Using Public Education to Educate the Public

There is a widely-prevalent myth out there that the conservative governments are in general, and the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were in particular, committed to the ideals of free markets, free trade, competition, and a small state requiring only low levels of taxation.

These were certainly the sentiments that Thatcher and Reagan occasionally voiced. Traditional conservatives however, Thatcher and Reagan included, never did, and still do not, understand the foundation of liberty, and understand free markets even less. Propagandistic education is the single most harmful lever pulled by those who have an unjustified, ignorant, and Marxist hatred for the very concept of large corporations, profits, and free markets. It is all very good and dandy to go after unions and offer lower taxes, but unless the tide of propagandistic education is turned, western societies everywhere are headed for a Soviet-style economic collapse.

A market is nowhere near free if a government-backed institution controls and manipulates a monopolistic money supply in a fiat money world, and the education imparted to the young in society puts a scholarly cloak on such reckless and destructive behavior.

Taxpayer-funded “free” education is the Holy Grail of the equal opportunity mindset. However, under the guise of equalizing opportunity, the New Elite, the liberal and conservative aristocrats who share power alternately, have used this vehicle to promote an erroneous worldview. A new generation of unthinking journalists, creative artists, and business leaders, entranced in their formative years by this rose-colored worldview, later continue to peddle it of their own accord. Mercantilism triumphs.

Although education in the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. is supposedly a provincial/state government responsibility, control exercised by the center has been on the rise. The U.K., Australia, and the U.S. have mandated national curriculums to varying degrees. Federal funding support for education is used as the carrot to lure the provincial governments into acceptance. The implications are ominous. A quack like John Maynard Keynes, who taught that federal agencies should print money, borrow money, and spend money in an economic downturn, is elevated to the level of an academic scholar and a superstar, whilst the works of some of the greatest economists like Ludwig Von Mises and George Reisman, are not discussed at all. Such “common” standards claim as an objective that students must learn to think critically, yet viewpoints that oppose government dogma are simply not in the curriculum, let alone critiqued. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency even threw out “a student’s guide to climate change,” a covert attempt to embellish, in children, the fallacies of the carbon racket by presenting climate scientology as science. What’s to stop governments from being selective on recommended literature readings? Even fictional narratives have implicit as well as explicit affirmations of certain values. Existentialist and the pseudo-scientific human-as-clay-putty models have long infiltrated the humanities.

In a democratic society, a periodic change of government away from the socialist is likely, simply because socialism always creates burgeoning fiscal deficits and deep-rooted economic problems. Unfortunately, such alternate governments are religion and tradition-based conservative governments, who perish in one or two terms after some half-hearted tinkering, losing to the empty rhetoric of the socialists that hypnotizes common people. Nevertheless, in some cases such tinkering is able to stabilize the economy just enough so that it can bear another decade of Marxist abuse before arriving at the brink of a collapse yet again, and the cycle repeats itself. One advantage of the Soviet system was that there was no such periodic stabilizing glasnost before Mikhail Gorbachev to arrest and claw back a bit of liberty, leading eventually to a free fall.

It is foolhardy to think that doing away with public education is politically feasible, or even appropriate.

Unfortunately, so small a minority of the citizenry understands how markets work, that, in a democracy, only conservatives who mouth some pro-liberty slogans can get elected and sit in the saddle for a few years, only to lose later to socialists who voice populist rhetoric, and re-accelerate the rate of damage done to the economy when in power. This has pretty much been the trend in the U.S., the U.K, Australia, and Canada since WWII. Typically, the conservatives try to wrest control of education back to the state or provincial level, as is their mantra, and try to reintroduce religious teachings. However, they really need to do the exact opposite the next time they secure power—wrest even more control toward the center, and use it to spread the truth, rather than the bromides of family values, which are also used by the fascists to further their own agenda. Only then can we hope for a generation of young adults, in which the majority has not been brainwashed by the egregiously vacuous narratives of statists protecting the New Elite.

It is foolhardy to think that doing away with public education is politically feasible, or even appropriate when the economy is infested with fiat money, climate scientology, competition law, and other absurdities. But ultimately, it’s not about taxes, energy subsidies, fiat money, or markets. The fight for the “content” in public education is the biggest fight there is–every field from physics to philosophy, journalism to art, psychology to literature, risks being fully corrupted. The larger issues must be tackled first. And nothing is larger than using the weapon of public education, which could be used to actually educate the public.
 

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About the Author: Vinay Kolhatkar

Vinay Kolhatkar is a freelance journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and finance professional. He is the Chief Editor of The Savvy Street. Vinay has authored a TV pilot screenplay Undercover: The Story of Jamila, and two literary thrillers A Sharia London and The Frankenstein Candidate.. He is also the co-author of Media Wars: The Battle to Shape Our Minds. More about Vinay is at the Founder page.