Education in America Has Become a Snare and a Racket: Part V

By Rich Kozlovich

This piece is profound and provocative.  It's a rather long piece, and the last of my Education in America Has Become a Snare and a Racket series, although I do intend to keep writing about this issue in the future using that theme, 

The problem with education in America isn't just about education and its institutions.  It's about the capture of the entire American culture by anti-American forces, in government and academia.  All being supported by the media and many in industry.  This piece addresses all parts of this crisis. 

I subscribe to George Friedman’s Geopolitical Futures, and I don’t always agree with their conclusions, but their research and factual presentations are very good.  I can honestly recommend subscribing.  They just ran a piece that’s an open piece, saying: The rising cost of higher education in the United States is unsustainable. They also provided a chart you may find intriguing.

They point out the debt these kids are accumulating is a staggering, $1.64 trillion dollars; yes that’s trillion with a capital “T”, and almost eleven percent of that debt is over 90 days delinquent.  That represents the second largest source of debt behind home mortgages.  They also believe this will be a major driver of social transformation in America, and that these universities will be at the center of the storm. I agree with that!

I’m not sure what they’re thinking is on what the end outcome will be, but they make this valid point. “Most socio-economic cycles end or begin with a financial crisis”. I agree with that also.

So, what’s to be done? Forgive that debt and provide free education for life?

In his July 23, 2019 piece  Robert Weissberg points out:  Americans are keen supporters of higher education and Washington has traditionally generously concurred. But, in the 2020 presidential Democratic primary, several prominent potential nominees have endorsed once-unimaginable levels of government aid for college students. Elizabeth Warren, for example, recently announced that if elected she would spend $1.5 trillion (raised by higher taxes on the very rich) to eliminate up to $50,000 in student loan debt for those in household with incomes below $100,000 with smaller cancellations for households earning less than $250,000.  Her plan would also abolish tuition at all public colleges while offering government grants for non-tuition expenses. Meanwhile, a $50 billion fund would help financially struggling historically black colleges and universities (HBCU)............

That’s not a solution, it’s a formula for disaster. The more we give the more these scam artist universities charge. And most of that money isn’t going to real education or research, it’s going to administration, with college president’s making a million dollars a year or more at many of them.

Michael Drake is the current President of Ohio State University, and as of 2018, he served with a base salary as $870,191 a year and another possible over $200,000 plus a year in bonuses, as long as it isn’t over 25 percent of base salary, which the maximum in this case was $212,242.  Surprise, that was his bonus in 2018. And he isn’t the highest paid.

More to the point, for what they're hired to do, the number of administration personnel who are paid over $300,000 a year is startling, and the number who are paid over $200,000 is even more startling. But what the most troubling is how many administrators they have on staff at these universities.

But even with all this, that isn't the worst part.  What kind of students are they turning out?  Entirely too many can’t read, write, spell, work basic math problems.  If they were turning out nuts and bolts instead of students, manufacturers would reject them upon delivery as defective at the back dock.

Most importantly, it's their knowledge and understanding of history.  It's seriously lacking and flawed.  It's basically been flawed by the American education system. A system that’s promoting the anti-American pro socialist propaganda of and his People’s History of America.  The link will take you to 21 posts about Zinn, especially those by

A system taken over by socialists to make Americans subject to an all-powerful state rather what the Founding Fathers created, which was a Constitutionally limited but necessary minimal state subject to the people.

In the piece by E. Jeffrey Ludwig, Decades of Intensifying Left-Wing Influence on High School Students, he notes that:

Thousands are graduating high school having been influenced to believe that American history is mainly about the exploitation of women, minorities, and workers........ teachers gathered in departments to review plans for teaching their subjects.  The U.S. history teachers gathered in a room.  It was my first week, and within a few minutes, it came to my attention that the teachers in the room all planned on regularly distributing excerpts from Howard Zinn's bestselling college textbook A People's History of the United States.  Suddenly, I realized I was in a dark coven of male commies.  Collectively, purposely, and without hesitation, they were agreeing on teaching that American history was a betrayal of the people by the power-mad white capitalist elite.  Our history was presumably a history of oppression, suppression, and exploitation of "the people." 

Lloyd Marcus in his piece, We Must Say No to the 1619 Project in Schools, states:  

Far too many youths are anti-American zombies infected via public education; sleeper-cells ready to attack their parents when commanded by progressives. Remember when Michelle Obama instructed students to monitor family discussions for what progressives deemed racist and discriminatory comments? Transforming our kids into stealth operatives, progressives instructed students to steal their parents' guns and turn them over to their teacher............The same way we have shamefully allowed progressives to infect students with the LGBTQ agenda beginning in pre-k, white students are taught to hate themselves and their country. Outrageously, innocent white students are cruelly taught that they are born racist and must feel guilty for being white. Actress Rosanna Arquette tweeted her disgust and shame for being born white and her white privilege.

What does any of that have to do with reading, writing, mathematics, etc. Nothing!  It has everything to do with undermining the very foundations of American culture, the American identity, the American Economy and the United States Constitution.

John KlarIf  asks, Vermont Is Going Insane. Will the Rest of America Follow?  Saying:

America looks ahead, it will see the chilling dystopia unfolding in Vermont. Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven advocates for extending the vote to 16-year-olds ("Listen to the Young," he admonishes).  Vermont Public Radio commentator Bill Schubart proclaimed that "I've recently learned I'm a "privileged, cisgendered, white male[.] ... I'll keep an open mind about identity politics, and trust the next generation to better educate me on the concept."  Talk about optimism — an old man hoping to be educated about his hitherto unknown identities by those with less than fully formed brains...........

Vermont leads the nation in adults who behave like errant children and delegate leadership to infants.  Small wonder that Vermont uncritically embraced a 14-year-old candidate for governor.  Vermont is the forefront of the new utopian vision of which Ryszard Legutko has cautioned — this is the state where Black Lives Matter flags are flown at numerous schools, and textbooks are edited to teach children that Vermont is a white supremacist culture.  This is where young children halt public parades while no police or other authorities intervene............

If America looks ahead, it will see the chilling dystopia unfolding in Vermont, where bizarre, government-imposed perversions of identity, culture, and society are being augmented by swelling poverty and an opioid crisis.  It's about time we adults embraced adulthood and led our children instead of abandoning them.......

And we wonder how a state could keep sending a socialist loon like Bernie Sanders back to Congress since 1990.

Steve McCann in his July 24, 2019 piece, The Co-Conspirators in the American Left's Takeover of the Democratic Party states:

In 2013 American 15 year-olds ranked 32nd among industrialized countries in math, 20th in reading and 24th in science. In 1989 this same age group ranked in the top 5-10 nations in the world in these same categories. Further, by 2015, nearly 7 out of 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 would vote for an avowed socialist. The education establishment, dominated by an unconstrained America Left, has assured that the citizenry is fast becoming among the least well-educated and most self-loathing populations in the world.

Using the cudgel of the mainstream media, the entertainment complex and the education establishment combined with the apathy and cowardice of the Republican Establishment, the American Left had successfully, within 25 years after the Reagan landslides, inculcated into a plurality of the American people a belief that there are no moral absolutes and that the state, not God, is the source of the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and thus the state can deny those rights to whomever it chooses.

They are creating the belief that this country’s founding documents are arcane, racially insensitive and unsuitable for today. They teach the young this nation is and always has been racist and oppressive, that religious liberty, the right to bear arms, and unfettered freedom of speech are subject to the whims of the state.

On July 27, 2019 E. Jeffrey Ludwig posted the piece, The Idiocy of the Latest Educational Framework noting: .The Idiocy of the Latest Educational Framework, noting:

America's education system is driven decade after decade by a never-ending stream of jargon.  Left-wing educators seemingly never get tired of reproducing their pap in schools of education and not-for-profit organizations.  Their jargon continuously reconfigures and is infinitely creative in saying the same thing in different ways; decade after decade educational jargon expresses educational models that produce fewer and fewer diligent, capable, informed, goal-oriented students.  The successive models since the 1890s can, in a general sense, be called "progressive education."  These models express the desire of the government and the educational powers that be to engage in social engineering.  This social engineering aspires to replace the parents and the family as the basic unit for passing on social and individual values and morality..........

Victor Davis Hanson on Aug 29, 2019 asks: Why Socialism, and Why Now?  He answers:

"Socialist!" is no longer a McCarthyite slur. Rather, the fresh celebrity "Squad" of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen -- Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) -- often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas. A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country...........

College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans. Many of these debtors despair of ever paying back the huge sums. Cancelling debt is an ancient socialist rallying cry. Starting over with a clean slate appeals to those "oppressed" with college loans...........mostly irrelevant college majors. Such degrees usually offer few opportunities to find jobs high-paying enough to pay back staggering obligations.

Lots of young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry because they cannot afford a home, a new car or nice things in their "woke" urban neighborhoods........

These are the ingredients for a culture that emphasizes the self, blames others for a sense of personal failure and wants instant social justice. Finally, schools and colleges have replaced the empirical study of economics, history and politics with race, class and gender indoctrination.

On September 12, 2019 Bruce Deitrick Price states it outright saying in K–12: The Real Threat is Red Supremacist :

Consider that Americans split 50-50 on most of the main issues in this country: gun control, abortion, capital punishment, conscientious objection, voting age, drinking age, et al. Surely, the hard Left works to change opinion on these issues. But typically, there are no giant anomalies to prove what effect red supremacists are having. Education is the opposite story.

When it comes to reading, writing and arithmetic, 99% of American parents want children to have these skills. Naturally they get them, right? Wrong, and that's how you know that some serious subversion is going on. Red supremacists seem to be everywhere in education. Examining K–12 is remarkably revealing, like taking an x-ray of the whole country..........

The big gimmick in K–12 was to kick out phonics in 1931 and make children memorize sight-words. Literacy went into decline and has never recovered........

Red supremacists wanted less literacy and used a fake instructional method to reach this goal.  But it seems they got greedy; they went too far too fast and became too obvious.  Fifty million functional illiterates!

 My solution requires a broad front, requiring a foundational restructuring of the government

1.  Fix the disaster of 1913 where the Congress gave up control of the currency with the FED, passed the 16th Amendment, which was income tax, and the 17th Amendment, which changed how Senators were chosen, ending the balance of power between the States and the federal government. Eliminate the FED and repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments.
2. Pass a 28th Amendment putting term and age limits on the federal judiciary, and firm term limits on members of Congress to prevent them from going back and forth from the House to the Senate forever. 
3. Eliminate the Department of Education, Labor, Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development just for a start.  Combine those that are left and put Sunset stipulations on all bureaus, agencies, sub agencies, quasi-official agencies, independent agencies, committees, commissions and boards.  And there are a lot of them. 
4. End all federal government interference in lower education, and return the power to the local boards of education, where they can be challenged by the local population. 
5. End all federal government assistance to higher education institutions. 
6. Make all higher education institutions for profit institutions.  All of which would be subject to the same laws and rules to which all other business in America are subject. 
7. Tax their endowment funds, which are huge. 
8. Stop all student loan programs. 
9. Stop all public funding or interference from the federal government. If the states wish to fund them that’s their business, but at the federal level, they’ll be treated as a business, and taxed and treated accordingly.

Let's stop being coy.  The only thing these leftist loons care about is getting elected. They have no moral foundation except for the insane desire to have power.  They believe in nothing, so they attack the past and anything that stands now, provided it supports the current philosophical flavor of the day, and gets them votes.  They will adopt whatever it takes to get those votes even if means betrayal of their comrades and their party.  They will betray the nation if that will get them what they want.  They have a moral foundation of quicksand, constantly shifting and leaving disaster in their wake.  That's history, and that history is incontestable.  

And no matter how terrible their plans and schemes work out, over and over again, 45% of the nation is willing to vote for people who have no moral foundation.

It's clear the Congress, and the government, are filled with people who hate America, and a huge percentage of the population agrees.  Did you ever wonder why?

Because we are funding that insanity through our education systems, from kindergarten right through graduate school.

If that isn't brought under control the nation is doomed, and make no mistake about this.  So too will the rest of the world because if America ceases to be America, the world's nations will collapse economically.

Can you feel the Bern?