Dismantling Public Education

To the Editor:
The Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, entitled “’A Nation at Risk,” told Congress that American prosperity, security and civility are in jeopardy because the educational foundations of our society are being eroded. Our concern, the report said, “goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. It includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strength of our people.... Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling”

Ample evidence was provided to support this claim. The writers of the report concluded: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

The report made no mention of the causes of this dismantling of public education. It did not explain that intervention by the federal government in local education is the primary cause of this “unthinking, unilateral, education disarmament.” It did not mention that the U.S. Supreme Court assisted in this effort with a number of rulings regarding the “separation of church and state.”

In addition to the federal government and the Supreme Court, colleges and universities have also assisted in the educational dismantlement of public education. One college president stated: “The campus turmoil of the sixties brought the exchange of a curriculum of connected principles for a smorgasbord of disconnected courses and programs. The educational consequence of this decentralization is an educated populace who have turned inward and have become disenchanted with academia, morals, and politics.”

This is a far cry from Cardinal Newman’s definition of the educated person as “’one committed to reason, a gentleman, a person who knows a good person when he sees one.” The educated person, said Newman, has a “’cultivated intellect and brings power and grace to every work and occupation which he/she undertakes.”

By 1995, the federal government willingly admitted that public education had been completely dismantled from top to bottom. The government offered the School to Work Program (STWP) as a solution. The STWP was the system used by the Communists in the old Soviet Union. The present offer is “No Child Left Behind.” Remember that education is within the jurisdiction of the state, not the federal government. It should remain so!

What should we do? We should take back local control of the public schools! The Supreme Court should repeal all laws based upon the phrase “separation of church and state.”

“Colleges and universities should be compelled to offer a coordinated curriculum that frees the mind for intelligent action, draws out the elements of our common humanity, cultivates the intellect, and disciplines the mind for correctness in thinking,” said Robert Hutchins, the former president of the University of Chicago.

We cannot long endure the present disconnection of spiritual, moral, and intellectual principles from public education and remain civilized human beings!


Dr. Lewis Rutherford
Professor of Speech