A Plebeian’s Essay On Education

A Plebeian’s Essay On Education

By David S. Petolicchio

6/19/19

The United States is in the midst of an intellectual civil war, an ideological war of emotions versus reason. It can be observed, that there are nefarious actors involved in this conflict, but the majority of the participants are simply ignorant masses, searching for their elusive benevolent ruler. We are faced with generations who lack basic history education and are entirely deprived of all philosophical foundations. Of course, this fault could be laid at the feet of our government education system, a system consistently faulty in both application and content. Its vast curriculum fails in the most essential and basic realms of societal needs. Subjects such as history, debate, philosophy, and civics are all foreign concepts to your average vapid pupil, all while training to take robotic tests with useless content rule the day.

It is imperative that we revisit our fundamental system of education and, as bold as it may be, revisit whether or not the government has any place at all in the education system. We know how essential quality education is, yet we constrain our opportunities of intellectual competition by barring charter school funding and blocking school choice legislation. Why would this be? Is not the education and the best possible means of learning all that matters to those in the education system? Are they not involved in the lofty mission of nurturing future generations for the sake of our great and once free country? It is a great tragedy, a failure of human character that leads us to the place of government educational monopoly. The threats and dangers of this system are numerous, and can be easily proved upon any measure of investigation, that the government is one of the greatest threats to our liberty. So why then, have we blindly allowed the government to have a complete monopoly on one of the greatest tools to determining the future of our nation? If the government, as our founding fathers clearly stated on innumerable occasions, is a series potential threat to liberty, then why have we turned over the minds of all future generations to their corruptible iron reach?

The rights of the people to legitimate education, should not require statement or clarification, yet we have a tumultuous debate on merely allowing any form of competition of education. It is the opinion of this writer, that education should at the least be opened to legitimate private and public competition and at most, entirely privatized. This in no way means that I am anti-education, to the great contrary, I support legitimate and truly nurturing education. I suggest that competition in the realm of education and the reinstatement of true critical thought and civil discourse, being essential for cultivating a truly free society, must be promoted and available at all times.

What then can be done to provide the true opportunity for educational advancement and real social progress? What hope do we have to reverse the out of control system we have allowed to erode at the minds of countless generations? Short of the gruesome and fearful notion of physical war, I suggest the promotion and constant distribution of private education on history, philosophy, and civics.

I humbly suggest, with my meager and often inadequate education, that we create private independent educational organizations such as the one this article was written for. I posit that liberty being truly taught with an emphasis in critical thought and historic integrity, the people will be provided with the adequate tools necessary to reclaiming this nation’s soul. The heart of the people is grown, rarely in adulthood, but rather in the ignorance of youth. It is imperative that competition for those monolithic public education assembly lines have competition so that their monopoly on information is broken and the people are allowed to choose their education based on merit, not on government mold.

There is no truly legitimate and innocent reason for those in establishment educational power to oppose honest competition. If their intentions were purely for the best education to prevail for the sake of future generations, they would welcome the notion of competition. Instead, we are faced with corrupt and bureaucratic despots who view education as a tool, as a weapon for the sake of the state to ensure a steady supply of uniformed, feeble willed, and submissive populations.

If this is what we are truly faced with, then we must work together to produce and support legitimate educational efforts seeking to change and improve this disastrous situation? Work in your communities, offer your knowledge or study! Work to improve your own knowledge constantly, make your knowledge available to your communities and honorably promote the truth. I implore you to create, cultivate, and participate in educational competition that will challenge the bureaucratic monolith that is the governmental educational monopoly.