Federal Education Equals Indoctrination

     The problem with making an important part of people's lives like education a passenger on a government train with a final destination of federal control, is that authority is placed in the hands of fewer and fewer people. When this happens, there is necessarily an increased chance of corruption and a lower positive outcome for those having to avail themselves of those services. This is exactly the reason that the founders of this great nation created a federalist system which put the most power and authority in the hands of individuals, then local and state government. The least amount of control was given to the federal government.
     What made education work so well in this country prior to the last 40 years, and the reason it doesn't work today, is that for most of this country's existence, education was a local issue and now it is a national one. Parents, local school officials and city school boards all worked together to inculcate in the children of their community the values and intellectual priorities that reflected that community. Since the 1970s, when education was essentially taken out of the hands of parents and local educators and placed under the control of national teachers' unions, the educational agenda was more about social engineering and less about a quality education that would produce decent contributing members of society. The new "common core" standards recently developed by the Obama administration and imposed on schools across the country, was in part, done so with the assistance of Bill Ayers. The unrepentant terrorist once bragged that he realized many years ago that the best way to take down the American system was by controlling what was taught in the schools.
     I fail to understand how any intellectually honest and culturally aware person can make the case that today's education system is dedicated to expanding students' knowledge and their ability to think for themselves. Recent history is replete with evidence that the union-run education system is designed to indoctrinate children and young adults in the Leftist faith. I have heard horror stories of parents sending their children off to college, thinking they are spending gobs of their hard earned money for a quality education, only to have their children return after only one semester as Leftist radicals. The most infamous, of course, is a man named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks which killed over 3000 innocent Americans. His Kuwaiti parents said he was a moderate Muslim who was pro-American until he went to college. He  returned from his first semester at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University hating America and fully immersed in the radical Islamist culture.
     The anti-American indoctrination starts in grade school with the teaching of history that is deliberately inaccurate and is designed to show America as fundamentally racist, sexist, bigoted and as a country that has acquired its wealth by stealing it from poorer countries. The Leftist faith deliberately fails to inculcate in children and young adults the critical thinking skills to understand that poverty can never create wealth, so they believe the portrayal of their own country proffered by the high priests and priestesses of Leftism. Along with hatred for their own country, students are routinely exposed to anti-religious rhetoric, having God and virtue replaced by government and entitlement. Until control of educating our children is returned to its rightful place, in the hands of parents and local communities, our education system will continue to produce immorality and dependence, the only real goal of the Leftists who currently control it.