By
Shane Dale
Nationalization seems to be one of the hottest topics in America today. Nationalized this, nationalized that· nationalized health care being the most widely discussed at the moment with the proposed Patients' Bill of Rights presently being argued in Congress. Upon discussing this and other similar movements, people seem to be disregarding the most prominent national government program currently provided: nationalized - or public - education.
Public education is of high quality in some places, mediocre in others, terrible everywhere else. In inner cities - arguably the place where education should be of a higher priority than anywhere else in the country - public schools tend to be the worst. Test scores are low, dropout rates are high. And the left's solution? Throw more money at it and turn a blind eye. It's been going on for decades and it needs to stop.
There doesn't seem to be a single example out there that shows that more federal money equals higher SAT scores or higher graduation rates. All it seems to have led to is higher taxes. But of course, if one were to begin to complain about high taxes, what's the first thing we would hear? "How dare you be so selfish? Think of the money you want to deny these children!" Enough. We've been made to feel so guilty in this country to complain about high taxes that seldom a peep is heard anymore. It shouldn't be that way, especially when so much hard earned cash is being wasted, more each year than the one before.
Just look at SAT scores: a 1996-1997 study revealed that while the state of New Jersey receives the most money per student from the federal government, its high-schoolers scored 39th out of 50 states on the test. Minnesota students, on the other hand, scored number one while receiving the 27th most federal dollars in the country, just slightly more than half of what the New Jersey schools accepted.
So this is all bad enough, right? It gets better. Perhaps the biggest problem with public education is what children are and are not being taught in the first place.
Take a high school in Santa Rosa, Calif. for example. The faculty at this publicly funded "place of learning" decided it'd be a great idea to teach their students about sex, condoms, alternative sexual acts to intercourse - you know, the important stuff every kid should learn in high school. So they decided to hold an assembly featuring all these things (including a simulated sex act under bed sheets), and along the way, it must have slipped someone's mind to inform the childrens' parents about this little seminar. Needless to say, once some parents learned of this nonsense, there was a minor bit of hell raised over the whole thing. A group of parents are in the process of taking the school to court, but odds are nothing much will come of it. We're talking about California, after all.
Then there was some disturbing footage from a one-hour special aired on ABC several weeks ago, entitled "Tampering With Nature," hosted by 20/20's John Stossel. In the middle of the second segment, in which Stossel attempts to debunk the fears of global warming, a piece was aired in which a young lady involved with an environmental activist group spoke at an assembly of elementary school students, letting them in on things to the effect that gasoline is bad and drilling for oil will pollute the environment and destroy wildlife, putting these things into terms that second and third-graders would understand. Never mind that climatologists, geologists and a bunch of other -ologists disagree on the ramifications of global warming, or if it even exists at all. Never mind that the proposed drilling site in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge would cover a mere hundredth of a percent of the land. Apparently, all that wasn't important enough to mention. And when Stossel interviewed some of these youngsters, he had the same garbage thrown back at him: "drilling is bad," "people will die," "Canada will get hot," and so on. Obviously, the children aren't to blame for this, but nonetheless, hearing this stuff with a couple of nephews already in elementary school is infuriating.
Why are so many people in favor of nationalized health care when we already have a nationalized debacle on our hands that we don't seem well-equipped enough to deal with? Before we move on to a Patients' Bill of Rights and beyond in federal utopia land, let's first prove that we can handle the problems we're already facing due to nationalization.
