ABANDON SHIP!

Some very good reasons to leaving the sinking ship of Government Education

A Nation at Risk
by Mrs. Spillman, wife, mother and grandmother

The world needs to hear and understand that we are being destroyed by the government school system.
http://tinyurl.com/223fmp

A View from the School Window
by Gene Malone, 8th Grade History Teacher

Local control of education as understood in Articles IX and X of the Bill of Rights will bring more responsible education. Large organizations seeking to use education and educators as a power base are harmful to the search for truth.
http://tinyurl.com/2ab6go

***The following is courtesy of Charles Demastus' Southern Heritage News & Views***
Rebecca Felton on Government Schools

Rebecca Felton saw the need to educate young people to become literate individuals set on the path to further study as each was equipped by nature, but she also recognized the socialist tendencies of government and how easy it is to spend other peoples' money. She was the wife of a Georgia legislator and a women's rights activist; and most notably spoke to the 1897 Georgia Agricultural Exposition regarding the rape of unprotected farm women by black men while white farmers were tending crops. This crime was serious enough at the time for her to publicly demand that black leaders use their influence to help stop it. It was this speech by Felton that fanatical black Wilmington newspaperman Alexander Manly used in a August 1898 editorial, and made the incredible claim that the farm women actually encouraged the advances of the black rapists. Responsible citizens in Wilmington was understandably outraged, and Manly can be credited with the violence that ensued.

Bernhard Thuersam, Executive Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
Post Office Box 328
Wilmington, NC 28402
www.CFHI.net

Rebecca Felton on Government Schools

"I have never been an admirer of our public school system, set up in Reconstruction days, and full of handicaps and infirmities. Some years ago I was invited by the Legislature of Georgia to meet with joint session of House and Senate and talk it over from my viewpoint. Since that time the system has grown more unwieldy as to size and more costly as to expense. It is surprising to know that our lawmakers did not appreciate the impossibility of covering the ground and getting all the children educated by failing to command compulsory attendance.

When Georgia legislators assumed the liberty to commandeer or conscript your tax money to educate my child it was only just, fair and equitable to compel me to send that child to school or know the reason why (I didn't). I fully understand that public utilities are hard to manage, but I also agree with a level-headed old legislator who was "agin the whole business, because it is the easiest thing to do, spend other peoples' money."

The basic principle in such education is protection against ignorance and illiteracy, it being a preventive to crime and disorder as elaborately expounded, but the public school education is or should be limited to a plain English education, for it is a well-established fact that many of our greatest criminals are the best educated; and it is rank socialism to take your money by force for any such purpose. Our public school education is a sort of molding machine where all the children are herded together and forced into the molds prepared by theorists, sometimes thoroughly impractical in general use and application.

It is a gigantic scheme to squander tax money, growing bigger every year and standing in the way of a better and more satisfactory way of securing education for the very people who need it the most, and care the least for this opportunity of free tuition. Up to this time there have been millions of tax money drafted or conscripted out of those who own something, to pay teachers and school commissioners, while the parents of no-account homes can completely defeat the undertaking by keeping the children in the cotton patch or in mill work, instead of attending school."

(Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Arno Press, 1980, originally published in 1919)