Home School

Hardening Soft Targets
LewRockwell  /  Eric Peters

Now the cry erupts for more armed guards in government (not “public”) schools, so that there will be more guns in government schools, so as to shoot back in the event a shooter attempts to shoot up another government school. But there is a much better, much more foundational way to deal with the problem of government schools being the soft-targets of choice of soft-headed people:

Get your kids out of government schools.

And not just because they are soft targets. Do it because government schools are the places where soft-headed people are created. Not just intellectually, either – although government “schools” do their best to stunt the development of critical thinking in favor of critical race theory and other orthodoxies that must be truckled to.

Government schools are emotionalwastelands.

Instead of family and friends – people your kid knows and whom the kid knows cares about them – random strangers constantly changing, from classmates to the teachers – some of whom may care but not in the way a kid’s actual parents do (or ought to). Your kid is one of the herd, herded along from class to class, among kids he may not really know and whom you, the parent, are even less likely to know much about, if anything.

Who are the people teaching your kid? What are they teaching him? How do they treat your kid? In a government school, you have not-much right to know the details about these things and no right to do much, if anything, about them.

But there is one thing you can do to assure your kids are not made into soft heads by government schools – and not rendered soft targets at a government school.

Take them home, school them there.

Arguably, this is a moral imperative for every parent, as what your kid is taught (and how) ought to be a parent’s responsibility. Not the government’s. Certainly not the financial obligation of your neighbors, whose kids they’re not.

Schooling kids at home also assures their safety, another moral imperative for any parent with moral sense. At home, you will not have to worry about your daughter having to deal with boys who “identify” as girls in the bathroom. Your son will not be hectored and shamed about his being a boy. No one will bully your kid – including government school administrators who force kids to wear Face Diapers and practice other variants of ritual humiliation.

Your kids will not have to walk through a metal detector and past an armed guard and so be habituated to prison life from earliest recollection.

You, the parent, will be there to protect your child – physically as well as emotionally – from the soft-headedness and psychological-emotional-developmental dangers of the government’s feed lots for kids.

They will learn to read and write, to understand how to do math and about history. Most all – and most profoundly unlike what occurs in government schools – they will learn to think, without which skill all there is is the memorization and recitation of a well-trained golden retriever.

Teaching kids to think was once the essence of a child’s early education. It was called the trivium – Latin for the three basic disciplines of grammar (basic competence with the written language) logic and rhetoric. Simply put, how to think. How to grasp the essence – the principle – of a thing and then articulate and apply it. To understand inferences, implications. What a thing means, in both abstract general as well as specific terms.

And so to understand, in order to be ever-more-capable of understanding more.

The trivium that once formed the basis of an education in former times and, ironically enough, was often referred to as liberal, before that word became political has been pushed aside in government schools because thinking isn’t desirable. It leads to questioning. To individual assertion as opposed to herd-collective reflexive obedience.

In government schools, kids are taught to memorize and regurgitate reams of arbitrary, disconnected information. The ones who do it best are rewarded the most. The ones who question it are treated the worst. The goal being to create as many quiet herd animals as possible. Naturally, kids chafe at being herded by this regime because it isunnatural. The human animal is not a herd animal by nature – though government very much needs him to be.

It is why there are government schools, you see.

The trick the government uses to get people to think government schooling is a good thing – for the parents – is the lure of the “free” (and of free time). Parents are relieved of the burden – as they see it – of schooling their kids at home and so free to work two jobs, instead. So as to earn the money necessary to pay for the government’s “free” schools via the property tax payments they never stop making, long after their kids have graduated from government schools.

In many – most? – parts of the country, these “free” schools cost a typical household tens of thousands of dollars over the 18 years of a kid’s growing up years – and then ongoing, until the parents sell their home and move into the old folks’ home.

How much money – and time – would parents have if they didn’t both have to work to pay for all the “free” things government so generously provides? One parent might not have to work at all – and so have time to teach her kids, with the love and patience that only a parent can provide, in a home that is both physically as well as emotional safe.

From “active shooters” as much as the government  schooling that tends to grow such.

Original Article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/05/eric-peters/hardening-soft-targets/