For decades, I’ve been telling my readers that the federal government ought not to be in the education business and that constitutionalist members of Congress are duty bound to close down the Department of Education. The Cabinet-level department was created during the Carter administration as payback for the National Education Association’s help in getting him elected.

In a recent article on whether one should be optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future, I quoted the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts who wrote in Commentary magazine:

I remain optimistic in general terms about the United States.... I am far less confident, however, about the nation’s cultural and intellectual future. There has been a vast dumbing down of our public culture that may be irreversible. There can be no doubt from the many detailed and reliable studies available that Americans now know less, read less, and even read less well than they did a quarter of a century ago.

How does a successful liberal playwright and screenwriter such as David Mamet become a conservative? In a way he probably has always been a conservative but didn’t know it. When you have grown up in a liberal cocoon in which all your friends, teachers, colleagues, and relatives are liberal Democrats, you tend to go along with the flow.

In November 2011, Commentary magazine asked 41 members of the cultural elite — writers thinkers, and professors — whether or not they were optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future. While most of the comments dwelt on political and economic issues, some of the contributors pointed to our education system as a source of their pessimism.

Colin Gunn, a feisty Scottish filmmaker, and Joaquin Fernandez, an American cinematographer, have produced a powerful and highly provocative film called IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America. (See trailer, below.) Having become aware of the horrors that go on in our pagan government schools, these two film makers, who also happen to be Christian homeschooling Dads, decided to make a hard-hitting documentary film that would wake up the Christian parents of America and show them what is happening to their children in the public schools. Ninety percent of Christian parents send their children to these pagan schools, and after twelve years of indoctrination in the philosophy of secular humanism, 88 percent of those Christian children come out no longer believing in the religion of their parents.

It will indeed be a happy new year if we manage to remove Barack Hussein Obama from the presidency in November. Then we shall all be happy (the exact degree of happiness being dependent on exactly who replaces Obama and how much his policies differ from the Obama agenda), except those citizens who want more government, more taxes, more regulation, more federal handouts, more debt, and more unemployed leisure. Those people will not be happy until all Americans are reduced to equal numbing poverty.

One of the surprises of the campaign for the Republican nomination is the growing number of voters who approve of Ron Paul’s stand on the issues. The Texas Congressman is, of course, a known quantity. He has been preaching in favor of limited government and a non-interventionist foreign policy for decades. But the fact that so many Americans like what he stands for gives hope to this writer that the fundamental patriotic spirit of the American people has not completely vanished. In fact, it is alive and well.

There is a man in the White House with a wife and two daughters. We see him getting on and off Air Force One or a big presidential helicopter. He waves at people. He wears a nice suit and looks neat and trim. We see him sauntering up to a podium to say a few words. Nothing he says seems to be of any importance. He has a Press Secretary who speaks for him at the daily press briefing.

I found the following passage in a book by Thomas Dick, The Philosophy of a Future State, published in Brookfield, Massachusetts, in 1830. It struck me as being as relevant to our present state of belief in life after death as anything argued today. And it is a particularly important contemporary issue since children in American public schools are taught the humanist doctrine that there is no afterlife, and that present existence is all that there is. Thomas Dick writes:

There have been some mentions of “education” in the Republican debates and by candidates in general. Some of the Republicans have even advocated getting rid of the Department of Education. That’s a good start, but virtually nothing has been said about the reading problem, or the deliberate dumbing down of our children. Nothing has been said about how our public schools are deliberately destroying the brain power of millions of young Americans.