“Trust Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.”

Proverbs 3: 5-6

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Public Schools in America Suck: You’ll have to Read this to Understand What I Mean

Saying that public schools in America have failed us is an understatement. They have set the stage for the worst things that have happened in our country over the past 50 years.

Consider this: Bernie Sanders is leading the Democrat field of candidates for president in 2020. Although Bernie pretends to resent being called a communist, he is a communist. He has been a communist throughout his entire adult life.

In Wednesday’s Democrat debate, Mike Bloomberg called Sanders a communist. Bernie responded by saying, “That’s a cheap shot.”

It wasn’t a cheap shot. Bloomberg told the truth. He should have pressed the point, but he didn’t.

Bernie leads the Democrat field because he has strong support from public school teachers and the young people they indoctrinated. Unions support Bernie, too. Their members were educated in public schools. They are ignorant about reality thanks to public school teachers.

Today, education in public schools takes a backseat to indoctrination. That has to change.

Comrade Sanders and the Communist Wing of the Democrat Party

How did a communist with a record of no accomplishments rise to the top in the Democrat Party?

Bernie has been in government in one way or another for his entire career. Even so, there isn’t one thing that Bernie can point to and say, “I did this” or “I’m responsible for this”. Putting a fine point on it, Bernie Sanders is a loudmouthed bum.

A communist bum who has accomplished nothing in his life has risen to the top of the Democrat field because the grassroots Democrat Party has become the Communist Party of America. For obvious reasons, Democrats don’t like to be called “communists”. They want to be called “social Democrats” or “Democrat socialists” instead.

Communism doesn’t sell well in America, but socialism does. Socialism is a step toward communism. Eventually, socialism becomes communism, and communism is followed by repression and rule by force, i.e., dictatorship.

Don’t believe me. Study world history. It’s in there.

When are young people supposed to learn world history? In their public school years, but young people don’t learn world history in public schools. They are indoctrinated to believe what public school teachers want them to believe.

Nobody Likes Bernie

Nobody who knows Bernie likes him. Technically, Bernie is an “independent” senator from Vermont, but he caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and runs for president as a Democrat. Bernie is “independent”, because he represents the communist wing of the Democrat Party, and the communist wing of the Democrat Party controls the party.

People who know Bernie and have to work with him don’t like him because he is a loudmouthed buffoon who talks incessantly and does nothing. He is totally unreliable.

People who like Bernie tend to be young, naïve, and foolish. They have little or no experience, and they have accomplished little or nothing. They think those of us who have worked to earn a living and raise our families owe them a living because they are alive.

The real Communist Manifesto can be explained with 3 simple words:

You Owe Me.

If we expand the explanation to 6 words, this is how it would read:

You have it. I want it.

Expanding the explanation to 10 words produces this result:

You have it. I want it. I will take it.

That’s what communism is all about. As Vladimir Lenin famously said, socialism is just a step toward communism.

Don’t be deceived. Bernie Sanders is a communist, and the Democrat Party has become the Communist Party of America.

Communism Doesn’t Work

Communism has never worked anywhere. It’s based on the outlandish belief that normal human beings will work hard to support people they don’t know who are unwilling to work to support themselves and their families.

That’s insane.

In countries that implemented communism, competition became a race to see who could do the least and still survive:

It happened in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution.
It happened in China after the Communist Revolution.
It happened in Cuba after the Cuban Revolution.
More recently, it happened in Venezuela after the Bolivarian Revolution.

As I said, communism has never worked, and it never will work. That’s why China abandoned communism decades ago and started to prosper.

These are things that our young people should have learned in public schools, but they didn’t. Bernie Sanders is a 78-year-old man with serious heart problems. He is the top choice for president among young people in America who were indoctrinated in public schools to believe that communism is the wave of the future.

That tells us all we need to know about our public schools.

Older Americans Need to Open Their Eyes: Public Schools in America Suck

Older Americans believe a lie. They think public schools today are like the ones they attended as children. Nothing could be further from the truth.

On February 5, 2020, I posted a SnyderTalk editorial titled “What Happened to Public Schools in America?” In it, I explained what has happened to our public schools. Below is that editorial verbatim:

What Happened to Public Schools in America?

I’m almost 70-years-old. I was brought up in rural South Georgia, and my family moved to Athens, Georgia when I was in the 6^th grade. My schooling, all of it, was in public schools. I can’t remember a single teacher who tried to indoctrinate me with his or her political agenda or one who taught anything other than the subject at hand.

Things have changed.

My wife and I moved to Virginia with our family when my oldest daughter was 3-years-old. Our youngest daughter was born in Charlottesville. We raised our family in the Charlottesville community.

Charlottesville is the home of the University of Virginia. I was a faculty member at the University of Virginia. By the time I retired in 2004, both of our daughters had graduated from college and moved out on their own.

In 2016, the population of Charlottesville/Albemarle County was about 155,000. In 1979 when we moved to the area, the population was about 96,000.

Charlottesville is a typical university town with two notable exceptions:

UVA has a very large medical school. Medical doctors in the Charlottesville/Albemarle County area represent a much larger percentage of the population than is normal for cities and counties that size.
Charlottesville is about 100 miles south of Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital exerts considerable influence on the Charlottesville community.

Saying that the Charlottesville/Albemarle County area is loaded with really smart people is an understatement.

My wife, Katie, was a public school teacher in Georgia before we moved to Virginia. In Virginia, she was a stay-at-home mom during our daughters early years, but she was very active in the public schools that our daughters attended.

Katie started telling me about problems that she saw in our daughters’ schools right away. As the years passed, things got worse. When our youngest daughter was in the 5th grade, we took her out of public school and enrolled her in a private school. Our oldest daughter wanted to stay put, so we let her.

In my mind’s eye, the public schools that our daughters attended in Virginia were like the ones that I went to as a boy in Georgia. My teachers did their jobs. In the early years, they taught me how to read, write, and do arithmetic. As I advanced, they taught me higher math and science, U.S. and world history, and literature.

Some of my teachers were fantastic. Others were very good. With one exception, none of my teachers were losers. The one exception was an algebra teacher who was also a football coach. He didn’t know much about algebra. I dropped his class and transferred into the class of the toughest algebra teacher in the school. It made a world of difference.

As I said, I can’t remember one instance of a teacher trying to indoctrinate me politically in school. That would have been out of the question. We were not in school to be indoctrinated. We were there to be educated, and my teachers knew it. As far as I know, no one had to tell my teachers that they were there to teach. They knew what they were supposed to do, and they did their jobs.

My daughters’ schools were different. Political indoctrination seemed to be part of the curriculum. Katie saw it firsthand. I heard about it from her. At first, I had a hard time believing it, but eventually I learned that she was right.

I’ll give you one example to prove my point, but I can assure you that there are many examples I could have used. When our oldest daughter took U.S. history and studied World War II, her teacher emphasized the fact that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan. In her teacher’s world, that was the only significant thing that happened in World War II, and she portrayed the U.S. as the villain.

When I asked my daughter what she knew about Pearl Harbor, she said, “Nothing.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t register with her teacher as an important event, so she didn’t teach it. When I asked my daughter if she knew how many Japanese and Americans would have died in a land invasion of the Japanese homeland, she seemed surprised by the question. Her teacher didn’t think that bit of information was worthy of discussion, either.

World War II = Hiroshima + Nagasaki, and the U.S. was the bad guy. That’s all my daughter’s teacher thought her students needed to know.

As horrific as the two atomic weapons dropped on Japan were, the loss of life resulting from those attacks was much less than the expected loss of life from a land invasion of Japan. Thousands more Japanese citizens would have been killed during a land invasion, and many thousands of American soldiers would have died as well. So, those two bombs actually saved lives.

When General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is hell,” he wasn’t whistling Dixie.

Many years later, I was teaching a leadership class at the University of Virginia. During a discussion, the dropping of those two bombs came up. The person who brought it up was very smart and well educated. She came from Northern Virginia (the D.C. area), and she had gone to an exclusive private school. She questioned the morality of using atomic weapons to end the war. I asked her what she knew about the estimates of deaths if we had fought a land battle in Japan to end the war.

She didn’t have a clue, so I told her to look it up and be prepared to report her findings to the class the next time we met. She did as I asked. As I said, she was smart. Her perspective changed completely when she understood that one piece of information. Her teacher did her a disservice at great cost to her parents.

How could an honest teacher fail to mention such an important fact? Turns out that her history teacher was like my daughter’s history teacher. In their worlds, the U.S. is the global villain. From their perspective, that’s the most important lesson to be learned from World War II.

I wish I was making this up, but I’m not.

I have discovered that people my age tend to think public schools today are like the ones we attended. They are not. Public schools have become indoctrination centers. Whatever the latest politically correct topic happens to be is what is being taught in our public schools. It’s almost as though reading, writing, and arithmetic are secondary topics that public school teachers try to cover if they have enough time.

For instance, how did “sexual identity” become a major topic for discussion in public schools? I have no idea, but it did.

Right now, our public schools are teaching our children and grandchildren that there are many genders and that each person must decide what he or she is or wants to become. Public school teachers refer to people like me disparagingly, because we know that there are only two genders, male and female. They think we are hopelessly trapped in a binary world.

I think they are crazy.

When police started arresting Antifa members for committing violent acts and publishing information about the criminals, I was amazed to discover that many public school teachers are also members of Antifa. It seems as though indoctrinating our young people isn’t enough. A very large number of public school teachers are radical revolutionaries. Their goal is to make the U.S. over in their perverted image, and they are doing it in our public schools.

See “Public School Teachers Behind Violent Antifa Group”.

See “MILITANT PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER TOOK STUDENTS TO ANTIFA PROTESTS, LIED ABOUT ABSENCES, RECORDS SHOW”.

See “Public School Teachers Among the Leaders of Important Antifa Faction”.

See “Berkeley teacher/Antifa leader ordered to pay $20,000 for withholding public records of her activism”.

I am a big supporter of school choice. It makes perfect sense for many reasons, not the least of which is that people have different interests. Not every student wants to go to college, and not every student is college material. So, why should our public schools try to prepare every student for college? That makes no sense, but that’s exactly what we are doing, very badly I should add. For the good of our country and to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars, that must change.

We need to stop thinking of all public school teachers as virtuous individuals and all public school administrators are upstanding citizens. Some of them, maybe many of them, are the dregs of society. We need to overhaul our public schools and root out the bad actors.

I still believe in the importance of public schools, but not public schools like the ones we see today. I’ll be the first to admit that some public schools are excellent and that some public school teachers are excellent, but many public schools are nothing more than indoctrination centers. Many of the teachers in our public schools should be fired.

For the good of our nation, our public schools must change. Spending more money on public education isn’t the answer. We already spend more money per student on public education than virtually any developed nation. We need to spend our money more wisely.

See “The US spends more on education than other countries. Why is it falling behind?”.

Ignoring our problems in pubic education is costing us dearly. We have a lot of work to do. Let’s get started.

Older Americans Need to Get Up to Speed

To understand what is happening in public schools today, you need to do more than read headlines. Problem is most people are intellectually lazy, older Americans included. They think they know all they need to know, because they read headlines posted on social media.

That’s ridiculous:

Right in front of our eyes, public schools were turned into mandatory indoctrination centers.
Right in front of our eyes, public schools demonized anything having to do with Christianity and introduced tolerance of everything under the sun.
Right in front of our eyes, public school teachers substituted their opinions for facts, and public school administrators allowed them to do it with impunity.
Right in front of our eyes, our children and grandchildren became ignorant boobs thanks to our public schools.

As long as older Americans are alive, they have an obligation to the future. They have a job to do, but they can’t do their job if they are ignorant.

Pay attention to what is real, and stop pretending that things are now as they used to be. If you don’t have enough energy or time to do a little digging, stop sharing your uninformed opinions.

If you love your children and grandchildren, you will get up to speed or you will keep your mouth shut.

“I have an opinion” is not a good argument. Facts trump opinions.

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“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17: 22-24)