SUPER TUESDAY AND PUBLIC “EDUCATION”

Ah, twas Super Tuesday in Alabama, and since it has been raining for what seems like forty days and forty nights here, we swam to the polls. 

Of interest this season was “Amendment One,” which would have renamed our elected State school board to something with a lot more words that, I guess, was to convey something much more super significant, and transform it into an appointed body. The power of appointment was to be given to the governor, with the blessing of the State legislature.

My default position on all amendments to our State constitution (which, as of January 2019 numbered 946 — and that’s not a typo) is “no.” That is how I voted this time, since I was not persuaded by any of my fellow citizens how removing the power of being on this body from the people (however ignorant they may be of most any political issue) and handing it over to our corrupt politicians in Montgomery could be considered a positive step forward. 

“But you remove the politics from it that way!” some say. After pausing to take an assessment of the seriousness of one uttering this nonsense, I would try to make the point that if one really thinks that by handing over the power of appointment to career politicians “removes politics,” one is sorely mistaken.

“Well, something has to be done!” I’m told. “Education in our State is in a terrible situation.”

This leads to my solution, the presentation of such causing the tables to flip and my fellow conversationalist to be the one who regards my sanity with suspicion. 

Take government out of education. Why is it there in the first place?

Throughout the history of mankind, education was not in the sorry state it has been since the relatively recent involvement of government in it. Am I really the crazy one to suggest there may be some correlation there?

As I said, this is really a default position of mine. We Alabamians frequently have to vote “yes” or “no” on some amendment that we are led to believe will alter our lives for the better. And that’s what this really comes down to — the idea embraced by the overwhelming majority of our citizens that the way to make life better is to increase the size, power, and scope of government at all levels.

Our family is a private school and homeschooling family, so the only skin I have in this game is the fact the State compels me through taxes to support “educating” other peoples’ children with curricula handed down from the centralized power center of the District of Columbia, whereby they will learn the essential doctrines of multiculturalism, diversity, “patriotism,” that their ancestors were evil dirtbags, and the faith of their fathers is a fairy tale.  

Perhaps that fact is what has me rankled this week.