A policy of uniform indoctrination

I once spent the better part of an afternoon in a garage in Willimantic, Conn., as the resident mechanic called around, trying to find a spare wheel for my Pontiac Ventura. Finally, as the sun was going down, he had an inspiration.

“I know this sounds crazy,” he said, “but let me try something.” The mechanic walked a few paces to the far corner of the garage and hauled back a wheel and tire for a Chevy Nova. The manual said it shouldn’t fit, but it did — perfectly.

It turned out there had actually been a lawsuit. Customers had paid a higher price, thinking they were getting a Pontiac. But GM had sold an unknown number of “Pontiacs” for which the undercarriage in fact belonged to the same-size, supposedly lower-grade Chevy Nova.

Because most Americans still tend to believe that paying more for something guarantees them higher quality, they’re natural suckers for the government schooling scam. With more and more billions continually being poured into the government-run “public schools,” surely we’re getting the best school system under the sun. Right? If it’s not succeeding it has to be because the selfish taxpayers just won’t pitch in enough. Right?

This requires a willful refusal to examine some straightforward statistics — the fact that the District of Columbia spends a world-record amount per student but produces some of our most pathetic quasi-literates, while the state of Utah ranks near the bottom in per-capita expenditures but far above average in academic achievement. For that matter, home-school moms who didn’t even finish college repeatedly turn out kids (including adoptive kids) who get accepted to prestigious colleges at the age of 17 (not 18), at a cost of only a few hundred dollars per year, while highly paid “professional teachers” with master’s degrees turn out droves of quasi-literates, steeped in little but “self-esteem.”

Why do you think our graduate engineering schools are now full of imported students from Asia and India, while the American kids undertake such challenging courses of study as “Hotel/Motel Management” and “How to be a Network Newscaster”?

So, if America’s largest jobs program for the otherwise unemployable, the “public schools,” does not educate, what does it do?

It concentrates.

During the hundreds of thousands of years during which homo sapiens went from being a relatively tasty savannah snack to dominating the Earth, parents kept their children close at hand, both protecting them and teaching them valuable skills. The benefits of true diversity adhered automatically.

Only in the past century and a half have we experimented with a new idea — separating children from their parents, gathering them together in government-run camps to instill in them a uniform and uncritical loyalty to the notion that only a powerful and all-knowing central state can keep us safe and prosperous, by setting policies whose wisdom would be challenged only by dangerous idiots, since they’re “scientific; all based on statistics.”

If you want to know what the schools are really intent on teaching — what they’re really pounding relentlessly into those little heads — try telling a recent graduate that what he or she learned about one of the laws of physics now turns out to be wrong, or that there’s a new theory about why Napoleon Bonaparte was able to so dominate Europe for two decades (just don’t ask which two).

They will give you a blank look. They don’t care.

Now try challenging some part of the real current curriculum. Challenge their near-religious faith in the notion that wasteful and excessive energy use in the United States and Europe are currently causing global warming (which is somehow bad), while the churning out of equal amounts of soot and carbon dioxide in China and India (exempted from the economically crippling restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol) is not a problem.

Inform them that the right to bear arms (including machine guns) and the right to drive your own car upon the public highways are just that — basic, human, civil and constitutionally guaranteed rights — not conditional privileges to be granted only when we plead and pay and then only when our government masters decide it’s “safe.”

Point out in the presence of these young victims of mass mind-bending that Dr. Peter Duesberg has thoroughly disproven the theory that AIDS could possibly be caused by an infectious virus called “HIV,” which explains why it is not now spreading out wildly among the heterosexual, non-IV-drug-using populace.

Challenge their smug “knowledge” that the cause of autism is not linked in any way to mercury preservative in mandatory childhood vaccines but rather remains “unknown.” Tell them the government studies that “prove” secondhand tobacco smoke is harmful were thrown out of court for cheating in 1993 (www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=22150.)

“Diversity”? No “diversity” of thought is tolerated on these issues and many others.

When you hear the loud and angry — and unanimous — shrieking and denials, the attempts to shout you down as a dangerous lunatic who should not be allowed to speak such repulsive thoughts, you’ll know you’ve stumbled on the real uniform indoctrination curriculum of the government schools.

And what fortuitous timing that the enormous growth of this largest-ever unionized government jobs program was burgeoning just when the purposeful policy of inflating our fiat money supply — severed from the discipline of any link to gold or silver — effectively halved the earning power of the average American in the period 1933-1978.

Fifty or 60 years ago, the salary of one blue-collar tradesman — usually a “dad” — could support a family with three or four kids in a free-standing home with a car. Today, factoring in our vastly increased cumulative tax bite, it takes the incomes of two parents — or one parent and a “matching welfare grant” from Uncle Sam — to support a family with just one or two kids. Our earning power, in real terms, has been cut in half.

Kids became an inconvenience. They could hardly be allowed to hang around the house alone. Even though it means they no longer learn any useful skills or trades from stay-at-home moms or grandparents, they had to be “concentrated” for easy supervision for most of the day.

Fortunately, the necessary institution was already in place — the government youth concentration camps, more euphemistically known as the “public schools.”

Next week: the ruling class expands the useful government policy of “concentration” to encompass (and infantilize) adults, as well.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel “The Black Arrow.”