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March 20, 2005
Constitutional Amendment Meme
uppose in your lifetime you could get passed one Constitutional Amendment that would most affect the U.S.A. in the way you most wanted to effect a change. What would that be?
The history of Federal involvement in American education is the history of the steady decline of American education, especially literacy in its true sense. As Richard Mitchell points out, "In its highest sense, literacy is a profoundly destructive talent. It is destructive certainly of all received opinion; it is destructive of all orthodoxy, all traditionalism, and, therefore, from a government's point of view, it is very undesirable."
And as Walter Karp showed us in Textbook America,
Something had to be done quickly or democracy might one day break out. Educational leaders quickly worked out a solution. Let the secondary schools teach the children of workers what was fit only for workers. As Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation of High School Teachers: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.' Since there was no way to stop 'the masses' from entering high school, the only way to meet the crisis, in short, was to prevent them from learning anything liberating when they got there.
The EduWits websites listed to the right of this post speak volumes as to the pernicious influence of government in schooling. And even though for years I thought that there was a way to change that influence through vouchers and charter schools and the like, the government still has its sentimental tendrils on education.
Therefore, I would want to see a Constitutional Amendement along these lines:
AMENDMENT XXVIII
Section 1. The Federal Government and its agencies are hereby prohibited from any involvement, legal, judicial, and financial, in formal public education or formal private education of the citizens and residents of the United States, except as noted in Section 3.
Section 2. The Federal Goverment and its agencies are hereby prohibited from financially supporting any programs, institutions, think tanks, colleges, universities, foundations, or any other legal entity involved in formal public education or formal private education of the citizens and residents of the United States, except as noted in Section 3.
Section 3. The sole exception to this amendment is that the Federal Government may require education for non-citizens who enter the process of becoming U.S. Citizens.
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So what's your one Constitutional Amendment?
*** What the public schools practice with remorseless proficiency, however, is the prevention of citizenship and the stifling of self-government. When 58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress think it is against the law to start a third party in America, we are dealing not with a sad educational failure but with a remarkably subtle success. Walter Karp in Why Johnny Can't Think
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Posted by witnit at March 20, 2005 2:25 PM
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