Agree or Disagree?
WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT AMERICAN EDUCATION
Public education ought to be grassroots driven. Currently, public education is orchestrated by both Federal and State agencies, in other words, by government bureaucrats. These agencies are bloated, inefficient and a liability to educational excellence. They also tend to propagate policies and ideologies foreign to the will of the American people and detrimental to the moral and intellectual development of our county’s youth. LaRue County Public Education ought to be executed by our own educators beneath the guidance and in cooperation with our county’s taxpaying citizens of Kentucky in full cooperation and assistance of morally committed and experienced educators.
Public education is vital to the sustainment of our Republic. The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not identify education as a basic right. However, it does recognize the right of all Americans to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This basic prescription implies we may pursue an education if we desire; but the government is not responsible for educating its citizens nor can the citizens be prevented from pursuing one. It was always recognized that our constitutional republic would suffer if most of our citizens were not well educated. Our form of government’s stability and permanency depended on the active engagement of and educated and informed “We the People.” So is the testimony of our nation’s founders. The author of the Constitution, James Madison remarked: “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” Thomas Jefferson similarly argued that governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed,” but that it is education that makes that consent possible. President Washington, in his last annual message to Congress, added that expanding education was essential to the perpetuation of nation’s common values and the chance of a “permanent Union.”
Public education ought to be noble. The public education enterprise should be directed at teaching, training and developing competent, knowledgeable, disciplined and productive citizens to pursue their respective callings in life for the good of our Republic and the wellbeing of their families. Truth, knowledge, skill, understanding, virtue, wisdom and physical health are education’s primary goals. It is the traditional, historical, experienced wisdom of parents, ministers and educators that should inform the educational enterprise.
LaRue County Public Education is accountable and transparent. Because public education is funded for and owned by the taxpayer, it is accountable to the taxpayer alone. For there to be accountability, transparency is imperative in all things. The elected School Board plays a critical role insuring this to be true in practice.
LaRue County Public School (LCPS) employees are employed by Larue County taxpayers for the advantage of LaRue County youth. LCPS employees work for LaRue county citizens. LCPS property is the property of the citizens of LaRue County. Due to this fact, LaRue County citizens have every right to know what is going on in their schools and how resources and property are being utilized. Within reason, they have the right to enter our schools and administrative buildings as desired without revealing their reason for doing so. LCPS officials are stewards of our county’s property and resources for the purpose of educating our youth.
LCPS owes no allegiance to the State or Federal government; nor to the teacher unions; nor to private vendors or lobbyist; and most certainly not to ideologies, foreign and contrary to, our constitutions, common sense and the laws of creation and creation’s God.
Public education ought to be fair. Public education supports the educational objectives of all youth engaged in all venues of education, whether they be charter, home-based, private or public schools. Monopolistic control of education is both toxic and destructive to educational excellence. All taxpayers and their children ought to get an equal return on the dollars they spend or save in the public education enterprise. This objective promotes community synergy in a common venture toward a common goal. For this to be realized, taxes ought to follow the student to the school they are enrolled. This opens opportunity and options reflective of democratic principles and serves to improve the educational enterprise through American innovation and competition.
Public education must wisely and frugally utilize allotted resources to demonstrate responsible stewardship of the taxpayers’ monies so that its mission is not jeopardized in both good and bad economic times. This provides Kentucky youth an honest and real-time understanding of the value of good stewardship.
The only true test of the public education enterprise’s success is how well our youth transform from dependent youth to profitable citizens of the community. This transformation is fleshed out in virtuous living, civic responsibility, and productive employment.
Public education is both worldly and spiritual in nature. We all live in the reality of this truth. There is both a seen and an unseen world. God rules both worlds. Because he is a spirit, he is unseen; because he is the Creator, we see him as the testimony of his creation and his incarnate Son. To educate youth in a way that dismisses this understanding is detrimental to our youth and to our society. A curriculum devoid of this truth is corrupt and destructive to the well-being of a blessed and civil society.
Public education must reflect the principles embedded in our nation’s founding documents. Ideologies in conflict with these documents should not be a part of our educational enterprise. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs of instruction are injurious to a healthy and honest learning environment and conflict with the Constitutional rights of our students and their parents. Critical Theory is a caustic ideology that provokes division, bitterness and hatred.
The aberrant and morally destructive literature injected into our public schools in cooperation with our educational professionals must be stopped. No material of any sort which corrupts the morals and conscience of our youth ought to be available to them at school. As temporary stewards of our community, educators are responsible to ensure this takes place while youth are in school. No library, classroom, or resource center should host or contain resources considered obscene or explicitly sexual in nature. All public schools ought to disassociate with organizations and/or vendors committed to the sexualization and/or grooming of our youth. Innocence and youthfulness is too short to waste and destroy for the sake of those who seek to exploit and corrupt our youth for their own nefarious purposes.
