How to Take Back the Public Schools
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

As we all know, the public schools are controlled by people on the radical left. How far left are they? The Association of Teacher Educators has invited unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers to be a keynote speaker at their annual meeting this February. These are the people who educate our teachers! If we conservatives want to take back the schools, we must finally decide that enough is enough and begin planning a serious strategy for victory. 

But you might ask: Why should conservatives want to take control of the government schools? Shouldn’t we want to get the government out of the education business? Yes, of course. But let’s be realistic. Parents have the freedom to homeschool their own children, but 85 to 90 percent of American children are still in the government schools, where they are being dumbed down and abused by the radical Left who wants to turn them into liberal Democrats.

My contention is that these children deserve to be saved from our nihilist schools by conservatives who know how these children are being cynically used to keep the Left in power in perpetuity. And of course we know that we cannot take back the schools from the top. The radical left owns the schools lock, stock, and barrel, and no conservative is allowed any power to change anything the Left doesn’t want in the education establishment. So we must start at the bottom, and this can be done by encouraging young conservatives to run for school boards as a start of their political careers. Then we must create an Association of Conservative School Board Members.

The left took control of our schools because they were organized and had a well-thought-out plan implemented by John Dewey and his progressive associates. Dewey concocted his plan in 1898 and said that it had to be implemented gradually or else parents would rise up against it. We must do the same. But we need not do it gradually, for what we advocate is exactly what most parents want.

Some years ago when I was on a speaking tour in Montana, I met a conservative individual who had just been elected to the local school board. But he had no idea what to do as a board member. Had there been an Association of Conservative School Board Members with an agenda, he would have known what to do. We can change that by electing conservative school board members plus forming an organization with a well-planned conservative agenda that parents will want to see implemented.

The first item on the agenda should be to change the way reading is taught in our schools. The present methods create functional illiteracy among a third of the students and low-level proficiency among the rest. We must make sure that every child in a district is taught to read with intensive phonics. Parents will back us in this endeavor. They all want their children to be able to read at a high level of literacy. They also want them to be able to write and master our arithmetic system.

The radical left is using their dumbed-down curriculum to turn most of the students into the low-knowledge voters whom well-trained community organizers can get to the polls. We must not forget that Barack Obama is a professional community organizer who knows how to round up the functional illiterates and get them to vote for stealth socialists. We must bring this diabolical dumbing-down process to a halt.

A conservative educational agenda can revive the kind of education that produces patriotic young Americans with knowledge of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We can also get religious morality back in the schools by having the students read the works of our Founding Fathers and the prayers uttered by past presidents in their inaugural addresses. We must find a way of posting the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Ten Commandments on school walls so that the students can be made aware of their nation’s religious heritage. There is no limit to what can be done to improve every aspect of the public school curriculum despite the ACLU and liberal judges. Parents can also be organized to support traditional education.

My point is that none of this can be done without organization and planning. I hope that there are enough young conservatives willing to run for school boards and willing to work with others in a concerted effort to fight the radical leftists who have total unopposed freedom to mold the minds of American children. It can be done if conservatives will it to be done.

Local taxpayers finance the public schools and still have the right to elect school committee members. Parents are generally in favor of traditional education. And that’s where conservatives can begin to win and destroy the evil monopoly the radical left has over our education system.