School Superintendent Fires All High School Teachers in Failed High School

Central Falls High School in Central Falls, Rhode Island has a 48% graduation rate and huge numbers of students failing courses.  The town of Central Falls grew up around the falls on the Blackstone River, which began powering manufacturing operations in the mid-1700s.  The area claims to have produced more of the arms used in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars than any other.  Central Falls was home to many manufacturing enterprises, but especially to the textile industry.  Now, it is a terribly depressed city with a median income of $22,000 and an unemployment rate well above the already high Rhode Island rate of 12.3% in December 2009.  But, the high school teachers earn $72,000 to $78,000 per year, teaching from 7:50 AM to 2:25 PM during the school year.

The State Education Commissioner, Deborah Gist, authorized the Central Falls School Superintendent, Francis Gallo, to turn the failed high school around.  Gallo asked the teachers union to agree to extending the school day by 25 minutes.  She also asked that teachers spend some time tutoring students before and after classes, eat lunch with them once a week, undergo more rigorous evaluations, attend a weekly after school planning meeting, and take two weeks of training each summer.  She offered them $30 per hour for 90 minutes of after school planning time a week and for the 2 weeks of summer training.

The teachers union wanted $90/hr. for the extra work.  They did not get that, so they refused the offer, knowing that the School Superintendent would have to fire the teachers, administrators, and assistants of the high school staff if they refused her offer.  Francis Gallo did just that.

Someone earning about $75,000 per year while working about three-quarters of the year is making money at about a $100,000 a year rate.  Surely one should expect such a person to be a professional.  Or viewed from another angle, surely one should expect a teacher to be a professional.  I cannot figure out why a professional needs a union, which will always require its members to behave in an unprofessional manner appropriate to at best semiskilled workers.  In any case, a professional teacher ought to be appalled at the degree of educational failure at Central Falls High School and should feel duty-bound out of professional pride to undertake the additional work needed to actually teach its students.  Possibly, the students are unreachable.  If a professional teacher were to conclude this, then that teacher would move to another school where the students are teachable.  But, to be happy drawing a high school teaching salary of $75,000 per year and not being able to graduate as many as 50% of the students, that is despicable.  The fired teachers surely deserved to be fired and apparently should have been fired long ago.

Unfortunately, Central Falls will fill the public school with more teachers and attempt to continue public education.  They may do better, but public education is always a failure.  Its internal contradictions are numerous:

• One of the chief lessons of history is that government must be highly limited, but government will not properly teach this in a government-run school.  This is an inherent conflict-of-interest.
• The central purpose of education is that children should learn to think rationally and independently.  Government does not want this to be the case:  it wants docile followers, so we have another conflict-of-interest.
• The study of ethics is central to education, but ethical ideas are commonly a bone of contention among Americans to such an extent that government-run schools will not allow genuine ethical discussions because they may become "confrontational" and may bring in religious ideas.
• Political issues must be discussed, but political viewpoints either rest on limited government or with extended government they must rest on imposing ethical ideas upon the citizens under threat of force.  Again, there is confrontation and the introduction of religious ideas, if powerful government is advocated, as the government always wishes it to be.
• The government cannot resist using the government-run schools as propaganda mills designed to mold its future voters into the beliefs the government wants them to have.
• The government cannot resist advocating ideas of class warfare and racial and sexual victimhood, since these ideas give the government many excuses to expand its powers.

The proper and wise way to provide the children of Central Falls with a decent education is to close down the government-run schools and start up more private schools.  The educational mandate of private schools is much less in conflict with the needs of American students and it has the property of being freely chosen, rather than imposed by force.

The Effectiveness of Federal Government Spending on Education

I am going to keep this very short and very graphic.  Let us examine the relationship between federal spending on K-12 education as shown in this graph:

This graphic is from an entry posted by Neal McCluskey called Federal Education Results Prove the Framers Right on the Cato@Liberty blog.  He notes that there is no federal government constitutional power and then suggests that this graph of federal government spending on K-12 spending shows that spending to have no beneficial impact upon actual student learning.  Note the very flat test scores generally since 1970 and the huge increase in federal spending on education.  All that meddling and no result!

The First Obama Stimulus Bill

There is talk about the need to have a second Obama stimulus bill, close on the heels of earlier bailouts for the financial and banking industries, the U.S.-based automakers, and money to help prevent mortgage foreclosures. Most economists and financial experts seem to be of the opinion that the first Obama stimulus bill has not been and will not be adequate to get the economy moving again. It certainly has not caused the private sector to invest and hire employees at what we have come to think of as normal levels. But, the first Obama stimulus bill and the Omnibus spending bill which followed on its heels did serve a purpose. They were designed to shift wealth and income from the private sector, especially the higher income side of the private sector, to the government sector. At this, they are clearly very successful. This is the primary desire of the socialists running the Obama administration and providing the leadership of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate.

Let us examine the first $787 billion stimulus bill to see how this was accomplished. Let us break it down as the Washington Post did on 14 February with costs in billions:

Health information technology (incentives for Medicare/Medicaid providers), $20.8

Health insurance for unemployed, $25.1

Assistance to unemployed families, $57.2

Tax Provisions, $73.8

• Making Work Pay Credit, $400/year for individual, $800/yr. for family, may exceed tax otherwise owed, offered for 2 years
• Tuition tax credit up to $2500, provided family makes less than $180,000/yr.
• Expanded child tax credit for low income families up to $1000 per child
• Families not owning a home in past 3 years get $8,000 tax credit to buy a home before the end of this year

Medicaid, $90

Health, Labor, & Education, $71.2

• National Institute of Health, $9.7
• National Coordinator for health information technology, $2
• Other health, $9.8
• Employment and training programs, $4.3
• Education for the disadvantaged, $13
• Special education, $12.2
• Student financial assistance, $16.6
• Other, $3.6

Housing, transportation, $61.1

• Highway construction, $27.5
• Other transportation, $20.6
• Housing assistance programs, $13

Grants to states to fully fund education budgets, $54

Energy and water, $50.8

• Energy efficiency, renewable energy, $16.8
• Federal loan guarantees for renewable energy & electricity transmission, $6
  
• Other energy, includes modernizing electric grid, $22.4
• Army Corps of Engineers, $4.6
• Other, $1

Nutrition, rural development, and agriculture, $26.4

• Food stamps, $20
• Broadband expansion in rural areas, $2.5
• Other, $3.9

Commerce, Justice, & Science, $15.8

• Grants to extend broadband, $4.7
• State & local law enforcement, $2.8
• National Science Foundation, $3
• Other, $5.3

Defense, Homeland Security, $11.4

• Homeland Security, $2.7
• Military construction, $4.2
• Defense facility repair & energy, $4.5

Environment, Interior, $10.5

• State grants for water infrastructure, $5.8
• Other, includes national park capital improvements, $4.7

Federal Facilities, $6.7

• Construction & repair of federal buildings, $5.4
• Other, $1.3

State Dept., technology & construction, $0.6

Overall, tax reductions for individuals are only $73.8 billion, not one penny of which will go to high income earners. Other than alternative energy, there are no private sector companies which will get any tax breaks. The total tax reduction part of the stimulus bill is only 9.4% of the "expenditure", so Congress got to fully direct 90.6% of the total monies use.

There is no incentive whatsoever for any industry to hire anyone, except in the construction, college & university, public school system, health care, computer & broadband, electric transmission line companies, law enforcement, vocational training, government, building materials, construction equipment, and alternative energy areas. Note that these encouraged areas are either government workers directly or private industry which has long been heavily dependent upon government funding and have been selected to receive subsidies from the remainder of the private sector through increased tax transfers of wealth. The money to be sucked out of the remainder of the private sector will fund these government-favored areas.

A great part of the money seems directed at making the medical industry still more dependent upon government. The $2 billion to set up the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the incentives to get Medicaid and Medicare providers to set up computerized medical records are especially interesting. It is perhaps quite rational to have more computerization of medical records and even to then use those records to better assess which medical procedures work best. However, we know that much more than this is afoot. It is very clear that the socialists now running the Federal government intend to use these computerized medical records to gain more control over medical treatments and to reduce the medical-decision power of the patient and doctor. This must happen as a part of the plan to have a single-provider (i.e., government) system of medical and health care.

It is very clear that the teacher's unions and the education establishment are being paid for their strong support of the Democrat Party and of ideological socialism. $79.2 billion is going to state grants for education, education for the disadvantaged, and special education. The colleges are making out big-time. The $9.7 billion to NIH, the $3 billion to NSF, the $1.6 billion for the office of science of the Energy Dept., the $16.6 billion in student financial assistance, and the tuition tax credit of $2500 will flood the universities and colleges with more money to continue to fuel their ever-escalating costs. A part of the $16.8 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy will also fund university research. The NIH, NSF, Energy Dept. Office of Science money will mostly fund an increase in university research grants and new lab facilities. The student financial aid and tax credits will decrease the pressure to control tuition rate increases. There is little reason to believe that any of this money will provide more spur to the economy than that money would have if left in the hands of the private sector. While it is true that some colleges and universities are private, most are nonetheless strong advocates of much bigger government, for which they are rewarded with research money and many financial considerations already.

The construction projects to be funded are almost entirely for more government infrastructure, to be supported by tax dollars long into the future. Most investors will find little stimulus to their plans in this stimulus bill. Few wealthy individuals will have reason to invest their money in the United States. It will make more sense for them to move more of their money abroad, where the tax rates on higher income people are lower. American multinational corporations will have ever more reason to expand their operations abroad, while contracting them in the United States. Contraction of operations will mean that they will have less expense for providing health insurance and increased sick leave mandated by Congress as well. Many companies must be very worried about this.

This stimulus bill should have consisted of a major decrease in taxes to be realized by every individual and by corporations. As I have pointed out repeatedly, it is very foolish for us to tax corporations at the highest rates in the world, with the exception of Japan, with whom we are about tied. It is equally foolish to maintain a very punitive tax rate on upper income earners. These high corporate and individual rates actually decrease government revenues, so we do not need to take the claim seriously that these high rates make life better for those with lower incomes because then government can do more to help them. Indeed, we can laugh at it derisively and proclaim with assurance that the real reason for these rates is one of envy, hatred, and the desire to take down those who have achieved great success in the private, voluntary sector. Such motivations clearly controlled many of those in the New Deal of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and they now control the thoughts of the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress in their pursuit of a New New Deal. This and only this explains their carefully orchestrated snubbing of most of the private sector and of the very idea of the sovereignty of the individual.

Are the Public Schools a Public Trust?

Flying home to Baltimore from Tulsa on Sunday, I sat next to an architect who was an ardent defender of the public schools and was adamantly opposed to competition from private schools. His arguments are very revealing when examined carefully. On my other side sat a proud Marine who was home-schooled by his mother who had been an English teacher. This Marine was a carpenter and was presently assigned to a unit that performed extensive honor guard duties in Washington, DC. He was able to give me a very accurate and incisive summary of the Global Warming fraud. It was also clear that he was very knowledgeable about computers.

The architect argued over and over that the public schools are a public trust. I responded that in many areas it was clear that the public schools had not earned the publics' trust given the quality of the education they provided. I also argued that public schools have an inherent conflict of interest which makes it impossible for them to fully address many issues and biases them to provide false propaganda.

Education should aim at helping students to learn to think for themselves. They should learn about the necessity to observe reality objectively, to analyze what they see and experience critically, learn logical thinking, learn that one's ideas should be self-consistent and non-contradictory, learn that the rights of the individual are paramount to living in a civilized society, and learn to prioritize the threats to the individual. After all, learning is the most individual of all activities, even when we interact extensively with others in the process. This is because we have learned nothing if we have not carefully and consistently exercised our own judgment in evaluating the truth of everything that we are taught. Some things we recognize as true, some things we recognize as false, some ideas are packages with both true and false contents, and some we place in the category of things to be examined further before assigning them to true or false or packages of mixed contents. It is critical that we commit ourselves to this evaluation of everything we are taught, or we have not learned anything.

In view of this, what is the conflict of interest in the public schools? Broadly, it is this: politically we threatened either by anarchy or by government. Nearly all Americans agree that anarchy is intolerable. The Framer's of the Constitution also recognized it as intolerable. But, they well knew from the example of the rule of the American colonies by Great Britain, that government, even the one they all recognized as one of, if not, the best government in the world prior to our revolution, was the greatest threat to the rights of the individual except anarchy. Their answer to this dilemma was to form a constitutionally strictly limited representative government. Even then they did not trust it very far, so they designed in many checks and balances between multiple branches of government. Then the people went still further and demanded a Bill of Rights, which was supposed to further guarantee the rights of the individual and in some cases the role of state government. Even then, Jefferson said that the people would have to frequently revolt to keep the government from becoming tyrannical! Many said that one of the reasons for the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights was to ensure that the people would have the means to revolt if they needed to. The recent need of the people to revolt against Great Britain had not been forgotten.

For a long time, most Americans received their education in private schools. Those who did not, still usually received it in lightly regulated public schools organized in small school systems governed by local boards of education. The parents of school children generally personally knew several of the school board members and these members were not the elite education specialists and distant school board members running most of our much larger school boards today. Then they lived down the street as neighbors and you did business with them. As long as this was true, the schools generally taught that the purpose of government was to protect the rights of the individual. In time, the socialists who were generally the primary advocates of public schools, succeeded in making the school systems much larger and in breaking the bonds between the parents and the school board members. They were then able to place more and more elitist professionals on the school boards, especially those committed to socialism. Of course, most of these people called themselves Progressives in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Then later they called themselves Liberals, because by then people had forgotten in substantial part that Liberals in the 1800s were the defenders of the rights of the individual.

These new Liberals were Socialists who believed the elite should run government and see that it managed the lives of the majority of the people who were not capable of managing their own lives. The school system was re-directed to "teach" children that they should look to the government to solve all social problems, that the Constitution was dominated by an Elastic Clause that allowed government to do anything it said was for the Common Good, and that there were many, many people who desperately needed government help in managing their lives. Of course they were not so bold as to tell these children that the elite thought most of them were unable to live their lives as well as the elite were prepared to help them to by bombarding them with politically correct thoughts. In the interest of advancing their socialist agenda, the public education elites opposed the idea that the purpose of government is to protect the rights of the individual. Sometimes this was a flat denial of these rights and other times they undermined the idea of individual rights by claiming that everyone had a right to demand the services of others to provide them an education, health care, a chicken in every pot, and even freedom from fear.

So the first conflict of interest is that public schools being run by government prove to be poor wardens to guard against government intrusions that violate the rights of the individual. Just as the checks and balances in the Federal Government proved to be susceptible in time to power-sharing agreements between the branches of government and then between the government and the states, the public schools achieved their power-sharing goals with respect to local and state governments and even the Federal Government. Compulsory, tax-supported schools are now run by the teachers unions. These union members hold almost all teaching jobs and hence can claim to be the vast majority of the education experts. They recommend slates of school board members at election time and the people almost always vote for them on the recommendation of the education experts. In turn, the public schools take most of the local tax revenues and they teach children that government needs to become bigger and expand its power. Of course, this usually results in the schools getting still more tax money and the politicians, except the most dimwitted, see the advantage in having more future voters willing to give them more power. More and more, state governments and the Federal Government give public schools money also. Thus, instead of being taught that we must assiduously oppose the expansion of government, that it is the problem not the solution, the young are taught to embrace the usurpers and tyrants.

One of the most important reasons for becoming educated is to think about ethics and to formulate a person code of ethical principles. Traditionally, most people thought that this involved religious teachings, which have been removed from the public schools in accordance with the separation of church and state. I think that ethics should be understood in terms of the individual life whose support, security, and happiness in this world requires rational personal choices based upon personally chosen values. But whether ethics has a religious base or a rational personal base, public schools are unable to address serious ethical issues. The personal rational base is clearly in conflict with the goals of the socialist, who has been reduced to propagandizing ecological anti-humanisms, racial group think, income bracket group think, gender group think, and a polarization between victims and oppressors based on race, gender, and income bracket. This is a remarkably poor substitute for an individual rational ethics.

So much for the idea that the public schools are a public trust!

Another argument by the architect was this: Private schools will not take in most public school students because they are too hard to teach. Interesting. First, there was a time when almost all children in many communities were taught in private schools. Why is it that this cannot be done again? Is this because the human race has become less teachable? If so, is this not evidence that the public schools have failed their trust? After all, they were supposed to provide everyone with a good education, not make them impossible to educate. Or if some people truly cannot be educated, then how can private schools be criticized for a failure to do the impossible?

When I pointed out that DC public schools spent $24,600 per student per year and that many private schools would be happy to educate the DC students better for such a sum, he simply asserted that no they would not. Then he proceeded to say that the DC schools should be given more money so they could educate the DC children. He suggested $50,000 per student. Well, if private schools would not educate them for $24,600 per year, I wonder if they would be willing to do a better job than the DC public schools for $50,000 per year then. I am sure they would! I am also sure that a true competition from private schools given nearly equivalent tax money through the choice of parents, would help the public schools to improve.

I do not think they will ever be able to provide as high a quality of education as private schools will, however. But, when the school, whether private or public, has to persuade the parents to give them money for the education of their children, there is little doubt that the schools will pay more attention to the individual needs and capabilities of each student and be more responsive to the parent's ideas of what their children should learn. This loss of control, of nearly tyrannical control is dreaded by the public schools. Yet this loss would cause parents to become more involved in their children's education and this would be good. It also means that the parents have given a particular school a warrant to discipline and teach their children, which compulsory public schools lack. They feel this lack, because teachers were constantly sending home parent and student contracts which I refused to sign on the basis that they were meaningless since the schools were compulsory. There can be no such thing as a contract which one is compelled by force to sign.

The architect also commented that homeschooling was a bad idea because many homeschooling parents were not qualified teachers. This riled up our Marine companion a bit, since he had earlier noted that he was home-schooled and now noted that his mother had been an English teacher. Of course the elitist architect was not apologetic about his comment about the Marine's parents' teaching qualifications. He also made no attempt to respond to my point that home-schooled children outscored public school children on the standardized tests, except to claim that they must teach to the test. I responded that I was pretty sure they teach less to the test than do public school teachers in general. I did not then point out that many homeschooled students are taught by professionals, who may not be teacher certified, but who were often once better students than most public school teachers were.

As the reader can see, none of the architect's arguments for compulsory and exclusively public education hold up to analysis. Some were very revealing of his elitist viewpoint and his conviction that many people are almost impossible to educate. I think that most people are capable of learning much more than they do in the public schools. The evidence is strong that this was once the case for even many very poor African-American students, who seem to be the unnamed students this architect deems to be impossible to educate, at least for less than $50,000 per student per year. For evidence that such students can be educated, I direct the reader to Thomas Sowell's book Black Rednecks and White Liberals for an extensive and fascinating chapter on the subject. The book is generally so good that I lent it to a friend long ago and he will not give it back!

The Cost of Public Schools

Today I mean the cost in tax dollars to support public schools, not the cost in ethical relativism, ignorance, group think, and propaganda devoured. Andrew Coulson of The Cato Institute did some looking into the numbers for the Washington, D.C. public school system. Through the last couple of years I have seen the cost per student given commonly in the range of $9,000 to $12,000 something. He states that the most commonly cited figure is $8,322 per student now. Why do these numbers vary so much? Well, it turns out that it is because it all depends on how much the school system decides to hide from the public.

Coulson found that for K through 12 in 2007-2008, the local operating budget is $831 million, the capital budget is $218 million, federal funding is $85.5 million, and the D.C. Council kicks in an additional $81 million. There are 49,422 students, some of whom, on a given day, actually come to school. Divide this number into the sum of the annual funding and the cost per student is found to be about $24,600, which is rather a bit more than $8,322.

I have heard many discussions about how it is difficult for private schools to take on the education of a child for about $8,322 per year, so they could not take over the public school burden of education. But.......the story is clearly very different when you realize that the public schooling cost for a virtual non-education is on par cost-wise with the very elite private school, Sidwell Friends, that Chelsea Clinton attended. Would any sane person actually send their child to the dangerous and dilapidated D.C. public schools rather than an elite private school? No!

It clearly makes much more sense just to provide parents with a scholarship voucher to use on the school of their choice. Sure, the amount on the voucher may be less than $24,600 per year per student, allowing one to save considerable money for the poor beleaguered taxpayers. Florida's McKay Scholarship program provides money for special-needs children and the average scholarship for 2006-2007 was only $7,206. Sure, the cost of living is lower in Florida, but special-needs education is more expensive to deliver than general education. It is clear that private schools are now available to do a better educating job even at a cost of $12,000 to $15,000 per year per student in even the D.C. area. Many new schools would soon arise to meet the need if parents were given such scholarships.

The quality of the education in D.C. schools is indecently poor. This school system is awash in bureaucracy, inefficiency, and out-right corruption. Parents should be allowed to put it out of business or force it to meet the competition. The fantasy that this public education is free and that it even is education, must be challenged. The forces enforcing its monopoly on the education of our young are truly evil. Those forces include egalitarian socialists and the teacher's unions.

Neither is interested in the individual student learning to think for himself.

School Choice Popularity in Maryland

A bill has been approved by the Maryland Senate to allow Maryland businesses to take a tax credit of up to 75% for a donation to an educational organization that provides scholarships to students. The bill has 78 sponsors in the Maryland House, which is more than enough to pass it, if Sheila Hixson, chairwoman of the House Ways and Means Committee, will allow it to be presented to the full House for a vote. Whether she does or not, this development is very significant because it shows how strongly disappointed many citizens are with the public schools and how desperate they are to maintain and promote private schools.

This is happening in a generally solid Democratic state. The governor is a Democrat and both the House and the Senate of the Maryland General Assembly are controlled readily by the Democrats. The Democratic party here, as everywhere else, is very beholdened to the public school teachers unions. This bill is opposed by the Maryland State Teachers Association. This group claims that the state cannot afford to give out handouts to private schools when public schools are cash strapped. Actually, Marylanders are very generous with their public schools, but no matter how generous they may be, it is never enough to make the teachers unions grateful.

Baltimore City schools are horrendous. The schools of Prince George's County, one of the two counties abutting Washington, D. C., are also very bad. Prince George's County School System is the second largest school system in the state, while Baltimore City is about tied with Baltimore County as the 3rd largest school system in the state. Many families in Prince George's County fled Washington, D. C. in large part because its schools are terrible. Now, there is pressure from many families because they wish to send their children to better schools. This pressure is particularly keen in areas with particularly poor schools, which turn out to be some of the most intensely Democrat strongholds in the state. Democrat politicians are now getting the message, partially.

Let us examine the opposition of the Maryland State Teachers Association. A business volunteers to give $100 to educate children. The corporation tax rate in Maryland is 7%. So, the corporation would usually pay $7 to the state out of $100. If the corporation gives this $100 to educate children, then it reduces its taxes by $75 - $7 = $68. Thus, education gets $100 and public education loses some fraction of the $68 less collected by the state. With this program, more students are educated privately, so public education has fewer students to educate, allowing them to spend a lot less money. More net money is going to the education of students and because private schools are better than public schools and many spend less money per student than our troubled public school systems, the total cost of education may actually drop. Our youth are net beneficiaries.

Ah, but the Maryland State Teachers Association does not like this. Is this not clear proof that the teachers represented by the Maryland State Teachers Association are not true professional teachers, who would, of course, put the interests of the students first? Yes it is. They are simply semi-skilled blue collar union workers. No more. It is clear that their priorities lie with having their hands in the government cookie jar and feasting at great expense upon the cookies put there by many hardworking citizens of the state of Maryland. It is time that Maryland citizens put the education of their children ahead of the interests of the public school teacher unions.

What is especially important here is that even Democrat parents are beginning to realize that their children are being poorly served by many of the school systems, especially those controlled most completely by the Democrats and the teachers unions, and they are rebelling. In fact, with enough vigor to get Democrat legislators to act despite the protests of the Maryland State Teachers Association.

CA Attacks the Right to Teach Your Children

In California an appellate court has decided that parents do not have a right to teach their children. The case was brought against a home-school family by the teachers union. In California, the ruling has been that private school teachers do not have to be state certified teachers. Many home-schooling families have declared their homes to be private schools. The teachers union brought the case to try to force any home-schooling parents to have state teachers certification. John Stossel, of ABC News, has written a commentary on this here.

Home-schooled children do better in academic tests and in many cases seem to do even better in terms of analytical thinking skills than do the children educated by our teachers union extensions called the public schools. These teachers unions do not like home schooling for several reasons.

• It removes funding from the schools due to the missing child.
• It removes a child from the reach of their propaganda programs, which preach the superiority of socialism over limited government and group identity politics over the rights of the individual.
• The fact that home-schooled children do better in tests than do those schooled by the teaching professionals in public schools is an embarrassment. This embarrassment can be used to further limit the monopoly powers of public schools and to open the doors to more voucher and school-choice programs. It points a finger at the failure of the public schools.

God is Man-Made

When people start talking about God, I sometimes ask them what they know about God. The answers I get most commonly are 1) "God is personal to me and I will not tell you who God is." and 2) God is good, powerful, the creator of the universe, all-knowing, and omnipresent. The first tells me nothing. The second leads to myriad questions, none of which the God-believer is prepared to answer. So, having a conversation about God with a believer is extremely difficult for one who is accustomed to the precision and the reality of science. God is not nearly as substantial as a fog. God is not as substantial as a field theory, since that can readily be known by observations of reality. No, God is a vanishing act. God is unknowable. Over and over, I am told that one simply has to choose to believe.

OK, so if I must simply choose to believe and then I have religion, why should I not choose to believe that the fate of the universe and the human race is determined by three gnomes living in a cave on the dark side of the moon. I could exercise my creative urges by thinking up a religion of my own creation. I could emulate Moses, Paul of Tarsus, Mohammad, and Joseph Smith Jr., except I could readily invent a much better religion, one which held human life in much higher regard than do the religions of the past. However, my arbitrary belief in the three gnomes would already undermine what man needs most to live his life well. What he most needs is a respect for reality, for the power of his own mind to know reality, and for his ability to live his life better because he understands reality and the requirements of the well-lived life. Rather than consign his fate to the three gnomes, it is critical that he assume the responsibility for knowing reality and for managing his own life. If man truly wishes to achieve his happiness, then he must assume these personal responsibilities.

This man has no need for a vanishing God. He understands that if God comes into existence only to the extent that he arbitrary chooses to believe in God, then God is man-made. In effect, man is God. Man has the means to know reality and man's good is the Good. For something to be good, it must be good for that being who can act to gain or to keep that good. Something can be good for a man. It is not at all clear that anything is good for a God, given the usual vague ways in which God is defined or left as a very vacuous concept. But, if we believe that God is Good, then perhaps we should see what is good for man and call that God. Then, if we can determine what is good for a man, we could come to know what his God should be. But, it is really better if we simply cut off all of this God and religion tradition and start with a cleaner and clearer way of thinking about ethics and what is good for man. These issues are complex enough without all of this prehistoric and ancient baggage. Indeed, the contents of that baggage are a disorganized, contradictory, and irrational mess. Modern man should be better able to think out the issues of ethics and value better than a bunch of ignorant ancients or medieval flim-flam artists.

The god that most people believe in now is not really a universal God. No, he is a local God. There are the gods of the Hindus, the God of the Christians, the God of the Jews, the God of Islam, the God of the Mormons, etc. Most believers, who have chosen to believe in God, have somehow chosen that God who was believed in by their parents or who is believed in by most of the people in their local community. Is it not a wonder that God who is omni-present, all-knowing, all-powerful, and the creator of the universe, is of such a different character in Arabia, India, Israel, and North America? God is apparently not very universal! But, as a man-made idea, this makes sense. Those who choose to believe, choose to belong to the local club. Why choose to be an outcast in one's home town? So, there is very little tendency to stray from the local dogma. Of course, a few hundred years ago, any straying was likely to result in one's death as a heretic in Christian regions. Today, any straying in the Islamic regions is still cause for one's execution. The clubs have not always been voluntary.

This fact that the clubs are local and have often not been kind to dissenters, makes it very reasonable to wonder if they are filled with cultists. In fact, the arbitrary nature of the belief and the fact that the beliefs have little regard for reality, makes it clear that the world's many religions are of the nature of cults. I do not think I will choose to add to these cults by adding one which believes in the three gnomes living in a cave on the dark side of the moon. I am just not enough motivated by a desire to exercise power over those who might join my cult.

There is a reason little publicized that I have heard from a number of men for being a Christian in the United States. It turns out that many men do not in fact believe in God or in Christianity. They simply find it convenient to pretend to believe. One of the reasons they regard as the most compelling for this pretense is that they think that they will be cut off from most women if they do not pretend to believe. It is usually not that they would not be able to win election to be President of the United States, no, it is that few women would ever choose to love them. I have heard this over and over again from intelligent men. They are right. Very many women will not love a man who has not made the arbitrary leap of faith to believe in the Christian version of God in these United States. You can be the best man possible and they will refuse you their love.

How odd that the religions, which are so commonly more supportive of men than women in their traditional beliefs, enjoy as their strongest advocates the loyalty of the vast majority of women in their local regions of practice? Modern Christianity has been under the primary influence of women so long now, that it has evolved into a rather feminized belief system. For instance, the Christians are now reluctant to believe in the existence of bullies, who must be opposed with force. Peace is a primary value, for which all freedoms can be traded. The Christians more and more believe that one must provide care for everyone through the medium of government. This is the maternal instinct writ large on the national scale. So, we have the Nanny State, more and more supported by Christians and women. More and more, the churches wish to be non-confrontational, which is always popular with women, who as they have taken over the public education system, have also made that a primary concern in the dogmas of public education. There is the commitment to not hurting anyone's feelings, which has materialized as political correctness restrictions on free speech, and widely practiced in the Christian churches and the public education system. The belief that everyone means to be nice, that no conflict can be allowed to occur, that peace is achieved when one party refuses to fight, that everyone's feelings are to be respected, except one's own feelings, and everyone must be mothered as an adolescent is becoming the rule wherever women rule. More and more they rule the churches and public education, making it difficult for a masculine, reality-first man to find a home in either.