Homeschool Helpers

Newsletter
Issue 132, October 26, 2009
From Homeschool Helpers

By Dan L. White

The Long School Day

The Obama administration intends to lengthen the school day and the school year. It seems they want to keep America’s children in their schools from dawn to dusk, from New Year’s till Christmas.

Public school kids will be children of the darkness, seldom seeing the light of day outside of their school building. They will suffer through year after year of institutional boredom, penned up inside brick walls as little more than prisoners of the education bureaucracy, with no real breaks. Their families will be little more than roommates, seen only in passing, at the tired moments of the late night and the sleepy haze of the early morning.

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, justifying the massive expansion of the public schools’ dominion. However, as we look back through a century and a half of education in America, the longer young people spend in the public schools, the less they learn. We can see that if we look at school tests from the past and then compare that with a recent Oklahoma survey that showed that about three quarters of high school students did not know that George Washington was the first president of the United States. America now has a thriving tutoring industry, with well known national chains whose only business is to do what the public schools are already being paid to do but don’t.

The biggest factor in a successful education is the family. The family is the base on which all society rests. Expanding school time to go from dark to dark and from New Years till Christmas will further separate America’s families, particularly when the public schools are explicitly teaching against those traditional families. In Philadelphia, school principals are required to try to get more students to eat breakfast at the school instead of with their families. Meal times together are one of the most cherished and integral parts of a family, but if the Obama administration gets its way, and it probably will, soon the public schools will be feeding the children of America breakfast, lunch and dinner. The family will not be the institution that society is based on, but the institution of the public schools will be what the family is based on.

In reality, that is the purpose for this drastic move – the supremacy of the socialist institution. The Obama administration has taken over the banking industry, the automotive industry, and is now making their corresponding move to take over the lives and minds of America’s young people. We see that with his speech to the public schools, his being idolized in the public schools, and his expanding school time. What better way to train the young than by eliminating interference from such sources as parents and churches? If the liberals can take all the kids’ time, they will have their minds, their hearts and their votes. Obama will be their father.

The socialists want the children as early as possible and to keep them as long as possible. May I quote from their platform?

“The education of all children from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care shall be in state institutions at state expense.”

Who said that, Obama or Duncan? Actually, Marx and Engels said that. Obama and Duncan are only doing it.

Expanding the school day and year will require a massive expansion of the educational bureaucracy and a huge increase in ever increasing property taxes. This comes when Americans are already facing higher taxes to pay for the Obama debt, lower incomes because of the Obama depression, and cheaper money because of the Obama dollar.

Perhaps the greatest problem that America has today is that its children are trained by its government, which shapes those young minds to be controlled by that government. Expanding school time from dark to dark, from New Year’s till Christmas simply expands a metastatic government bureaucracy that has demonstrated its total inability to educate in any area except socialism. This public school monolith is like an educational Berlin Wall, trapping its citizens in a socialist ghetto. It’s not time to expand that wall. It’s time to tear down that wall.