Seventy-five years of progressive public education has paid off big-time for the Democrat Party. The popular vote indicates that slightly more than half the electorate preferred a failed community organizer to an experienced problem-solver with a great economic vision for our future. Why? Because they don’t understand the difference between socialism and capitalism. Recently, when I asked a young computer repairman what was the difference between socialism and capitalism, his answer was: “A socialist government is for all the people. A capitalist government is for the few.” He had been well indoctrinated by his Marxist teachers.
And so the United States will enter a dark period of economic turmoil, ruled by socialists in Washington who will continue to do for America what Hugo Chavez has done for Venezuela. The electorate that voted to keep Barrack Hussein Obama in the White House represents the most ignorant body of voters in American history. They are the great American illiterates who don’t read books or even newspapers. They belong to the great educational underclass, deliberately created by our public schools, so that they will vote every four years for whomever the left puts up for election.
In 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released its report, Reading at Risk, on the continuing decline of American literacy. Its chairman, Dana Gioia, stated: “This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.”
According to the report, the number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.
In 1988, Arthur O. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, told a meeting of newspaper publishers: “Today up to 60 million Americans — one third of the adult population — cannot read their local newspaper. As we edge closer to the 21st century, life is becoming more complex and will become more difficult for adults who cannot read.”
And we have just seen the results of this growing national illiteracy in the presidential election. And as long as the public schools keep using teaching methods that create functional illiteracy, the intelligence of the American people will continue to decline.
And you would think that by now the newspaper publishers would want to know what they are doing in the public schools to create so many functional illiterates. More and more newspapers are folding because of the decline in readership. Why haven’t they made any attempt to look into the causes of this growing illiteracy?
America’s international standing should have shaken up the newspaper owners. In 2009, the United States was 17th in Reading; 30th in Math; and 23rd in Science. According to the U.S. Education Department, 30 percent of college-accepted freshman must take remedial courses in order to take a college class. Forty percent of 10th graders can’t read at grade level. Thirty percent of all high school freshmen will drop out before grade 10. Countries like South Korea, Finland, Singapore, Slovenia, and Lithuania are way ahead of us, despite the fact that we spend more money on education than all of these combined. According to a web site on international test scores in Math and Science:
By the time our students are ready to leave high school — ready to enter higher education and the labor force — they are doing so badly with science they are significantly weaker than their peers in other countries. Our idea of “advanced” is clearly below international standards. There appears to be a consistent weakness in our teaching performance in physical sciences that becomes magnified over the years.
And what is the cause of this weakness? If the students can’t read, how can they excel in science?
Republicans cannot escape blame for creating this situation. While it was Democrat President Lyndon Johnson who brought the federal government into education through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, which institutionalized educational malpractice, subsequent Republican administrations expanded the federal role. Instead of working to get the federal government out of the education business, Republicans like President George Bush gave us No Child Left Behind, a great expansion of the federal intrusion into education.
The Republican establishment shunned educational critics like John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt, Marva Collins, and yours truly, who advocated getting the federal government out of education and restoring the kind of curriculum in our schools that promotes literacy, patriotism, and an understanding of our free-enterprise system.
Who voted for Obama? The white Marxist elite and their liberal middle-class cohorts; the cultural elite, like Bruce Springsteen and the editors of Vogue magazine, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone; the vast majority of American blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, who are politically and economically illiterate; young single mothers on welfare; unionized public employees; the economic underclass. These voters couldn’t care less about the Founding Fathers, or the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence. For them, the purpose of government is to provide bigger and better freebees for themselves. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that the purpose of government is to secure the unalienable rights of its citizens. But that idea is now gone with the wind. Rights are now derived from government, not God.
As for the Bill of Rights, that too has been torn to shreds. Religious freedom from government is a thing of the past. Catholic institutions must now pay for the contraceptive and abortion services of their female employees through compulsory health insurance, which is at odds with Catholic religious principles. The new Obama Bill of Rights endorses gay marriage; it forces Catholic orphanages to grant adoptions to gay couples. Biblical religion, while not totally relegated to the trash heap, is now studiously ignored by the Left. At the Democrat convention, the Party Platform had left out the word God. While the delegates voted overwhelmingly to keep it out, it was put in by the convention leader in order to avoid embarrassment.
So what can we expect from the Obama administration in the next four years? Higher unemployment as new taxes will force many businesses to lay off employees. We will get more regulation of the economy, particularly the energy sector where the war against coal will intensify. As taxes are raised on dividends, capital gains, and corporate profits, more and more Americans will seek ways to preserve their wealth. With less incentive to invest, productivity will decline, thus reducing federal tax revenues. Which means that Obama will have to borrow more money to pay for his programs. The federal debt will thus increase.
ObamaCare will kick in with its own array of taxes, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts. Hundreds of agents have already been hired by the IRS to help collect these taxes. The healthcare industry will be in a state of turmoil until it can adjust to the new bureaucratic rules and regulations. The costs of healthcare will increase while the quality of services will decline as more and more doctors will opt out of the government system.
Meanwhile, a Republican House of Representatives will be forced to play its role of obstructing Obama’s intentions of moving the country further to the left. Obama will blame the Republicans for any further damage to the economy by his policies. He will seek to override Congress by Executive Order. If he does this, he may be susceptible to impeachment. The investigation of the Benghazi affair may also provide cause for impeachment.
If we cannot stop Obama from further destroying our free-enterprise system, we may be headed for a long period of socialist domination in Washington leading to such economic hardship and uncertainty that Obama-style socialism will, at some time in the future, be repudiated by the voters. It took the Russians 75 years to shake off the horrors of communism, which killed millions and impoverished everyone. Perhaps America has to go through its own painful experience with socialist economic and cultural chaos before the electorate will throw the socialists out. Europe is now struggling with its own “democratic” socialism and unable to deal with its debts.
What can we do to restore sanity to American education? Conservatives should begin working at the local level to start revamping our dumbing-down curriculum in the schools. If we can’t win the White House or the Senate, maybe we can win school-board elections. Most school boards today are run by an invisible hand out of Washington that determines what can and cannot be taught in our schools. If you’ve ever attended a local school-board meeting, you know that the board is controlled by unseen national forces. Try to buck the national trend, and you will be shot down. But only a full-scale attack on the local school board by local conservatives will be able to make any positive changes.
Republican governors should make it their priority to find out what is going on in their schools and get rid of the progressive atheists who are causing widespread depression, unhappiness, violence, and academic failure among American students. High literacy must be restored. Why do we tolerate teaching programs that have made a third of our adult population illiterate? Also, conservative governors should mandate the distribution of copies of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to all children in the schools of their states.
The only cause for optimism is the fact that Governor Romney got virtually half the popular vote, which means that at least half the electorate is sane enough to have understood what was at stake in this election. They preferred voting for an experienced problem-solver to a failed Marxist community organizer. And if we can get our schools to once more smarten up our children instead of dumbing them down, we may be able to increase the number of intelligent, sane citizens in our country.
After the great conservative debacle that got Lyndon B. Johnson elected president in 1964, conservatives got to work building a whole battery of single-issue organizations to educate the public. The unpopular Vietnam War gave Republicans a chance to regain the White House. Moderate Nixon became president in 1969 but resigned in disgrace in 1974 after having easily won a second term. Gerald Ford’s administration lasted three years, followed by the disastrous Carter years. Finally, in 1981, we got Reagan, who inspired the nation with his optimism and dedication to the principles of our Founding Fathers.
We need a literate population that can read and understand our founding documents. Indeed, we have the most intelligent conservative voters in the history of the republic. Enough books critical of Obama have been written to fill a library, but the only people who have read them are conservatives. Our changing demographics mean that we must reach out to new immigrants, and Latinos in particular, as potential patriots of the future. If they strive to become Americans, we should help them reach that goal. The conservative movement has spawned a small army of excellent candidates for future elections. So there is no reason to lose hope. One of them will someday become president.
