Dakota Beacon

Do you ever stop to think, whatever happened to American know-how and “get-up-and-go”? If you step back just a bit and look at where we are and what we have become, you will not find much resemblance to the Americans who built our blockbuster economy, who were instrumental in defeating tyranny in a couple of world wars, who overcame a world-wide depression, who once tamed a wild frontier and made the windswept prairie bloom into the breadbasket of the world. You just won't. What you are likely to see – if you are honest – is a society of whiny, needy, dependent and neurotic people. People who have virtually no understanding of that earlier American just described, who find that person so foreign that he can no longer relate to him at all.

Today David Knight reported on a weird story. Some Americans actually began to take back their streets – literally. It seems that in Vallejo, California, the city government has been neglecting potholes. Well, I remember when Obama called America a “nation of potholes” and promised to fix them all. Apparently he missed Vallejo's because the people there are struggling to drive in what seems to have become a giant waffle of potholes. After ceaseless begging of residents to the city to do something about it, some responsible and concerned citizens of that city finally realized how silly they were being. After all, potholes are not rocket science or brain surgery. They are holes that city workers, if so assigned, fill with asphalt. These guys decided they would acquaint themselves with the technology of pouring asphalt into open holes and fix their own damn streets. Of course this prompted the resistance of the mayor and city officials. They say it is dangerous for people to go out and fix things themselves, although they don't seem to find potholes a foot deep to be much of a concern. The citizens have crowd-funded this work and it's getting done. What a concept. People actually taking responsibility and fixing the things that are vexing them. It seems laudatory. This is more like the American “get it done” spirit which facilitates the good old American Dream. We need more of this in our communities.

Then we found a podcast, courtesy of a reader, wherein Doctor Mark McDonald provided some insight into what he sees as a very serious problem we are experiencing – one which could explain the reason we are not seeing more of the “pothole vigilantes” in more cities. He discussed the issue of our education system, which is not focused on educating our children but rather on indoctrinating them – from kindergarten through graduate school. He strongly urges that parents not encourage their children to go to college at all unless they are pursuing a very specific profession which requires a specific credential – engineering, law, medicine. Otherwise, he suggests that they re-direct their efforts toward things like internships, work in various services. One could just say, move toward something more like what worked to make America great in the first place, not “higher education” at all, but apprenticeships and starting and operating businesses. Our country's greatness was built on this, not on the imported “wisdom” of graduate programs pioneered in European hotbeds of communism and imported to places like Columbia University. Funny, it wasn't that long ago, although pre-”covid” - that this has been observed somewhere on this website.

Elsewhere in the interview McDonald alluded to his involvement with the “covid” phenomenon as beginning with his assertion that closing the schools would harm children more than help them. This is not consistent, of course. Perhaps he is conflating normal social interaction with the operation of the indoctrination centers we call “public schools”. As a home school parent I can assure whoever wants to know, that there is no reason why home school restricts social opportunities. There is also no need whatsoever for a local high school to bestow its diploma on your son or daughter in order for him or her to enjoy a good high school education and a creative and productive life. There are numerous distance learning institutions which provide a standard high school education with at least moderately decent standards and that holy grail – the diploma. This, of course, is a sort of window dressing. No one really needs to do this. The GED is also an option for anyone and should be no problem for. anyone with a general high school level of learning.

Home school provides a far wider scope of material and culture on which to draw. In a home school environment, for example, neither Shakespeare, Twain, Austen nor Alcott, would need to be banned. Our schools are now banning even Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which, if you think about it, is only the logical extension of banning Huckleberry Finn. One thing you can do if you home school is to encourage the kind of problem solving we just saw in Vallejo. You see the problem, you find out how to solve it and you do it. Simple. And very effective.

The problem of our current political landscape and the dilemma of our citizens is rooted in the fact of their upbringing in daycare, public school and leftist college campuses. We can fix all of this. One parent should financially support the family and the other should nurture the children. That's it. It need not necessarily by the “traditional” roles of Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show. And in some cases extended family can play an important part in this. Why do we rely on public schools for “socialization”? There are countless substitutes – better ones – for this. The problem really is the parents, not the schools. The schools could not be a problem without the cooperation of the parents.

It seems a waste of valuable family time for parents to attend school board meetings. It would be a more effective use of time to take the kids out of these schools and use the time to educate them and interact with them. Get your kids to help you paint their bedroom, help you plant a garden, learn how to fix their bicycles, how to bake a cake. Teach them to read – really. Not with flash cards or “see-and-say” but phonetically. And then encourage them to learn a second language. Read poetry together. Listen to the stories they write. Listen to the music they make. Enjoy the art they create. If you don't think you can handle 6^th grade science, you undoubtedly know a neighbor or friend who can. Pool with a few other parents and meet in your den – you'd probably enjoy an informal lecture as much as the kids would. Spend a little on music lessons and encourage practice time. It's a great way to train the mind. It's just lame to complain about the schools. Once we know they won't change, once we see parents arrested for simply disagreeing with the school policy or curriculum, it is time to move on, much like the citizens of Vallejo. If Californians can get off their collective duff to do what is needed, there is really no reason the rest of us aren't.

If you have kids, get them out of public schools. If they are in private or parochial schools, monitor them to make sure they aren't “public schools lite”. We can take back our country but not with people who have been raised on communist, one-world, anti-American, dysfunctional propaganda. That will only produce what we see right now – a needy, dependent population afflicted with fear and hypochondria of various sorts. That's just not America.

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