What Are Public Schools REALLY Designed to Do to Our Children?

Posted in Tough Questions

Our public schools are staffed by well trained professionals who teach according to a modern up-to-date curriculum which is designed to bring children to their full potential that they may easily integrate into today’s society and the workforce. How can you deny them these great advantages?

This is a typical statist comment, the kind that would also go on to say that children are our nation’s greatest resource and therefore demand the best money can buy. You see, they quite quickly equate children with sides of lamb, butter and other “resources” of our nation which are sometimes sold to the highest bidder , sometimes bartered off to reduce debt and sometimes given away. I resent my children being spoken of in those terms. Thy also assume that money buys the best.

Well, what exactly is behind the National Curriculum? On April 19, 1987, the then Assistant Director , Resources Development, Department of Education, Wellington, met with a number of leaders of home schooling groups in Auckland. This gentleman stated that his own idealism had been somewhat tarnished after years in the state education system when he realized, in his own words, that education “was not only about children and learning, but also about money and politics.” The Christchurch Press of November 5, 1985, had an article about the then Under Secretary of Trade and Industry, Mr Neilson, and his six-point programme for making Labour “the natural party of Government.” Point three of this programme called for the introduction “of peace studies into the education system to achieve this end.” The idea is to train children in the schools to think a certain way so that when they become voters they will just “naturally” think along Labour political lines and just “naturally” vote for Labour. At a speech at Massey University in mid-1990, Finance Minister David Caygill was reported in the papers as saying that Governments should mould public opinion, not follow it. He said it was the politician’s responsibility to pursue policies that were in the public interest “even when the public disagrees.” What better way to mould public opinion than when the public within the state education system is not yet old enough to have its own opinion?! Apparently , both Mr Neilson and Mr Caygill understood what Abraham Lincoln said over 100 years ago: “The philosophy of the classroom is the philosophy of the government in the next generation.”

During the 1986 school trials of the draft programme Keeping Our Selves Safe, the Police Youth Aid Officer in Palmerston North chaired a public meeting to explain the programme to interested parents at Central Normal School. He was asked why the KOSS programme was targeting potential victims, school aged children, and educating them to understand and recognise perversions such as incest, sexual molestation, rape, exhibitionism, etc., rather than targeting potential offenders and educating them in self control. The constable answered with a shrug of the shoulders and the words, “I guess the children are easier to reach since they are a captive audience in the classroom each day.”

A few years ago Massey University Education professor Ivan Snook said that the furore over sex education, morals in the schools, etc., was only a smoke screen. The real issues were power and control: whose were the children and who will control their education? Karl Marx was committed to seeing communism take over the world. He worked out a 10-point plan to see this objective succeed. One of the points was the establishment of free, compulsory and secular state education systems in order to train up the next generation in the philosophy of the state.

Many Christians and other concerned parents were thrilled with the way parents were promised a lot more say in running schools as a result of the changes brought about by the Tomorrow’s Schools document. But most were totally misled. It turned out that what Tomorrow’s Schools did was to off-load much of the expensive administrative headaches onto volunteer Boards of Trustees who receive token remuneration, while the core curriculum, what was actually being taught in the classroom, remained even more tightly in the control of the Ministry of Education. A quote by Phillip Capper of the Post Primary Teachers Association which appeared in the Dominion Sunday Times of 14 October 1990 is one of the most straightforward and honest statements by a professional educationalist one would ever hope to read. He said, “What I would like to see in the political debate about education is a recognition that public education is an exercise in social engineering by definition.” And here is a snippet from the Manawatu Evening Standard of 4 December 1990. “Unresearched government-decreed practices in schools could socially, emotionally and intellectually deform children,” says Christchurch Teachers’ College principal Colin Knight. Dr Knight said the education system placed children at risk by continuing to neglect educational research. ‘It is of serious concern to me that, despite the far-reaching effects of teaching on society, few educational practices have a sound research basis.’ He said changes in what went on in schools were mainly brought about by politically initiated reviews and reports on questionnaires and Gallup polls, by parliamentary debate and political expediency.’

The New Zealand public school system is designed and operated according to political considerations. I have no qualms about keeping my children out of such a system.

From Keystone Magazine
March 1996 , Vol. II No. 2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
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email: craig@hef.org.nz