomes a man, should receive no instruction respecting the nature and functions of the government he is afterwards to administer, is a political solecism ( a mistake).”

Mann knew the dangers of introducing the constitution to the classroom without a common and proper teaching platform, because of the different renderings citizens held of the constitution. He feared that teachers and instructors would be chosen on account of their party affiliation: “or that teachers will feign affinities which they do not feel”. Given the chance teachers would invent ways to look attractive to those that are heading the school boards and even teach falsehoods in which they do not even believe in so that they would be kept or hired. Mann also knew that if the “tempest” of political strife were let loose on the “Common Schools”, ‘they would be overwhelmed with sudden ruin.” The schoolroom is a theater for party politics and Mann wondered with “what violence will hostile partisans struggle to gain possession of the stage, and to play their parts upon it!” Mann’s solution was to elect prudential; committees in each state that would make the political decisions for the school, thus taking the fight out of the schools and placing them in the streets and at the ballot box. This reasoning demands that the school districts would be responsible for their own political viewed school and course of study. This of course gave the Federal government the opportunity after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period to take on a larger role in public education, attempting to ensure Southern States would rectify the inequalities caused by slavery. The lines between public and private remained blurred much longer in higher education than in elementary schooling mainly for the reason that the elementary and secondary schools funding was provided by local money and a closer look by school boards and parents controlled what the local schools were teaching.

Previous to the Civil War, it had been planned to expand college attendance. The Morrill Act of 1862* established land-grant colleges enabled this to happen. By 1867, just after the Civil War and during the period of reconstruction the House of Representatives created the Education and Labor Committee. Congress first authorized the Department of Education along with the US Office of Education in 1867, eight years after the death of Horace Mann and thirty years after his appointment to the position of secretary of the board of education of the state of Massachusetts. The department was just supposed to collect and disseminate information on education.

I find it interesting that all of these committees and departments were enacted almost 30 years to the date after Horace Mann’s acceptance of the seat on the Massachusetts Board of Education. 30 Years allows for a total of three sets of students to finish the 10^th grade. So, it might be safe to say that there were some of Mann’s educated graduates that had been elected to Congress by that time. Since this gave a generation of instruction to students and the student’s children, it only follows that there were those that grew up learning the thoughts of Mann and permitted this style of education to become stronger and more developed. As Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next”.

In 1874, in a Michigan Supreme Court decision involving the city of Kalamazoo, it was clearly established that communities could use local property taxes to support high schools. Since then local property taxes had been the principal means of raising revenues for both public elementary and secondary schools, dependence on this tax, however, meant that the wealth of the communities in which children lived determined the quality and extent of the schooling available to them. In the early 1900’s, in order to help poorer communities, many states began to supplement local tax revenues with state programs to aid public higher education. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, when state funds were dramatically expanded, general state revenues also largely financed such programs. In 1958, the National Defense educational Act+, and in 1965 the Secondary Education Act expanded the federal involvement in the local and state school systems. Then in 1971, a landmark decision by the California Supreme Court (Serrano vs. Priest) determined that reliance on local property taxes to finance public schooling violated the California State constitution. Equalization of educational expenditures among the school districts of a given state became a major educational issue. The possibility arose that in years to come public schooling in many states might be completely funded through states governmental programs instead of the local property taxes.

The Secondary Educational Act of 1965 was revised in 1981 and became the Consolidation and Improvement Act. Due to the conservative efforts in the House of Representatives and the advice of President Ronald Reagan the revision gave each state more control over the allocation of federal funds for programs with educational purposes and preventing the federal governments Department of Education from total control of state education. The Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981 is now the “No Child left behind Act of 2001”, enacted by President George W. Bush to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.

Moreover, Mann set the balance of the school on sound teachings with teachers that kept the “faith”, but the faith has changed. In Mann’s own words, he poses the dilemma of all history.

“Surely, between these extremes, there must be a medium not difficult to be found. And is not this the middle course, which all sensible and judicious men, all patriots, and all genuine republicans, must approve? --Namely, that those articles in the creed of republicanism, which are accepted by all, believed in by all, and which form the common basis of our political faith, shall be taught to all. But when the teacher, in the course of his lessons or lectures on the fundamental law, arrives at a controverted text, he is either to read it without comment or remark; or, at most, he is only to say that the passage is the subject of disputation, and that the schoolroom is neither the tribunal to adjudicate, nor the forum to discuss it.”

Horace Mann concludes his last and final annual report stating “it will come to be universally understood, that political proselytism is no function of the school; but that all indoctrination into matters of controversy between hostile political parties is to be elsewhere sought for, and elsewhere imparted...” There is no place in the school for converting students to one form of the government or the other. Today we have very liberal professors and teachers that skew their class syllabus to invoke a certain theme that manipulates the student to a predetermined outcome.

The last throw of the report is the statement that we must not commit old errors and must not tolerate the harmful zealots that preach that their way is the only way and anybody that disagrees is mistaken. Mann finishes off his report with his blessing of the search for new truths “--thus, will the only practicable method be adopted for discovering new truths, and for discarding, --instead of perpetuating, --old errors; and thus, too, will that pernicious race of intolerant zealots, whose whole faith may be summed up in two articles, --that they, themselves, are always infallibly right, and that all dissenters are certainly wrong, --be extinguished, --extinguished, not by violence, nor by proscription, but by the more copious inflowing of the light of truth.”

Seek the truth. Let alone a new truth. How many times do we have to hear that one? Seeking the truth is a fine idea that should be encouraged but you had better start looking yourself when others say they’ve found it.

Sincerity is no attestation of truth. Because someone sounds convincing and seems to have all of the answers is the reason that we must consider the evidence before leaping blindly into some new fad or fashion of the truth. Truth was what was sought by the great minds of societies: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Jesus. (Yes, Jesus was truth in Himself, but I am trying to be sensible to all readers.) They searched for truth by interpreting the evidence. Today, too often ideology and fanaticism stand in the way of truth. Those who once were described as radicals are today described as liberators; malicious malcontents become instant visionaries. Their vision is not obstructed by truth; they cannot see it.

Horace Mann has been charged by some of those that are opposed the public school system with the plight of the American educational system. Though not intentionally, Mann did allow the disreputable path of our educational facilities to be combined with those of the federal government. Horace Mann had good intentions to ensure the education of children in the United States and that children would be taught in a similar way across the country. This modern day national education system is far from the intention of Mann I am sure and has become a scary Orwellian thought or Star Trek like “Borg collective” learning system that frowns on individualism and radical thinking. Anything that is not in line with the curriculum in our schools today is seen as radical and cannot be tolerated to disrupt the other students. Accordingly, who have become the intolerant zealots now? This whole methodology is against what is granted as a freedom by the very nature of first Amendment in our Constitution. This was a clear-cut change to how the educational system started out to be because for years preceding Mann different religious organizations had been the main establishment of the educational system. Horace Mann himself was supposedly a Calvinist and by all accounts had a high affection for religion. Maybe this all changed when he took his trip to Europe to study the educational systems in those countries? After all, it was about the time that Karl Marx was spouting his absurdities. Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” was published in 1848 and his followers were out in the streets declaring the new order of things.

How the trust was won

During its history, the Office of education has acquired responsibility for aiding public and private schools at all levels. The guise that this department authoritized itself is that its major purposes of the Department of Education is to ensure equal educational opportunity for all and to improve the quality of that education through federal support, research programs, and information sharing; a definite change from just the collection of information. This was the goal of Mann, which conforms to the beliefs of Jefferson? Now these are amiable goals, but this is not the centrist group that Mann had thought it would be, but now has more recently morphed into a platform by which an offensive assault by the liberals has been launched, unchecked and able to do as it pleases with the ACLU@ at its side (We’ll learn a bit more about the ACLU later in the book). The Department of Education assists the state and local school districts with racial integration, bilingual education, underprivileged, and disabled students. Again, this is amiable but this is how it gets what it wants, by holding the purse strings of those school districts that could not operate without the funds that it promises to provide if certain measures are met. Mann’s theoretical followers capitalized on the fact that American schools had a profound faith in education as a means to achieve increasingly complex individual and social goals. They also didn’t like the fact that American’s had a remarkable faith in mass schooling and that it was implemented through largely decentralized organization, unlike the educational systems of other countries which are usually directed and financed by the national government, where manipulation and control of the curriculum that the students would follow ensured that the majority of students would take the teachings as gospel. Mann learned on his visit to Europe that a centralized government could wield a lot more power to control the subjects that are taught in the school systems and he could remove the hold that religious schools had on education. The competition among protestant denominations was one reason for the founding of hundreds of colleges. Although, religious convictions motivated the creation of the earliest colleges, among them Harvard (1636)&, William and Mary (1693), and Yale (1701), despite their religious origins, many of these colleges received public assistance and were eventually stripped of all of their early religious activity.

Because these reformers were storming ahead with their scholastic agenda of public funded education and agendas that were different from the beliefs of citizens in areas of the United States they received opposition and in 1925 those that opposed the public school systems urged the Supreme Court ruling (Pierce vs. Society of Sisters, a Roman Catholic diocese) that states could not compel children to attend public schools. In the hundred years that followed, the rise in high school attendance was one of the most striking features of American education.

Things really started to change in the 1940’s both during and after World War II. Mass higher education began with the introduction of the G.I. Bill^, which flourished in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. On March 3, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson approved Public Law 358, the “Veterans Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966,” Home and farm loans, job counseling, and an employment placement service were other benefits provided. The education and training program went into effect on June 1, 1966. It was retroactive, providing benefits to Post-Korean veterans, who served between February 1, 1955, and August 4, 1964, as well as to Vietnam Era veterans, who served between August 5, 1964, and May 7, 1975. For the first time in GI Bill history, service personnel also were eligible for GI Bill education and training while they were on active duty. This program ended on December 31, 1989. During the years of the program, a total of 8.2 million veterans and service members received training, as follows:

¨ 5.1 million in colleges

¨ 2.5 million in other schools

¨ 591,000 on the job

¨ 56,000 in on farm training

VA spent more than $42 billion during this time to provide educational assistance.

The current programs that are available revolve around, 38 U.S.C. Chapter 30, and 10 U.S.C. Chapter 1606, of the Montgomery G. I. Billa and the Montgomery G. I. Bill - Selected Reserve Educational Assistance Program (MGIB-SR)b – MGIB was enacted not only to help with the readjustment of discharged service members, but also to support the concept of an all-volunteer armed force. With this in mind, a provision was made to allow certain veterans with remaining entitlement under the Vietnam Era GI Bill, to qualify for MGIB benefits if they continued their active duty.

There have been phenomenal progressions in our school systems in a century by making education readily available to families in the United States. In 1880, only 2.5 percent of American youth of high school age graduated from a secondary school. In 1990 about 75 percent of American youth of high school age graduated from a secondary school of which more than 41 percent of U.S., high school graduates enrolled in institutions of higher education graduated. More than any other educational institution, the public school was a place of custodial care of youth who had no plans and nowhere else to go, moreover, at their most idealistic, meeting the societal objectives of social mobility and equality of opportunity. Along the way, Mann’s educational vision has been twisted and bent over periods of time so that it is only his vision by namesake.

The ruin of a “Good thing”

With all of this funding and increase in attendance and graduation, are the students really getting the education that they need?

Public schools have been facing declining test scores since the mid 1960’s, poor performance, high functional illiteracy rates, watered-down curriculums, and declining standards, and yet no one sees any correlation between these statistics and the expanded role of public schools as socialization centers performed by the federal government as surrogate parents acting as a local power. Public education has become all things to all people, and academics are suffering. It has become so focused on providing nutritional, medical, psychological, religious (or religious resistance), and social care that it has lost sight of its original purpose and that is to educate. Public schools are no longer places of learning however they are set up instead to be social service centers that, according to Sharon Robinson of the American Educational Research Association (which is another special interest group bent on psycho-babble that is run by government official’s wives that have nothing better to do), “accelerate progression toward the day when reform is guided by the joint efforts of researchers, practitioners, parents, social workers, health professionals, law enforcement officials, members of the business community, and other civic-minded citizens.”

The International Child of the Future

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our Founding Fathers, toward his parents, toward our elected officials, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.”

That was said by Chester Pierce, a Professor of Educational Psychiatry at Harvard. - speech at the Childhood International Seminar in Denver, 1972:

(The central planning of the burgeoning collectivist state located in Washington, D.C.)

Parents, along with some educators, professionals and legislators, have been battling the directives of those bureaucrats and politicians who are forcing on the states Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, School-To-Work, Workforce Investment Act, invasive student surveys, whole language, revisionist history, and "integrated" math. (Integrated math teaches that there is no right answer; there is little deduction grounded in mathematical skills requiring the "boring" work of memorization or learning without depending on a calculator.) Public education is fading away, and while it is doing so, it is taking a whole generation of children with it. The problem lies within the very foundation of public education, the Department of Education has the notion that education itself entails parenting and raising children instead of just educating them in a performance type curriculum. The public schools have in effect coerced parents into letting go of their children and have in fact attempted to become the families themselves. The result of parents giving the authority to public schools to raise their children has been devastating. Elementary, Secondary, and High Schools are supposed to be accents of parents and families of the community and not an operational arm of the federal educational collective.

My daughter attends a public school that depends on federal monies in order to operate and carry out its normal duties of a school including textbooks. I am very active with the schools activities and have seen first hand the strings that are attached to the funds that the school receives. The school is continually obligated to conduct surveys and other reports that have nothing to do with the education or the advancement of the students. The reports and surveys are more concerned with the student’s sociological and psychological attributes. The federal money that is divvied out to the school first passes through the hands of the School board; the school board then allocates the money to all of the schools in the district (the school district in this case is the whole county), there is then a competition between the schools. Needless to say, the school that my daughter attends loses out on a lot of the money because of the lack of political pull within the boundaries of the school. Many of the School board members have students in other school boundaries and they receive the larger amount of funds for their supplies. Since the conception of the “No child left behind Act,” there has been a concerted effort by the school, as a condition of the NCLB Act, to include more activity that includes the student’s parents. I do not have a problem with the parental activity, but the lack of parental activity. The problem lays in the attitude that has been instilled in those parents that have been conditioned by the system to rely on the school as the all-encompassing citadel of sociological and rearing of the students.

Treat with great caution the people who teach your children. It’s one thing to have your child instructed, it’s an entirely different thing to have them manipulated.

My daughter is 10 years old and just took one of these surveys. The students in my daughter’s class are 9 and 10 year olds. All of the questions were closed questions; meaning they required just a “yes” or “no” answer. Here are some of the examples of the questions that are on the surveys:

§ Do you think that the school is clean?

§ Are there problems with children bringing weapons or drugs to school?

§ Do you think that your teacher expects you to go to college?

§ Do you think that your teacher expects you to finish college?

§ Do you think that your school bathroom is clean?

§ Do you like math?

§ Do you like your teacher?

§ Do you like to work in groups?

Now I don’t know what a 9 or 10 year olds concept of cleanliness is but I have seen a few 9 and 10 year olds rooms and they aren’t a good example of cleanliness, not to mention problem of those students that would not give a good report. The next question shouldn’t have to be answered by a 9 or 70 year old but the teachers and the staff of the school.

The third and fourth questions puzzle me. How would the student offer an answer to this? The student would not only have had to first have a conversation individually with the teacher but also have the ability to understand what the concept of college is. There are many differences between the concepts of elementary school and that of a college or a university that even an exceptional 9 or 10 year old would not be able understand let alone finish.

I think that the obvious majority answer to the fifth question would be a resounding “NO.”

Do you like your teacher? Yah, we all have a favorite, but the majority of 9 and 10 year olds can’t properly answer this type of question because they wouldn’t have the ability to reflect on all but 3 other teachers.

The last of my example questions is probably the most disturbing for me. Most children have their friends in groups or are able to help in some manner within the role of class work. However, in certain instances, the student may be a new student and not know many of the other students, in this case, really might not want to work with students that they are uncomfortable with. This could skew the answer along with the students that are mentally above most of the other students in the class setting, the student, being mentally beyond the other students would thus, not like to work with others if given the chance to work by themselves, they would. I personally have never had a great deal of like for working with others on many projects. One reason is that I learned early on that if I worked by myself I could come to my own conclusions and not have to listen to others that might have an inferior idea thus, giving to an argument or other confrontation that would hinder the project.

To be brief, Outside of the very important argument that the government makes a horrible parent, there is the added issue of “busyness” that has overtaken schools, the school system really doesn’t like to have students with personally individualistic ideas and can arrive at a solution without the help of the collective of student compilation of ideas to arrive at a “common” determination. Who said that the “common” determination is the best way to resolve all issues or projects? Because of this sociological stalemate in our schools programs, we are losing our unchallenged standing and superiority in commerce, industry, science, and technology to a rising tide of mediocrity. Teachers are no longer concerned with whether or not their students have a firm grasp of the core program of study; they are more concerned about whether or not they offend someone with their program. Instructors must embrace every child’s opinion, no matter how wrong it may be, in order to teach them in a politically correct manner. By focusing on too many programs, their standards are lowered and their focus on the details of academics like science, history, and language is lost. Instead of making sure that students have a firm foundation of knowledge, public schools are focusing on solving the social problems of the community around them. Instead of education, it has become socialization.

In a socialistic system, (our current public educational structure) there is no competition; therefore, there is no incentive for improvement or innovation. Public schools have a monopoly on the education market. Private and charter schools are only allowed to compete on a limited level because of high costs.

Teachers are taught in their college textbook education to teach from every point of view, so instead of a nationalistic viewpoint, the content is more general and supposedly worldlier and as a result of the lack of depth and detail, students suffer. Teachers are forced to defend their points of view by either intentionally or unintentionally inventing new philosophies to mask their ineptness and also their fear that a point of view might offend a student or even worse, a student may question their authority on a matter that is discussed in the classroom. This in turn harms and tips the educational scale so that the balance of truth can never be recovered. The poor innocent mind is now cast into half-truths and all out lies on the basics of educational studies and liberal ideas that instead of encouraging their freethinking “out-of-the-box” supposition, have in its place incarcerated their minds to a reality that out-of-the-box is actually “in-their-box”.

Out-of-the-box has been the requirement of thinking for job seekers and corporate gurus for more than a decade. Now that everybody is “out-of-the-box”, who is “in-the-box”? Are we to believe that those that are out-of-the-box are better thinkers and thus better people than those that are “in-the-box”? This “out-of-the-box concept was realized by those companies and industries that needed new thoughts and ideas in order that a solution is acquired to grow their business. The reason that these industries were asking for people with this type of thinking skill was that their old system was fading and needed a boost. This is the exact position that our educational systems are in today. The ineptness to provide a steady flow of talent that could raise the bar of scores and grades within the walls of our hallowed institutions reminds us that we should be vigilant on our quest to demand better teachers, those that are not the mandatory revolutionaries that our weak government allows to hang around.

These teachers and people that are now in charge of our leaning institutions expect the government to ensure that everything is fair. We all know that this is a total impossibility. These are teachers and citizens not vaguely interested in the pursuit of excellence but interested in the pursuit of fairness. Life itself is not fair; and if these imbeciles think they can make all things fair, they are wrong, wrong, wrong. All their meddling interference, taking, giving, is simply government intervention in our private lives, whether we are students or not, its definitely a huge waste of money. They are generally undetectable because their motives are so good, so pure, that we actually think for a moment that it might be a good idea to listen to them. They want the equalization of outcome and want everybody to be treated the same way. Then the wake up call is sounded and we wake up to the notion that what we should be doing is determining our own search for excellence. These teachers don’t want equality of opportunity they want equality as the end result. They don’t want a high achiever in their classroom; that would skew the results, so they punish the high achiever, and then they can enjoy equalized failure, pain, and equalized misery. These manipulators don’t approve of individual excellence. What they represent is resentment in the purest form. The passionate envy of the qualities and possessions of another, carried to the point of spite and hatred. These proud school officials bring out their regurgitated words in a different form so as to sound like new philosophies to explain their failure: gender equality, lack of self esteem, homophobia, lack of funding, etc. They keep focusing on the failures and all they get are more failures. These types of teachers, professors, and other of the academia are just providing people and students with a menu of excuses to explain away poor results. Hopefully we will not allow our schools to fall from compelling ignorance to rampant stupidity, because ignorance and stupidity are far from the same thing: Stupidity is incurable!

Is there a solution?

Not under the existing structure.

The only viable solutions that can be seen are either complete privatization of the public school system, or, barring that, school vouchers. Competition improves quality, and until we see public schools having to fight for their funding, we will see no improvement whatsoever in the educational system. When the government is no longer a factor in education and parents get involved with the school programs and politically change the landscape that is in our schools today, only then we will see a difference. One way that has been recommended is the practice of school vouchers; with vouchers, parents no longer are chained to a horrible underachieving district and allows a choice so, if all efforts to change the district have been tried, they can take their money and children elsewhere.

Media an our school of Thought

I saw this on a web site as I was conducting research for this book, after a lot of thought, I came to a decision; I decided to not use the writer’s thoughts, instead I decided that all of those that have not seen it before; should. It is an interesting read, not only for the writers perspective but also he is right in his thought and his perfect demonstration of how subtle the takeover has been for the liberal media and the socialistically viewed.

Report #4

From: Dave Screwtape

To: House Democrats, Senate Democrats, Democratic National Committee, Friendly Publications

Subject: We Control the Future

I know that after the first two installments of my reports on why we're winning, that many of you are encouraged to continue the fight against the Republicans with vigor, knowing that long term victory is ours. The Republican Congress and Bush's approval ratings are merely temporary setbacks. The most encouraging fact is that we control the future of this country as we shape and mold America's children.

The first way we do this is through the classroom. Lincoln once declared, "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next”. This fact ought to have Republicans quaking with fear.

More than ninety percent of American students attend public schools. The vast majority of principals, teachers, and superintendents support our party, a fact I relish.

Most remain unafraid to push children to begin thinking progressively, to be aware of the threats to the environment, to be concerned about the proliferation of handguns in America, to support acceptance of homosexuality as an alternate lifestyle, to realize that America was a dark and evil place until the 1960s, and to stand with feminist principles and ideas. These teachers are heroes and we need more like them. They are the key to our control of the next generation.

Sadly, too many teachers believe it's only their job to teach the basics such as reading, writing, and history. They need to get in line and realize that we aren't supporting education merely out of the goodness of our hearts; we expect results! They are to be recruiters for the Democratic Party not mere pedagogues.

Conservative teachers are a minor annoyance. Most stick to "the basics" and will never dare be controversial. Those who do reveal any bias are dealt with properly. We can't have science teachers challenging the validity of evolution or choosing Bible storybooks for their class. This is America! We have a first amendment to prevent people from forcing their religious viewpoints on the rest of us.

In general, most Conservatives simply give up teaching, because they know we are winning and they can't stand it. They can't stand to see a whole generation lost.

At college, we have even more success. Those students that are most willing to learn listen to the voice of their professors as if it is the voice of God. This fact has not gone unnoticed with college professors who take every opportunity to move the leaders of the future in our direction. I commend teachers who are able to use an English class to push students to support abortion. I laud those who find a way to bring up gay rights in Criminal Justice class. You are true heroes who help insure the future of our party for years to come.

Teachers are heroes, but they are not the only ones helping to secure our control of the next generation. Hollywood is doing its part as well. Generally, we heap praise on shows like "Nothing Sacred" and movies like "The Contender" but these are merely the Sunday morning sermons that encourage the congregation. The real evangelism for this party is done in children's television.

Our entertainment media is at its best when it's subtle. Cartoons that encourage environmental concern and opposition to development can help begin the process of molding a child into a supporter of the environmental movement, which in turn can mold him into a Democrat. Thanks to these programs, many children loathe developers, loggers, and their ilk while they like environmentalists.

A very special thanks also has to go for those writers who manage to put a dig against the Republicans in the midst of an entertaining program. I remember a few years ago, watching a black family sitcom where one character commented to an intelligent boy, "You could do anything. You could grow up to be a Black Supreme Court justice who isn't a sell out.” This was a good swipe at Clarence Thomas. As with the best assaults on the Republicans, it was a "hit and run". The plot continued on without a beat as if the writers hadn't just attacked the integrity of a Republican Associate Justice of the Supreme Court!

The best thing about these efforts is that most parents, including conservative parents remain oblivious to the message that their television is preaching. They're too busy letting the television baby-sit their children to actually pay attention to the messages they are being sent. The parents then wonder later why their children became liberals.

Yes, it's nice when Hollywood makes movies for us ("The American President" and "The Contender") but it is a far more successful as a tool to turn the minds of the young to our cause. Despite the immediate political climate, the entertainment media and the public education system will guarantee long-term political power and success.

Regards,

Dave Screwtape

Adam Graham writes the Screwtape Report. The Screwtape Report is written from a Democratic perspective by a conservative in order to reveal Democratic strategy and thinking.

Present day educators ignore the fact that the Bible was used openly in public schools for over 150 years. Our educators instead teach tolerance rather than truth; and tolerance, as we have seen, is being preached by those that fail to practice it. The word tolerance as used by the politically correct crusaders simply means that I have no right to object to what you do, but you have a right to object to what I do and what I think, or even what you think I do and think. What they’re asking us to tolerate, of course, is their own intolerance, it has weakened our nation, and if reports are accurate, fewer than 36% of today's primary and secondary students are even able to read the Ten Commandments.

A good example of the flawed reasoning, which hopes to use legislation to restore what hypocrisy lost, was published in 1995 by a prominent, well-intentioned religious organization, based in Colorado. Boston professor William Kilpatrick, who probed the question of moral illiteracy, wrote the article, “Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong”. He wrote, “The tale is told of an ancient King who devised an experiment to discover what language a child would speak if left to develop on his own. He ordered two babies taken from their natural parents. They were raised by deaf-mutes and deprived of any other contact. The results were that neither child learned to speak any language.”

Notice the following warped path our educational guru’s have come up with as Kilpatrick’s analogy continues. “If this sounds like something that could only happen in a darker age, think again. In the late 60’s, American educators undertook a similar experiment on a much larger scale. Instead of two children, the test included tens of millions”. The subject was not language, but morality. Public schools were filling the void with a new brand of “relativism” borrowed from Karl Marx. More than anything else in modern print, this bit of skewed logic speaks to a fundamental blindness that has crippled spiritual leaders, and too many in the congregations, for centuries. Religious hierarchy discovered that they no longer controlled the critical teaching of moral precepts. The amazing thing about it is Horace Mann, the father of modern education, used no force to fill the new public schools, beginning in 1840.

Patrick Henry in his book “Age of Man” writes of the need for an educational system that is open to all and to the education of all.

“By adopting this method, not only the poverty of the parents will be relieved, but ignorance will be banished from the rising generation, and the number of poor will hereafter become less, because their abilities, by the aid of education, will be greater. Many a youth, with good natural genius, who is apprenticed to a mechanical trade, such as a carpenter, joiner, millwright, shipwright, blacksmith, etc., is prevented getting forward the whole of his life from the want of a little common education when a boy.”

“After all the above cases are provided for there will still be a number of families who, though not properly of the class of poor, yet find it difficult to give education to their children; and such children, under such a case, would be in a worse condition than if their parents were actually poor. A nation under a well-regulated government should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support”.

James W. Skillen wrote an apologetic letter that projects the tolerant view of our early political founders such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, that is the need for an educational structure that provides an incentive and the inestimable value that our children mean to our posterity. Dr. Skillen has authored and edited numerous books and articles, including: A Covenant to Keep: Meditations on the Biblical Theme of Justice, Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civic Community, The Scattered Voice: Christians at Odds in the Public Square

November 1991

Education and Religion: Here We Go Again

By James W. Skillen

Toward Genuine Freedom with Justice in Education

Our argument is on behalf of a fundamental, pluriform transformation of the structure of American schooling that can do justice to all. This is something entirely compatible with the First Amendment, though not with the way that amendment has been interpreted by many of the Supreme Court Justices since the 1940s. What will such a transformation mean?

First of all, the obligations currently resting on parents and guardians to rear their children should be respected with non-discriminatory protection. As a right of conscience and parental responsibility, all parents should be allowed to select the agencies of their children’s education without any financial or legal penalty. Parents, not the state, hold the principal responsibility for minor children. Fair treatment of all parents should mean a proportionate investment of public educational dollars in every child.

Among other things, this means that the highly inequitable distribution of current educational tax dollars, based on residential districting, should be ended. Further, the highly disproportionate distribution of school funds to government-run schools must be stopped. A system of equitable, statewide (or even nationwide) distribution of educational dollars to each school-age child (whether directly or indirectly) regardless of the school he or she attends should be established. Whether the tax monies are raised through a property tax or some other means, the method of distribution should not be based on the class or residential neighborhood of the child, as is now the case. Since religious and other conscientious convictions of parents and their children must be respected under the First Amendment, governments have no right to require schooling of all children and then discriminate financially against those tax-paying citizens who choose religiously qualified schools for their children’s education.

The First Amendment should be interpreted to require the protection of citizens’ freedom to exercise their religious convictions without inhibition by government except where government must act to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of all citizens. If, because of conscience some parents want to educate their children in Catholic, or Protestant, or Jewish, or Muslim, or some other faith-guided schools, then the First Amendment’s protection of their religious freedom should govern the distribution of public dollars so as not to discriminate against them.

Once we recognize that government need not own and run all the agencies of education, then government’s support of schooling for its citizens in a variety of different school systems can be seen as completely compatible with First Amendment requirements. The only danger to the First Amendment arises (as it does now, in fact) from government giving its financial and legal support to only one religious or ideological system of schools to the exclusion or disadvantage of others. Whether 5 percent or 95 percent of public funding goes to support religiously oriented schools, no infringement of the Establishment Clause exists as long as those schools are freely chosen by citizens without compulsion or special privileging of any of them by government. Once the distinction between state and society is made; once the distinction between school and government is accepted; then the ability of government to treat all families, all schools, and all citizens fairly becomes possible. Government has important responsibilities to fulfill in securing the just treatment of all citizens. But government measures that properly aim to protect citizens and public life should presuppose both the independence of families and schools as well as the right of parents to choose schools for their children free of any financial or legal discrimination.

CPJUSTICE

inquiries@cpjustice.org

Socialist Agenda in our Schools

Much has been written about British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, founder of the Rhodes scholarship. We will learn a lot more about him in the following chapters. Briefly, he was dedicated to establishing a socialist one-world government controlled by a small group of elite, a worldview he received from John Ruskin, his socialist professor at Oxford. After making his fortune in diamonds, Rhodes established a secret society in the form of a scholarship to promote this ideal should it fail to materialize before his death. Rhodes biographer Sarah Millin wrote: “The government of the world was Rhodes’ simple desire.” What we have mostly learned about the Rhodes Scholarship is that it is a base, along with the Carnegie foundation to establish educational institutions and change textbooks and teaching methods to promote internationalism and socialism, to fill prominent positions in the State Department and control foreign policy, treaties, and foreign trade, and to promote the United Nations and its socialist agenda.

Europeans, under the guise of educational advancement, have hidden a worldwide army of men with the ideology of Cecil Rhodes imbedded in their hearts and minds. Just like, he planned. It is important to realize who is shaping the planet toward progress without oppression.

In practice, this is an attempt at world peace through world tyranny. The methods that have been used in attempting to attain this goal have been to fund the Federal Council of Churches and church peace movements, to establish educational institutions and change textbooks and teaching methods to promote internationalism and socialism, to fill prominent positions in the State Department and control foreign policy, treaties, and foreign trade, and to promote the United Nations and its socialist agenda. Every child in the United States is being taught by their liberal teachers a world-nation view that the United Nations is the great peacemaker, by bringing all of the nations of the worlds together and to iron out their differences. In reality, what the countries of the United Nations want to do is to see that America is no more. In their misapplied way of thinking, if the United States of America were not around then it would be easier to promote the peace of the world.

More than 150 years ago, J.S. Mill wrote in On Liberty:

"If the government would make up its mind [only] to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to the parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them.... A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another... and… establishes a despotism over the mind.... All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects are evil…."

In this new educational system in the United States of America our students are given to myths as fact and to separate doctrines from the truth to erase what once was an amazing American history that has now become, somehow, politically incorrect.

With our Education, So goes our nation.

For the avid reader:

For the Greater Expectations National Panel,

Judith Ramaley
Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources,
National Science Foundation
Panel Chair

Andrea Leskes
Vice President for Education and Quality Initiatives, AAC&U
Director, Greater Expectations, Panel Member, ex-officio

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) released October 2002, this report of the Greater Expectations National Panel calls for a new focus on excellence to better prepare students for the twenty-first century. The report recommends the creation of a New Academy characterized by high expectations, a focus on learning, commitment to demonstrated achievement, intentional practices, and an engaged, practical liberal, not political liberalism, but a more vast education for all students.

The panel's deliberations, summarized in this report, have led to a recommendation to rethink what we should expect from, and how we should provide, college education in the twenty-first century. The report challenges all stakeholders to unite for collective action, creating a coherent educational system designed to help all students achieve the greater expectations that are the hallmark of our time.

The panel concludes that change is urgently needed. Even as college attendance is rising, the performance of too many students is faltering. Public policies have focused on getting students into college, but not on what they are expected to accomplish once there. The result is that the college experience is a revolving door for millions of students, while the college years are poorly spent by many others.

Despite years of efforts to improve, secondary education in many school districts continues to be seriously deficient, resulting in students who are underprepared for college-level work. State-mandated tests—the centerpiece of the school reform agenda—often reflect a limited interpretation of learning, overemphasizing memorization of discrete facts at the expense of deeper understanding and its application. Faced with many pressures, including high stakes testing and financial constraints; schools place too little emphasis on the analytical, integrative, and practical skills graduates need.

There is also a disturbing misalignment between high school exit requirements and college entry expectations. Few colleges regularly share with secondary schools what incoming first year students should know and be able to do. "College" courses in high school (as well as remedial courses in college) have proliferated, despite the absence of guiding principles about what characterizes college-level learning. Many colleges and universities have begun to encourage more in-depth, investigative, or research-based learning even in the first year, but high school and many advanced placement courses continue to feature broad surveys and superficial "coverage.” The senior year of high school, which ideally should emphasize the intellectual skills expected in college, is wasted for many students.

Other barriers to quality include professors trained and rewarded more for research than for teaching, a prestige hierarchy built on reputation and resources rather than on educational success, and a lack of meaningful or comparable measurements to assess student-learning outcomes.

I can believe that. In addition to dumbing-down our college students and failing to educate them in the history and Constitution of the United States, colleges are pumping their captive audiences so full of this P.C. mumbo-jumbo that they’re good little citizens of the state when they graduate. They’ve been taught to believe that government is good so that when government moves to take away more of their freedoms, they won’t resist. They’re the perfect foundation for a socialist state.

* Morrill Land Grant Act gave to each state the proceeds from the sale of 30,000 acres of public land for each member it had in Congress. The money went to support vocational college courses in agriculture and the mechanical arts. In some instances, established colleges added these vocational courses, but in most cases, new colleges were founded.

+ National Defense Education Act (1958) The act provided about $575,000,000 for educational purposes. In many cases, federal funds were available to institutions only when matched by state funds. Some of the grants provided loans of up to $1000 to college students at 3 percent interest; fellowships for graduate students planning to teach; grants to schools and colleges for facilities required in the science and language fields; and grants for the use of movies, radio, and television for teaching purposes.

@ American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) a national organization, founded in 1920, that seeks to enforce and preserve the rights and civil liberties guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions. Its activities include handling cases opposing allegedly repressive legislation, and publishing reports and informational pamphlets.

& The first separate building for worship at Harvard University was Holden Chapel, built in 1744. The college soon outgrew the building, which was replaced by a chapel inside Harvard Hall in 1766, then a chapel in University Hall in 1814, and finally Appleton Chapel was built in 1858, Morning Prayer attendance was compulsory during this time. When attendance became voluntary in 1886, the College was left with a building that had become too large for the Morning Prayer services and too small for the Sunday services.

^ On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944," better known as the "GI Bill of Rights." At first the subject of intense debate and parliamentary maneuvering, the famed legislation for veterans of World War II has since been recognized as one of the most important acts of Congress. During the past five decades, the law has made possible the investment of billions of dollars in education and training for millions of veterans, and the nation has in return earned many times its investment in increased taxes and a dramatically changed society.

a MGIB is a contributory program. Service pay is automatically reduced by $100 per month for 12 months unless the service person declines to participate at the time of enlistment. Individuals on active duty must complete a minimum of two years of continuous active duty to be eligible. Qualified service members with remaining Vietnam Era entitlement are exempt from the pay reduction requirement. Active Duty Educational Assistance Program (MGIB), which is the education program for individuals initially entering active duty after June 30, 1985. Payments for MGIB benefits currently represent 78 percent of the total VA educational assistance payments.

b MGIB-SR is the first GI Bill to provide educational assistance to members of the Selected Reserve (including National Guard units.) This program is primarily an incentive for recruitment into the Selected Reserve. DOD funds this program and is responsible for determining eligibility to MGIB-SR. VA administers the program.

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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Education of the Masses - Chapter 5 of My Book Also THE STATE OF EDUCATION