Government Schools

I plan on posting some information about the history of government schools that is all verifiable if you know where to look. I will not attempt to do everything chronologically, as there is so much information. But, will give you quotes, statistics, etc. to show that public schools are not working.

In 1840 the literacy in the United States was between 92 and 100 percent. And they were reading books like Last of the Mohicans, which is a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, and analysis of human motives and actions.

By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for white, 80 percent for blacks. For all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of white couldn't read. Black illiteracy doubled and white illiteracy quadrupled. Think about this: we spend 3 to 4 times as much real money of schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone could read.

Quote: Catherine Barrett, president of the National Education Association said, "Dramatic changes in the way we raise our children are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling...we will be agents of change."
In The Truth About American Schools, (1997, pg. 20) author Gerald Bracey in discussing the condition he termed 'overeducation' that "we must continue to produce an uneducated social class that will do.. the n_____ work:, a term he attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. This is a echo of a statement made by William Torrey Harris to Collis P. Huntington, the railroad tycoon, in the 1880's assuring Huntington that the new school institution was being "scientifically designed" to prevent 'overeducation' from happening.

If you think things have changed, stay tuned. There would have been no Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, George Washington and many others if they had been 'schooled' as we know it.