FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 28, 1998
    THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
    Burning of the schools not too far away

People who believe the coming economic downturn is going to be a really big show -- the kind of folks now wisely diversifying into gold, guns, ammo, and dehydrated food, installing water storage tanks, solar generators, and propane refrigerators -- are treated in one of two ways by our friends in the "mainstream press." Either they're ignored, or they're gently ridiculed as Millennium Nuts, people gradually coming unhinged from reality.

OK -- let's talk about some folks who have really come disconnected from reality.

Aug. 20 was the first day of the 1998-99 school year in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where a couple of waist-high felons opened fire on groups of their classmates (all girls) and their teachers last spring, killing several.

On Thursday morning, NBC's "Today" show interviewed one of the returning teachers, who was wounded last year but has recovered.

No, the pleasant lady said, what with the routine of teaching the new kids the rules, the behavior expected of them in school and so on, she hadn't really had time to think much about that tragic day. Although, when she stood out in the hall between classes to monitor the movements of the precious little herd animals to the sound of the omnipresent bells, she did miss her dead associate, who used to stand guard duty in the next classroom doorway, exchanging pleasantries.

Did anyone else watch this brave, tearful little interview, and wonder how many more psychopaths this woman is busy training?

Wake up.

Fifty years ago, the majority of Americans never graduated from high school -- eleventh and twelfth grades were appropriately reserved for the minority who needed to study Greek, German, physics and calculus as they prepared for college. (If girls and racial minorities were systematically excluded, that was wrong, of course. But that's a separate issue.)

For the eight or 10 years that most kids did go to school, they generally walked to a folksy, low-tech building where they got to know one teacher, the principal's secretary, and the janitor. Kids often used the same books their parents had, 30 years before ... which really did encourage mom and dad to help with homework, also allowing them to see if their kids were moving ahead at the proper pace (precisely the reason the curriculum is now completely altered every decade, so no parent will notice how much ground is being lost.)

There were no herd migrations from room to room every 54 minutes. There was no federal Department of Education, no aggressive teachers union, and precious little state interference -- the whole shebang being pretty much funded and operated at the local level. The only extent to which the "welfare state" intervened was the presence of a single part-time school nurse, with a practice largely limited to Aspirin and Band-aids. And the result? Near 100 percent literacy, in real books without pictures -- not dumbed down "anthologies."

When the kids went home in the afternoon they would generally find mom and grandma finishing up the housework or starting plans for supper. Junior might be sent out to care for the animals, or to pick some beans and carrots for supper. Failing that, he was free to sling his .22 rifle over his shoulder and hike to the store for a Popsicle or a comic book, hoping to bark a squirrel on the way. No one who saw a youth walking along the road with a rifle over his shoulder had the slightest concern that he might be intending to shoot any of his schoolmates.

Plenty of cousins and other members of the extended family were close at hand, ready to teach an interested young fellow or gal (the best way -- by letting them "pitch in and help") anything from small engine mechanics to the arts of the seamstress. Geography and history? Grandpa would help you start a collection of coins, stamps, or guns, (start ital)all(end ital) of which teach geography and history.

# # #

Fast-forward to today. The wet dreams of the education bureaucrats have finally come fully, hideously true. Tax-funded state education lasts from age 4 to age 22, and if the kid goes home in the afternoon he finds nothing but an echoing, empty subdivision. Grandpa is gone, along with his unsanitary pipes and his stamp album, replaced by endless repetitive pre-literate tank gunner training videos, disguised as "games."

Mom's out working full time just to pay the taxes on dad's paycheck (effective combined tax rates on the middle class are now literally 10 times higher than they were in 1953, up from 5 percent till they're pushing 50 -- mostly to pay for the temples to full-service social work which the "public schools" have now become.) Grandma's vegetating in some rest home, convinced she has nothing useful left to teach anyone.

Education and "socialization" are now fully in the hands of the government bureaucrats with their ed school Ph.D.s. And what has been the result? Two generations of functionally illiterate psychopaths.

They point their fingers and keen "It's the fault of the parents, for not sending us good enough raw material." But the whole premise of our great and now utterly failed 150-year experiment in government education was that the "professionals" could do (start ital)better(end ital) than the parents, who as amateurs were fit for nothing but raising money through bake sales. After all, we need a homogeneous final product, don't we? The whole aim was to iron out the ethnic and religious and cultural differences ... throw them all into the "melting pot" of white Northern European Protestantism. That's why the parents have always been systematically shut out. Yet now, after 150 years, they complain the parents don't "play a strong enough role"?

There's a hoot. By their fruits shall ye know them, brother.

They point their fingers and bemoan "the ready availability of guns to children." But kids safely carried around far more guns and knives 50 years ago, and 100 years ago, and 200 years ago, when the nation faced no child-murderer epidemic.

And when a gun isn't readily available, the proud young products of our new and much-improved mandatory government youth propaganda camps no longer show any reticence about just bashing in a young classmate's head with the closest handy rock, the better to steal an attractive bicycle or jacket, or merely to keep them from snitching.

Will the congresscritters in their august wisdom now pound on their desks and enact a law holding an adult criminally liable if he fails to adequately chain down all his rocks, thus allowing one to fall into the hands of a youth who uses it to commit mayhem?

It's the schools, you idiots. Yet Miss Arkansas is right back there again this year, "teaching the new kids the rules, the behavior expected of them in school," standing out in the hall between classes, making sure they follow the old model of the Prussian Industrial Revolution, training to move from one factory machine to the next, without question, the moment their supervisor rings a bell ...

You treat children as slaves, and you're surprised when they despise you and your institutions? You lock them up in cages, and act surprised when they kill their keepers?

Sister, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.

***

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." -- Henry St. George Tucker, in Blackstone's 1768 "Commentaries on the Laws of England."