My Personal Battle: A Fight for Better Education Part 1

When my oldest daughter was in the fourth grade, she started a new school. I had been lucky enough to get her re-assigned to a school near where I worked, a halfway decent primary school where she excelled. But I wasn't working when she entered fourth grade due to the birth of my second daughter, so she entered a school district that I knew nothing about.

It was a bad fit from the start. My daughter ended up stapling papers and doing other busy work because she would finish her school work long before her classmates. She was forced to run laps during recess along with the rest of the class, who hadn't behaved properly.

My first attempt at change was to call the assignment office, but I was told that I couldn't change schools after the school year had started. After many calls and heated conversations with the head of the assignment office, I was told that the only way I could move my daughter out of her current school was to put her in a magnet school. I had three options, all of which I toured before putting in the application, which had to be approved before she could move.

During the waiting period, I had a shock. My daughter was in her room one night writing "valentines," one of which said something about someone having sex with someone else and liking it. Of course I was concerned and took those concerns to her teacher and her principle. I also asked the principle for help in moving her to a school that may be a better fit for her. While I was there I was told that my daughter had been writing notes in class stating something to the effect that she wanted to kill her sister, and counseling was recommended. I also found out that the note had been written two weeks prior and no one had informed me of it at the time. I left the school frustrated and in tears, completely fed up with the entire system.

Why did the school not tell me about something so important until I had said something about moving my daughter out of their school? Why did I have to fight for an entire quarter, a nine week period, to get my daughter moved to a school where she would actually be learning something? Why should I have to fight anyone at all? And is my daughter actually learning something where she is at now?

My frustration with our education system continues to grow and grow, and not just because of this incident. I entered college a little over a year ago to try to get a teaching license. I changed majors because I didn't believe in the philosophy of children that was being taught to me. The major I switched to, psychology, taught the exact same philosophy. At this point, the whole thing has me frustrated and enraged.

My personal battle now is to research our education system and discover and impliment a new way to teach our children. My research has already led me to several very scary facts about our current public education system that I will be sharing with you through several more posts. I hope that you pay attention. And I hope that any like-minded people will join me in finding a way to save the future of our children and bring the rights of the parents back to them and take those rights out of the hands of the government and its employees.

A Note About Universal Health Care

One of the platforms that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran on during the past election was universal health care. While the name and the idea of universal health care sounds exciting and hopeful, people have many misconceptions about howit would actually work.

First, let's get past the name - Universal Health Care. That means that there would be health care for everyone. Well, the last time I checked, our nation already offered health care for everyone, as long as you can afford it. And this is where the politicians decide that they can go crazy. They have determined that it is the right of every American to have health care, whether they can afford it or not, so they are proposing a universal health insurance paid for by the American taxpayer. This means that even if you do not get sick or injured, you are helping to foot the bill for all of those people who do get sick or injured and those requiring medication.

The cost of such a program would be hard to determine, but there is only one way to fund such a huge undertaking by the government - raise taxes. And since there are a vast number of people who can't work because of their medical problems, this leads to a redistribution of income from the able-bodied working man to those who are unable to work.

Don't get me wrong here - I don't have a problem with helping someone in their time of need. What I have a problem with is being forced to do so. I work day after day to provide for myself and my children in the best way that I can; to have the government take money that I have earned and give it to people who haven't earned it is an injustice, in my mind.

We have established in an earlier blog posting that government has never run any program at a surplus. Just as insurance companies now reserve the right to refuse coverage, the government would also be able to refuse coverage for anyone for any reason. And with the government mis-managing so many programs, the likely cause for refusal of coverage would be the lack of money to fund the coverage of everything for everyone. So how do we decide who gets their health care? Do we create waiting lists? Are these waiting lists based on a first-come-first-serve, or based on need? Who determines who needs care the most? How is this determination made? How can they create a system where favoritism or bribery for services would not be a likely happenstance? Imagine for a moment that you have a life-threatening illness or injury, but you can't get surgery or treatment because there is a waiting list. Does universal health coveraget sound like a noble ideal in this case?

But most importantly, we should consider things from the perspective of the healthcare provider. These men and women would no longer be able to choose their patients, but would be subjected to the government telling them which patients they could take. They would also be subjected to many more rules and regulations that would likely raise the cose of services. Since the government would be paying the cost of healthcare, it is very likely that it would begin to set the pay for doctors.

"Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of
enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of
medicine, men discussed everything - except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should
have any right, desire, or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness...That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in
the stockyards - never occured to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy." (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

So here we have it. The government has proposed to provide everyone with health coverage, but what this plan basically amounts to is benefits for the few at the expense of everyone. I, for one, would not want to see something like this happen to our country.

A New Way to Think About Those Government Bailouts

http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams/2009/01/26/my_new_spread_the_wealth_grading_policy

Anyone who doesn't have even the vaguest misgivings about Obama's stimulus package or the recent bailouts needs to check out this article.

Wheels in our Heads

"The thought is my own only when I have no misgiving about bringing it in danger of death every moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a loss for me, a loss of me."
-Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

We Americans have wheels in our heads. Some of us suffer from this more than others, but the fact is that most people hold beliefs that they have either inherited from their parents or have been led to believe will make them better people. Most people don't take the time to test these beliefs in the fire of reason because the beliefs are comfortable. To question and test your own beliefs requires a great deal of separation; it requires the knowledge that although your beliefs are a part of you, you are not your beliefs.

I have had the experience of testing the wheels in my own head. Raised in a Christian home, I grew up believing that God was king of my life and Christian conservatism was the political way to go. The problem that I encountered was that I had a hard time trusting in the infallibility of the scriptures; I also had problems justifying the hypocrisy of the people around me, as well as my own hypocrisy. To be a Christian conservative meant that I wanted everyone around me to not only accept the beliefs that I held, but that I wanted to shove these beliefs as far into their lives as I could, whether they believed them or not. I did not feel comfortable with this approach because I know that I would not want someone else's beliefs and way of life imposed upon me.

It took a great deal of strength to examine my beliefs and realize that they did not stand up to reason. I was defined by my Christian beliefs - they were me. To separate myself from them took a great deal of personal honesty and courage; after breaking myself apart and examining the pieces, throwing out the ideas that hindered me and keeping the ones that helped, I came out a much stronger and more secure person.

The purpose of this blog is not to impose my personal beliefs on you, the reader. Rather, I hope that this blog will cause you to look at your own beliefs and figure out which ones are a part of you and which ones you are using to define yourself. Tearing down the wheels in your own head can cause a feeling of liberation because you know that your ideas and beliefs are your own and you know why you hold them. And above all, YOU hold THEM - THEY do not hold YOU.

Nationalization!?!

I was wading through this morning's news reports when I saw it: Obama's economic recovery team is considering nationalizing the banks in order to stop the current banking crisis. Granted, they understand the economic pros and cons of this move, but they are still considering it.

As a Libertarian and someone who has a deep respect for the principles that this country was founded on, the idea of nationalizing any business strikes fear in my heart. Not that I didn't expect it, though. I, along with the rest of the taxpayers in this nation are the largest shareholders of Bank of America and CitiGroup as a result of the government's bailout of both of these banking institutions. Now that the government has gotten a slight taste of bank ownership, what is to stop lawmakers from taking complete control of the banks?

Let us stop and consider what this would mean for our country. First of all, the men that worked hard to create their banking business would lose their ownership of what they had built, having it taken from them by politicians who, in the end, reap all of the benefits. Imagine if the government controlled how your moneyis held, who could receive a loan, or anything else that banks do.

I want to take you for a moment to a place where the government already has control: the public schools. Education of our nation's children is a top priority since they will be the ones leading and producing in the future. But on a worldwide scale our children are continually ranking lower and lower in education, leading one to wonder what they are gaining from our system. Parents have little or no choice about where they can send their child to school, and are subjected to being ordered to take their child to a different school in the name of "cultural or economic diversity." Teachers are subjected to so many rules and standards that their focus is shifted from giving students the best that they can to making sure that students meet the requirements of the government. And schools in every part of the country face so many budget problems that it is a wonder that they can even afford the supplies needed to teach our children.

What does this mean for our banks? Banks would not have to compete for customers, so imagine any perks that you get at your bank disappearing and customer service resembling that of the DMV. And imagine how much worse your banking fees would be. The government has never been able to run any program at a surplus and they have to get the money to run the banks from somewhere. Getting a loan would become almost impossible with all of the regulations and restrictions that would be imposed, especially since irresponsible lending is one of the things that got us into this mess in the first place.

Many people downplayed Obama's socialist background, but if the process of nationalizing the banks turns out to be easy, e.g., his administration doesn't face too much opposition, then what would stop them from nationalizing the automotive industry, another sector of the economy facing financial problems?

Americans stand to lose much more than we would gain from the nationalization of any industry in the country. We have already seen it in our school systems. I hope that the American people will not stand idly by while it happens to our banking industry as well.