Why the United States of America Should Abolish its Public Education System

      Public education in America should be abolished. We should close schools down, convert them to the prisons they were designed to be from the beginning, and use them to detain all teachers and parents convicted of child abuse in the years going forward.
     It's not that I advocate abolition of public schools because I lack constructive suggestions about how to improve schools. I have plenty of ideas. The problem is that improving schools is futile, because the people whom we have put in charge of schools, are extremely defensive, litigious, and disdainful towards people whom they feel are not being sufficiently appreciative of the self-anointed "heroes" of society who are teaching children.

     If abolition of public schools cannot be done, then - at the very least - non-parents should no longer be obligated to pay taxes that fund schools.
     It does not benefit me that the children in my neighborhood are smart but also traumatized by sexual abuse and indoctrination; therefore, the existence of public education does not benefit me (nor children, for that matter) overall. Aside from that, it does not make sense that someone who has decided to opt-out of parenthood, should not be free to similarly opt-out of funding the education of children who are strangers to them. Non-parents need the full right to opt-out of the education and child-raising system, if that is their desire.
     Until compulsory taxation to fund public schools is no more, people who expect non-parents to pay to educate kids, have no right to exclude taxed non-parents from public participation to decide how that money is spent. Moreover, if the states supporting abolishing the federal Department of Education are honest when they demand that education be truly local, then the states have no right to force people from different communities to fund each other, nor to fund a central state department of education. Until there is no longer any state-level entity regulating education, no taxpayer - parent or not - should be limited in their ability to redress school boards for grievances.

     As an alternative to ceasing to tax non-parents to fund schools, I would be willing to accept making public education non-compulsory. But I would prefer that both be done.
     By "making public education non-compulsory" I mean making it voluntary, on the part of the parent(s), whether to send the kids to public school. I would like to see every state add an amendment to its state constitution which would make it illegal for any state, county, or municipal governmental entity to require parents to send kids to school, and which would make it illegal to prohibit parents from home-schooling.

     Some states only allow home-schooling if there is a valid religious exemption which is explicitly stated via scripture. That is an insane regulation because it automatically renders all children of agnostic and atheist parents into wards of the state for 1,200 hours per year, who have no right to stay home and remain with their families. The people who create state statutes forbidding homeschooling without religious justification have no idea what kind of additional problems they could be causing by crafting such irresponsible legislation.
     If it turns out that reform is actually still possible after all, then it is my opinion that schools could (and should) make things a lot safer for children, if they ensured that parent-teacher conferences are attended by an additional person. Specifically, someone who is trained in detecting signs of grooming and abuse; someone like a psychologist, social worker, or a detective with the sex crimes Special Victims Unit.
     Enacting a policy like this would "turn-up the heat" on abusive parents and abusive teachers who may be trying to blame each other - or the kid - for a kid's bad behavior, knowing that the child is acting out because they harmed the kid. With another pair of eyes in the room - focusing on nothing but "Are any of these three people exhibiting signs of having groomed or abused a child, or coached a child to stay silent?" - a teacher or parent who is abusive, will have a tougher time concealing their lies.

     If a bare minimum standard of protecting children - like that - cannot be adopted, then why not consider abolishing public schools altogether?
     Why not turn them into prisons, but just be transparent about it?
     Why teach them if we're just going to fail to protect them? Can't somebody figure out a way to teach children without molesting them?
     It's not like we need public school buildings for teachers to teach students. The lockdowns, during the Covid pandemic era, proved that. Students brought computers home, and did online learning. Hell, we don't even need public school buildings for teachers to spy on children while they're changing clothes. Bringing webcam-equipped laptops into children's bedrooms - and making rules requiring them to keep those laptops turned on during certain times - allowed teachers to watch (and possibly even record) any and all children whom they wanted to see undressing.
     [Articles from the Covid era could not be found; but see these two articles regarding events that occurred in 2009 and 2010:
     https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/
     http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/19/schools-spied-on-students-webcams#:~:text=The%20ruse%20was%20revealed%20when,very%20seriously%2C"%20he%20said.]
     If we don't need the physical buildings, then maybe we don't need the teachers spying on our kids while they change either. Maybe we don't even need the teachers at all.

     In my opinion, public schools have failed, and done so much damage that they deserve to be shut down, or at the very least, completely reformed, and decentralized, and federal Department of Education abolished.
     In mid-2025, a video came out, showing a high schooler - at his graduation ceremony, in full view of students and his family - showing-off the laptop on which he used an A.I. program to help him cheat. High schools and colleges are loaded with kids who think it's not cheating to use A.I. to summarize assignments, so they can avoid reading.

     Schools have become a vehicle to facilitate the trafficking of children. A kid who questions his or gender, can be identified for potential removal from their household if their parents don't affirm their gender. Several states have made it legal to abduct "trans kids" from non-supportive parents, on the grounds that the kid will definitely commit suicide if their uninformed choice isn't affirmed. Washington, California, and Maryland were the first states to do this.

     Cafeterias, rigid schedules with bells, and the design of the schools, are reminiscent of prisons. Not only are we training kids for either a rigid work schedule and cubicles, or else prison; the schools are designed to have long, straight hallways, which make it easier to shoot people (because the design provides little cover, and thus, few hiding places).

     We are releasing these kids into the "care" of a society in which everything is illegal. It's not just public education that's broken, it's all education. Even non-public driving instructors teach teenagers to speed, five to ten miles per hour over the speed limit, knowing it's illegal, knowing that other drivers will be impatient with them if they don't break the law. We are setting these kids up for failure from Day 1.

     Then there's the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The school mustered no defense, while 400 police officers arrived, some of whom tackled mothers who ran into the school to heroically and successfully rescue their kids from gunfire.

     I recently tried to go to a school board meeting, in Deerfield, about the transgender locker room controversy. I went to the wrong school by accident. A children's music recital was taking place. Who was at the door to greet me? Nobody. Not a security guard. Not a receptionist. Not a teacher. Not a student. Not a parent volunteer. Not a Wal-Mart greeter.

     I walked into the school and started looking around for employees. I found two cafeteria workers who didn't speak English. Then I saw a teacher who did speak English. I asked if there was a school board meeting happening in the building. She stared at me and kept walking.

     That is who is teaching America's kids. And that was who was available in the building, to stop me, if I had been a school shooter, who decided to enter the building.

     Pro- gun control groups say to take away law-abiding people's guns, "even if it will save the life of just one child". So why not abolish public education "even if it will prevent the molestation of 14,000 children per year"?

     Schools care so much about preventing shootings. But they evidently do not care enough about stopping them, to hire armed security guards to patrol the outside of the buildings, monitor entrances, and check doors and windows frequently to make sure that they are in proper working order. Also, they should monitor the outside of restrooms, because that's where the majority of the fights, rapes, drug-taking, smoking, vaping, drinking, and use of piercing guns, takes place in schools. Guards posted just outside bathrooms can listen for problems coming from within, without invading anyone's privacy.

     Schools say they want to stop shootings, and also stop abuse by teachers. Do American public schools stop to notice, for one second, that one hundred twenty-three times as many kids are molested or raped by a student or teacher, for every one child who is shot or killed?

     If schools can't post one security guard outside a building, to stop one kid from being shot or killed each day, then what are the odds that they're going to take any reasonable measure to prevent fourteen thousand kids from being molested or raped per year (a problem that they're comparatively less vocal about)?
     Most teachers do not molest kids. But non-abusive teachers are less aggressive - and less obsessed with acquiring power within the authority and seniority structures of the education system - than the teachers who do molest kids. Thus, the non-abusive teachers are ill-equipped to help weed-out the "bad apples".
     The abusive teachers who do rise to the top of the power structure, are not going to stop abusing kids; not even if evidence were to come out which would show a positive correlation between shooting schools and previous sexual abuse. Is anybody studying that? No. A society that fails to ask that question cannot possibly be maintaining an education system which deserves to continue to exist.

     Regardless of how polite or timely or constructive the proposal, the most aggressive defenders of public schools will always respond to improvement proposals, and concern, with a claim that those who are criticizing the schools want to portray all teachers as abusive.

     I do not want to abolish teachers. I want to abolish compulsory public education, and cease taxing non-parents to pay for public schools. I do not want to be jailed for refusing to send my child to be taught by a complete stranger, who - if they are a child abuser - will take what was just my money, turn around and give it to their teachers' union, who uses that money to hire a lawyer, to defend the accused teacher.

     We are, in effect, paying public employees to rape our kids.

     I am being proactive about this because I know that something horrible will happen - in the next few years - in a public school, or in all public schools. I don't know what that event will be; maybe it will just be another 14,000 molestations and another 100 shootings per year, maybe it will be a new problem. Either way, I want to be the person who saw the problem early, and called it for what it was. Whatever the problem will be, abolishing public schools now, would prevent it.

     We are separating men and women and children from each other, like cattle do when they enter farms with slaughterhouses on premises, and like Jewish families were separated upon entrance to the concentration camps. The purpose of this is to make the children and women vulnerable to attacks, now that their men - typically the strongest member of the family - are out of the way. Social Security Title IV-D (child support) facilitates and accelerates this process, through the taking of children from non-abusive parents by family courts; this effectively bribes women to divorce men for no reason.

     Hitler and Lenin both explained that public schools are the essential condition for slavery and indoctrination. The amount of damage - and loss of productivity and creativity - which schools can cause kids, within just a few years, is impossible to estimate.

     Small children are growing up unable to communicate properly, because the schools enforced the masks mandates, and kids had to listen to words without seeing what adults' mouths looked like when they formed those sounds. Moreover, teenagers are graduating unable to read.

     Four-year high schools are attended not only by students age 14 to 18, but also by 19-year-old students whom have been held-back, some of whom are pregnant and starting families. What is the reward for a smart 7th grader who "gets to" skip ahead a year? Becoming a freshman in a high school where grown adults and kids age 13 and 14 are in the same building. That is a recipe for fights, teen pregnancy, immorality, drug taking, and disaster.
     The damage has already been done; and it will take a long period of healing before public schools can ever be reconstituted in a way that helps kids thrive and does not traumatize them.

     To address the problem of older kids hurting younger kids, I have suggested splitting high school campuses in two; separating kids over the age of sixteen, from kids under sixteen. I believe this would help reduce the rate at which kids under sixteen, suffer sexual and physical violence at the hands of older kids (as well as young adults).

     The trouble, however, is that I am convinced that the education establishment (i.e., school boards, administrators, teachers, and politicians who favor public education) and most parents - are too pompous, busy, unbothered, and full of themselves, to entertain, for one second, the possibility that they are not caring for their children's well-being enough.
     Bad parents reason: "I'm all my kid has", and then dumps that kid on a stranger, and makes a daily ritual of it. This is tyranny, it is routine child abandonment, and it is wrong. And nobody wants to take it seriously enough to stop it, because the government has rigged things such that the only way to rescue a child from an abusive situation is to let the agents of the corrupt state intervene (subjecting everyone involved to a heightened risk of harm).

     That's why I believe that advocating for reform - rather than abolition - will fall upon deaf ears. So much so, that advocating making education voluntary, and making the funding of education voluntary, will be treated as advocating abolition, even though it is not.

     That's why I have no choice but to frame my support of abolishing public schools in an unorthodox and yet-unheard manner: "I will not produce any new child slaves, to sacrifice to a system which intends to force me to surrender my child to a series of complete strangers, for seven hours a day, half of the days of the year, knowing that my child may eventually be abused, and my money used to hire a lawyer to help keep the person who did it out of jail, and knowing that I may be legally prohibited from describing the abuse that occurred."

     I have no choice but to proceed as if my future child will eventually be abused. Once warned that 14,000 kids are molested in schools per year, nobody has the right to ignore the statistics on this. It would be detrimental to our safety and survival, to ignore obvious patterns like that.

     I don't care that "only" about 0.4 percent of U.S. public school children get sexually abused while in school. Sending my kid to school does not lower other kids' risk of getting abused; it simply adds to the pool of kids who will be available to be abused. I am not interested in playing Russian roulette with my future child's innocence or safety.

     The majority of teachers do not abuse kids, but this fact does not mean that the minority of teachers who do - and the minority of kids who are abused - should be ignored. To regard these kids' experiences as "negligible" would be to commit the fallacy of an "appeal to the majority". It is also to ignore the suicides of kids who were molested, whose families never found out that abuse was the cause of their suicide. To ignore these kids is to commit the fallacy of "survivorship bias".

     Additionally, abolishing public schools does not mean that all private schools should be supported. It simply means that all education should be consensual. The United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises the children of every country the right to "compulsory education". But how can compulsion be a right? What does it mean; to say that we have a right to be compelled to be educated? It just means that our government has the authority to force us to consume and repeat propaganda against our will. Being subjected to compulsion - i.e., involuntary servitude - is not a right; it is legalized slavery.

     I do not support the public funding of private schools; this would be inappropriate expenditure of public funds, and it would render private schools no longer private. I do not support privatization if that word means the government-directed sale of public assets to private entities; but rather, I support something called "radical privatization", wherein the government gets out of the business or industry entirely.

     The U.S. government is the biggest purveyor of lies on the face of the planet; it should not be in the business of educating anyone; not adults, not children.

     The fact that the above argument would not be enough to convince most people that schools need to be abolished if they are not immediately drastically reformed, should show you how much our society has made criticism of people who claim to protect kids, off-limits; not only teachers, but administrators, parents, and the politicians and doctors who facilitate the butchery and kidnapping of kids who have been groomed by teachers to discuss their feelings about sex openly to the point where they think it is normal.

     Public employees are trying to take America's children as sex slaves and mind-controlled drones who repeat Western imperialist propaganda. Even if many schools have stopped teaching racism and imperialism, they have just replaced that indoctrination with gender lies and pathological fear of germs.
     In the 2018 decision in Janus v. A.F.S.C.M.E., the U.S. Supreme Court stopped teachers' unions (and other public employee unions) from collecting compulsory dues from their co-workers. Now it's time to make them earn n honest living, without effectively stealing money from the public (by conscripting a violent government to coercively extract taxes from non-parents like me).

     We have a right to stop our assets from being handed-over to line the pockets of lawyers who make a living defending child molesters (people like my father, Richard Kopsick; and his friend Steve McCollum, who defended at least two teachers accused of sex crimes against minors).

     One man, at a mid-2025 meeting of the board of education that governs Shepard Middle School in Deerfield, Illinois, said that the school should sue people who claimed that teachers made a girl undress in front of a trans-identifying male. If this man got his way, then hypothetically, anyone concerned about that, who failed to correctly guess the exact details of how the teachers and administrators exposed those girls, could potentially be sued for libel or defamation. These people are greedy, overly litigious enablers of indecency, and their interests align with the interests of the school officials who exposed those girls.

     But things like this are allowed to happen; because we have built a whole society of people who know that they will continue to receive goodies from government as long as they shut up about rape, molestation, and forcing girls to undress in front of boys while their mothers are placed under gag orders.

     I acknowledge that the severity of child abuse in schools varies from state to state; and Illinois, being one of the most populous and wealthiest and pro-big-government states, probably suffers more than other states. For example, Illinois is the home of Abbott Laboratories, which produces the drug Lupron; and Governor J.B. Pritzker recently banned the banning of books (thus hindering public school libraries from excluding books depicting sexual violence against minors). But I still say all of this, and I do it in order to warn people in other states against giving public schools and teachers' unions too much power and money. More states will suffer the problems I have described, if public schools are not abolished.

     A mother in Arizona told her school board that her son was being taught never to say "no" to any person of authority; cautioning that this could easily cause a child to refrain from resisting a kidnapper. Now we have racist volunteers trying to arrest immigrants, refusing to identify themselves, putting people into unmarked vans, entering schools...

     In light of the re-elected president's immigration policy, the Department of Homeland Security and I.C.E. are now claiming the right to enter premises without warrants nor consent; thus, the ability of public schools to keep I.C.E. agents out, is limited. So - if we are going to fail to prevent illegal arrests by secret police and volunteer mercenaries who refuse to identify themselves, then what was the point of teaching kids about the Holocaust, and caution them against adopting the attitudes that facilitated mass submission to the Nazis?

     This is the society we are raising children to think is normal. Public education has failed. With the Covid and gender propagandization phases now complete, soon the parallels with Nazi indoctrination policy will be impossible to ignore.

     Forcibly removing children from the custody of one group, and transferring them to another group, is one of the components of the internationally recognized definition of genocide. We must oppose compulsory public education; to make it more difficult to commit genocide (by eliminating a common opportunity to do so).

     Also - not that anyone cares - Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) and the federal Department of Education were never constitutional to begin with.

     Through the Constitution, the people grant the federal government the right to "establish an uniform rule of naturalization" of immigrants. It's possible that it would be completely legal for the federal Congress to create the uniform rule, while the states were to apply the rule that Congress created.
     I.C.E. did not exist for the first two hundred years of the country's history, that's how we know that it doesn't need to exist. I.C.E. was only created after the George W. Bush Administration committed an obviously unconstitutional, unpredecented, sweeping reorganization of the executive branch, and has resulted in the existence of eighteen federal-level intelligence apparati (which was not just one of President Trump's lies).
     All other issues pertaining to immigrants could thus easily be handled by the states and/or the people. These include enforcement, settlement, health, welfare, education, driver licensing; anything aside from who makes the uniform rule of naturalizing them, and the authority of the federal government to ensure that states are uniformly enforcing that rule.

     Similarly, the federal authority to regulate education is also invalid. The Department of Education began as part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and the Constitution's General Welfare Clause (which was used to excuse its creation) should never have been construed to grant the authority to regulate education, to the federal government, because education is not mentioned in the Constitution at all. In fact, the words "school", "schools", "schooling", "educate", and "education" do not appear in that document even once.
     To give the federal government the authority to regulate education, would have first required taking the authority to regulate education, from the states and the people. That never happened. That's why the federal Department of Education is unconstitutional. Supreme Court justice John Marshall once wrote that "all laws repugnant to the constitution are null and void".
     These facts should not be lost on us. We should not be forced to choose sides, regarding the perceived battle between the unconstitutional Department of Education and the unconstitutional agency I.C.E.. We have the right to - and should be free to - ignore and resist all federal and federally-funded efforts to regulate education, and to regulate immigration any more than the Constitution explicitly requires.
     We do not have a duty to cooperate with plainclothes kidnappers who refuse to identify themselves, and we do not have a duty to surrender our children to teachers who legally get to move children around for seven hours a day while their parents don't know exactly where they are. We have a right to stop our education and immigration systems from being turned into legalized kidnapping and human-trapping operations.

     One in 250 kids sent to public schools being molested is a travesty. That's one kid, out of every ten classrooms of twenty-five. In a high school with a thousand students, approximately four kids will statistically be abused each year.
     But, for the people who worship only the will of the majority, the abused kids are negligible. The trouble is that anything can become "negligible", if you are heartless enough to ignore it. But to ignore it is simply neglect.

     The majority of teachers doesn't abuse kids, and the majority of public school students don't get sexually abused. That's why the minority of kids who are abused by teachers will never matter to the people running the schools.
     And we, the public, are not only embracing this way of thinking, but also failing to equip students with any means to against it. We are leading them to assume that suppressing their own individual rights to resist compulsion and abuse, serves the common good.

     That's why it's time to admit that public education has failed.

     While closing public schools will drastically reduce the rate at which teachers molest students, it will increase the rate at which family members molest kids (because kids will be in the home instead of at school). This is its own problem, aside from the problem of abuse at school.

     Reducing abuse by parents, requires protecting children from their parents, and refraining from interfering with their right to fight back against parents who are hitting them or abusing them. It requires informing parents that they do not have an unequivocal right to "take care" of their kids, in the Mafia sense of the phrase "take care"; because the 2000 Supreme Court case of Troxel v. U.S. affirmed that the privilege of caring for children is contingent upon refraining from abusing the child. Thus, the right to give birth to children is universal, but the right to keep kids and raise them unquestioned is not unconditional.

     Decreasing child abuse by family members and acquaintances of children (and other non-teachers) will also require large numbers of people to become familiar with the signs of grooming. Unfortunately, many Americans have become desensitized to detecting those signs. We have literally been groomed into not noticing grooming.
     Adults should not get a free pass to be alone with kids, call them special and mature, give them gifts and hugs, talk about their private feelings, etc.; but the transgender movement has made this normal, so sexual abuse by teachers goes largely undetected when the kid is gender-questioning. But it's not just the transgender movement which has enabled this grooming; the vast majority of the teachers involved in the "making up a unique handshake for each student" trend are not transgender. Is it too much to ask, that teachers refrain from touching their minor students?
     Any attempt to improve the system will only make its many vast flaws easier to tolerate. Every improvement carries with it the possibility that it will backfire. This goes back to what I said about the damage already being done.

     Social media is also rife with evidence of parents objectifying their children for attention and even money. Yet the authorities do almost nothing about it, except in the cases of the most egregious offenses. To be honest, schools helped create a world in which children must be constantly entertained, or else on-camera entertaining others, in order to get attention, wealth, and fame later on. My own high school, Lake Forest High School, allowed students to create a music video in which they rapped, danced, and threw money into the air.

     Nobody prevented this, nobody but me criticized it, and nobody cares, because children don't have money, can't vote, and have no rights, only the privileges that their parents deign to give to them.

     An adult transvestite gave a 14-year-old girl a lap dance, at a school in North Carolina, at a state-sanctioned event. Adults and children watched; adults and children cheered. This is what public education wants children to think is normal and fun and exciting.
     In Loudoun County, Virginia, a boy wore a dress, claimed to be transgender, entered a girls' restroom, raped a girl, got expelled, and went to another school where he went into another girls' restroom and raped another girl. The first school even attempted to cover-up and deny the fact that the boy claimed he was transgender and wore a dress in order to help carry-out his first crime.
     But as long as putting girls with trans boys in restrooms and locker rooms "is the policy", then taking any sort of preventive measure likely to proactively protect kids from rape and humiliation, is simply illegal, and thus, children's right to defend themselves is ignored and nullified.
     And yet, we accept it. Why? Because we go to jail if we want to do anything more to stop it, other than just complain about it. Because - like Adolf Eichmann - these educators and school administrators are just being loyal to their country, and because they are obeying the rules for war. The law is lowering our standards of justice.

     What we really need - to combat sex crimes against children and women and other vulnerable people - is a "Congress of Organizations Battling Rape, Abuse, and Alienation" (C.O.B.R.A.A.).
     All the elements in our society, which are trying to fight these problems, need to come together, to educate people, and compare notes, about how to detect and report grooming; and to identify corrupt public employees and people in the legal professions who may have an incentive to legally traffic children - and/or an edge when it comes to abusing them with impunity.
     Communities should form anti-abuse groups, which would partner with various types of child advocacy groups, to train children and parents to become familiar with the faces of outed predators living among them, and (if necessary) coordinate plans to march on police stations and courthouses which are sheltering people in the legal professions who refuse to charge and prosecute people accused of sex crimes against minors.
     Such an organization should consist of rape crisis support organizations, groups which provide physical protection to survivors and witnesses who testify against abusers, people exposing abuse by clergy members, agencies fighting unfair takings of child custody, social workers who can educate people to detect signs of grooming, groups wishing to reduce prostitution and shelter abused sex workers, women's and children's self-defense course instructors, and other agencies aiming to protect the vulnerable from sex crimes and the alienation of non-abusive parents from their children.

     Even if public schools cannot be abolished any time soon, then it is at least clear that they plan to do nothing about abused kids, except continue to abandon them; and in stranger, more creative, more devious, more bizarre new ways every year.
     If compulsory education cannot be completely abolished, then the only course which should be compulsory, upon minors, should be physical defense. Every child should be armed with knowledge about how consent works, and about how to evade kidnappers and report attempted grooming.

     We do not owe these people access to our children. We owe them nothing but ankle bracelets and fire. Slavery must end before it affects the next generation.

Written on July 2nd and 3rd, 2025.

Published on July 3rd, 2025.

The Skilled Trades Lead to Engineering, Not Poverty and Shame

     On January 21^st, 2018, I met a man who used to be a wood shop teacher at a Kindergarten-through-8th-grade school in Lake Forest, an affluent suburb of Chicago, Illinois.

     My acquaintance told me about how he lost his job. He said that, one day, he came in to work at the school as usual, and a construction worker walked into his wood shop classroom, and laid some blueprints on a table. When asked what he was doing there, the construction worker casually informed the teacher that he and his crew were going to have to start taking the machines down.

     Unbeknownst to the wood shop teacher until that moment, the school was ending the wood shop program, and wanted to re-assign the teacher to a different subject.

     The reason the school gave was that there was a safety risk; a student could lose a finger, or get seriously injured in some other way.

     But on the other hand, high school students would be better able to understand and adjust to that risk than younger high school students, so why not allow only seniors and juniors to take the courses? Students need to acquire hands-on skills at some point, and they should start acquiring those skills, so that they're ready to start working when they're 18 (or 16).

     Aside from being better able to respond to dangers in the wood shop, older students are better able to understand the risks and consequences associated with using wood cutting equipment. So why not allow juniors and seniors to sign waivers, indicating that they understand the risks, and – with parents' permission – agree to accept them, in exchange for receiving wood cutting skills.

     While we're on the subject, why don't we make sure that more (or all) schools, have wood shop, auto shop, and other technical courses and programs, on site? And why don't we encourage more schools to take others' lead, and have one campus for juniors and seniors (who can drive, and take wood and auto shop), and another campus for underclassmen (i.e., the freshmen and sophomores who still mostly take the bus to school)?

     But I'm getting off topic.

     The supposed safety risk associated with wood shop classes is just a ruse, because that risk can be allayed; through proper safety education, and waiver programs.

     But, of course, waiver programs do not satisfy those who support terminating wood shop classes. That's because waiver programs do solve the problem.

     Parents who want to take wood shop classes out of high schools, want to avoid the risk of liability lawsuits against the school. For a public school to be found liable for an injury to a student, and have to pay damages, would be costly to the school (and the local school board) in terms of both finances and reputation.

     It is my assessment that parents who are against wood shop classes, by and large, do not care that waivers and proper safety education solve the problem, because the waiver system eliminates the possibility that the school could be found liable to pay damages to an injured student. It does this by refusing to accept students into wood shop programs if they do not agree to foreswear suing the school.

     This is a wise policy in my opinion. The intent is to reduce the chance that a student will behave carelessly in a wood shop classroom.

     What upsets parents who are against wood shop classes, is that solving this problem exposes their real agenda. That's because the ulterior motive behind the opposition to wood shop classes is more than just safety concerns, and concerns about legal and financial risks to the school.

     People who enter the trades – such as construction, automobile repair and maintenance, electrician work, heating and cooling, plumbing, etc. - are generally not regarded in a positive light by wealthy suburbanites.

     The wealthy tend to see those types of jobs as somehow “beneath” themselves and their children; particularly construction and auto repair. And plumbers? Forget about it. Plumbers are garbagemen in the eyes of many of these people.

     But then, of course, “garbagemen” are really sanitation engineers. People who get really good at automobile repair and maintenance, end up offering suggestions that improve the quality of their trade. Wood shop can lead to wood crafting, not just construction. And construction, heating and cooling, and plumbing, are all essential things we need to survive comfortably in the modern world.

     Any person who takes wood shop or auto shop in high school, or studies electricity, could become an engineer. Don't believe me? Think of all the math that goes into the study of those subjects; algebra in electricity, trigonometry in simple construction, calculus in advanced construction.

     Studying a skilled trade late in high school could potentially lead a student to choose a trade school or technical school over a university.

     There, students could study C.A.D. (computer-aided design), 3-D printing technology, CNC machining and die casting, mechanical engineering, electrical systems engineering, architecture, bridge design, and more. And the electrical systems, homes, and bridges that result from those studies, improve all of our lives.

     So why disparage tradespeople? Why pretend that someone who wants to work with their hands, learn a trade, develop their skill, and produce or manufacture something of value, is only going to be a garbageman for the rest of their life?

     In Lake Forest, Illinois in particular, and in other nearby affluent suburbs, there is a sentiment among many well-off parents, who believe that - to paraphrase the words of my wood shop teacher acquaintance - “We want our children to be doctors and lawyers; we don't want them in construction or plumbing. We pay people to do those things for us, and we want our children to as well.”

     My friend's portrayal of the attitude among these parents, confirmed my worst suspicions about this topic, which I had long suspected.

     Parents like that would never tolerate their child become a skilled tradesman. Even if it meant cheaper electricity or a better home for themselves. After all, a person who becomes a skilled tradesman might join a union, or even – God forbid – become a card-carrying red! A bourgeois parent would never tolerate it, when they'd rather see their child working in an office or a trade floor, or better yet managing a workplace from afar.

     The effect is that any child who grows up wanting to earn an honest living, without manipulating money or simply managing and moving resources that somebody else produced, is not going to have an easy time finding a career in which his parents can take pride.

     Perhaps more importantly, one potential outcome is that many children will grow up in privilege and opportunity, without any skills or common knowledge to take advantage of those opportunities.

     The students who would have studied the trades, but were deterred by their parents' disapproval, would have found paths to perfectly comfortable livings. In the more valued of the common trades, tradespeople can even earn six-figure salaries (that is, if they're particularly skilled in their fields, or if they become managers). That's a hefty sum, compared to the salaries earned by most people who graduated college after having studied humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts.

     How is a wealthy parent harmed by having a child who grows up to be an industrial engineer, civil engineer, or public works employee (even if he is a garbageman)? A parent is only harmed by such an outcome if they have both 1) an unhealthy sense of identification with their child's achievements; and 2) a twisted set of values that derides honest work that hurts no one, based on the field somehow being “dirty” or “low-class”.

     Well, disparaging people for being “low-class” is how you get a lower class. Antagonizing people who perform tasks that are essential to making our lives easier and more comfortable, is how you get both increased social division and increased stagnation of infrastructural development.

     What about the rich kids who weren't intelligent enough to become doctors? What about the kids who studied political science, but were too honest to defend obviously guilty people or push a political agenda? How are they supposed to make ends meet?

     It might sound like I'm saying “the poor rich kids”, and in a way, I am. But the poor and rich alike deserve opportunity to acquire skills and become independent, and become self-employed if they choose, and to choose a field that has meaning and value to them.

     Students who grow up well-off in the suburbs, grow up disconnected from both the reality of nature on the rural farms, and from the reality of large concentrated numbers of people (and, importantly, poor people) in the urban centers. So they grow up without people skills and without connection to animals and nature, and to the life processes which sustains human beings. They grow up away from the world of the productive; away from places where food is grown, and things are built and manufactured, alike. Away from the majority of the people, and as a consequence, away from people who might suggest alternative ways of living and working, of which a student might not have otherwise heard.

     As a result, they grow up without essential sets of skills that have to do with life outside the suburbs.  Without picking up hands-on skills, they grow up completely unprepared for the real world and its problems, and with little practical ability to be independent and self-sustaining. These are real problems, and neither they, nor the problems that poor kids experience, ought to discount the seriousness of the others'.

     Poor kids (and rural kids), at least, get to go on school field trips to farms, plants, factories, and refineries. Those field trips can do either of two things: 1) prepare them for farm work, factory labor, working in a steel plant or oil refinery, etc.; or 2) scare them away from those fields, so that they'll be effectively encouraged to go to college instead (and pursue a “higher” course of study).

Rich kids never had those field trips. Or if they did, then it was mostly about scaring students away from “dirty work”, and there was no real risk anyone would end up in those fields (unless they wanted to).

     That is, as long as the rich kids are willing to take advantage of all of the privileges and opportunities which their upbringing affords to them. And sometimes that means taking advantage of white privilege, or succumbing to social pressure to boast about your achievements and employability to the point of it compromising your humility.

     The suburbs are no fun. Say what you will about poor urban areas, and rural areas; they're where real life takes place.

     Students should not leave high school, having practically no clue what a factory is, nor what S.T.E.M. fields are (science, technology, engineering, and math).

     An eighteen-year-old graduate from a public high school ought to instantly know what you're talking about if you say the phrase “the trades”. A young adult should be able to recognize a grain elevator, or an energy plant, when he sees one.

     Someone who is just entering the work force should also know what their basic rights are in the workplace; in regards to safety, health, breaks, wages, conditions, and how to participate in effective negotiation with management.

     Neoliberals and neoconservatives in the suburbs don't care about workplaces having good, or even adequate, safety and health conditions, or good pay, or good break policies. They just wonder why employed people can't start their own businesses, create jobs, and contribute to society to a degree equal to the help they've received.

     Not that they would ever listen, but there is a simple answer to this: If you didn't shame them for becoming independent contractors, or for trying to survive without striking a deal with some large corrupt multinational, then they might do just that!

     The last thing a wealthy parent wants is for their child to grow up a unionized tradesperson. Someone who can destroy the work they've just done, if the person who hired them refused to pay what they promised. A wealthy suburban parent would hate to have to treat such a person like a human being with dignity; whether it's their child or not.

     The only thing they care about is shitting on those people, criticizing them at every opportunity, controlling them, and making it as difficult as possible for them to become independent through honest work.

     The last thing we need is for parents and teachers to educate children, while completely neglecting to inform them as to what types of professions the world will need most badly when they enter the workforce.

     If I had been told at age 14 that the world desperately needed more engineers, doctors, or whatever, then I would have considered studying engineering or medicine, and I would have thought about how I could fit in to those careers. Not only to make a lot of money; but because I know that people need those services. I'd know that I'd be contributing something which is valued by others, and that would give my work (and the studies which precede it) a sense of purpose. And the quality of work of someone who believes in the work they're doing, is impossible to put a price on.

     It saddens me to realize that many wealthy parents have neglected to suggest back-up plans to their children, in case they don't turn out to be the doctors, lawyers, astronauts, cowboys, and artists they expect to be when they leave college.

     While they heap criticism and disdain upon the skilled trades (which they regard as unskilled), such parents are usually also content to allow their children to make money carrying bags at gold courses. To such parents, the fact that caddying involves sucking up to the wealthy for money, makes the indignity of that job tolerable.

     Moreover, it provides the caddy with an opportunity to ape the most Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic tendencies of the business and political elite who belong to those golf courses. This, of course, will be essential to furthering their future white-collar career.

     The fact that, by allowing their children to caddy - and intern with corrupt businesses, law firms, political offices, etc. - they are conditioning their children to serve the elite and the old money, not to become independent of it. In effect – despite their privileged upbringing - they are reduced to the same level of servitude to the wealthy elite, to which the poor are reduced as well.

     The only consequences of obedience to affluent suburbanite parents is eternal servitude. The best form of rebellion against such a flawed parenting style is total independence.

     In 2014, Chicago teacher Douglas Bartlett, was suspended for four days without pay, after he showed common hand tools to his elementary school students. The tools included screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, a pocket knife, and a box cutter.

     According to Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor, Bartlett “thought he was using physical objects to help his students learn the required course material.” However, since the set of items he displayed in his classroom included a pocket knife and a box cutter, his instruction that day was deemed to be in violation of Washington Irving Elementary School's policy against “possessing, carrying, storing, or using a weapon on the job when not authorized to do so.”

     I guess they were worried that one of the kids might pick up the box cutter, hijack the classroom, and fly it into the World Trade Center.

     Bartlett maintained that he displayed all of the items as tools, not as weapons. The school, on the other hand, says that Bartlett failed to ensure that the knife and box cutter were inaccessible to the students, and that he failed to obtain permission from the school before showing the items.

     Auto shop and wood shop classes are disappearing from high schools, depriving students of hands-on skills, while standardized multiple choice tests relieve students of the burden of having to actually remember the correct answers. Wealthy parents want their kids to get into good schools so they can have dignified jobs (that is, jobs that the parents consider dignified).

     So you have to wonder whether reprimanding the teacher for showing common tools, was anything more than a way to distract students from acquiring valuable trade skills that could risk injury to them (or, more importantly, to their public school's finances).

     Where are those life skills and agriculture classes in high schools?

     A world where everyone knows advanced math, and everyone knows one or more skilled trades, and anyone can farm part-time on their own property, is not something that the business or political elite want. They want obedient workers who are equally dependent on big business and the corrupt governments with which they collude.

     Luckily, however, many of these people are dying, and their death cannot come soon enough. They, through their ignorance and passivity – and their need to be persistent social-climbers and yes-men – are causing the destruction of our ecosystem, and the poisoning of our food with toxic industrial preservatives.

     But this is not enough for them; they must also profit off of our efforts to save the planet, in order to render them ineffective and useless. After all, what do they care? They're intent on dying before anyone can catch them in the act. They'd hate to sit around waiting for judgment and revenge to come. And it will come.

     But the fact that their judgment is coming, does not stop them from encroaching on our ability to merely subsistence-scavenge from within the shell of the old world which they have destroyed, but kept alive like a zombie. Just like the “headless” “zombie corporations” which they have kept alive through bailouts and restructuring, heading companies with C.E.O.s who often have little to no understanding of the industry in which they're working. Just like the idiot politicians who know nothing about the things they're regulating.

     Don't ever allow yourself to become so deluded as to think that you could never become like one of these people. All you have to believe, in order to slip down the road to their twisted line of thinking, is “Hey, I got mine, and I'm not complaining!”

     I, for one, will complain as long as I am pressured into renting things which I would rather own, and as long as I have to beg and apply and pay for permission to use something that I thought was my own property.

     We must each own a means of production, if we are to be independent, and self-sustaining. For only when we own the means to produce, can we keep everything we produce with it, without the owner of the equipment demanding compensation for its use. We should return to the days when many companies gave their employees tools as part of their compensation package.

     We should also seek to ignore and invalidate all contracts which pressure employees into agreeing - as a condition of gaining employment - to refrain from competing with their employer company, when they leave that company, for some duration of time. These are called “non-competition contracts”, and they interfere with the freedom of competition which is afforded to us in the marketplace.
     These contracts, as well as other anti-competitive agreements, only make it harder for a worker to resist the temptation to borrow other people's means of production in order to earn a living, instead of the owning a means of production outright by himself. The enforcement of non-competition contracts results in a truly sorry state of affairs, in which virtually every worker who 1) is not the best in his field, and 2) dares to quit working for an employer, is effectively unable to operate successfully and competitively in the field he has chosen. And maybe even the field to which he has decided to dedicate his life.

     The only alternative to redressing this unjust state of affairs, is to coerce 99% of people into dependence and “skill-lessness”, while those who already have advanced skills – and those who represent them – receive more pay, more economic rents, and more legal insulation from competition and legal responsibility, year after year.

     Students in high school today, as well as all young people in general, should be encouraged to at least consider the trades. Being a doctor or a lawyer is all well and good, and medicine is literally a life-saving field. But skilled farm labor, and H.V.A.C., will become devastated fields if several million people do not learn the skills necessary to join them within the next several decades.

     And that is the kind of information that I wish I'd had when I started high school. I hope that the younger of my readers will not discount the value of that information.

Based on a Facebook Post Published on January 22^nd, 2018

Edited and Expanded on January 24^th, 2019

Published on January 24^th, 2019

Thoughts on School Prayer

     How should we address the controversy over prayer in schools?

     I believe that the solution is to neither force prayer, nor ban prayer altogether.

     Continue prohibiting teacher-led prayer in public schools, but end public funding of all private and religious schools (in order to keep them actually private).

     If public school students initiate prayer themselves, however – say, before a meal in the cafeteria, or in any other manner that doesn't interrupt other students' learning - then don't be a monster and ban them from praying when they want to. When student prayer would interrupt other students' learning, then allow public school students to pray in designated rooms, without being led or forced by teachers.

     Don't punish kids for not participating in a moment of silence. Especially not if they consider a moment of silence to be a form of prayer. Leave students free to step outside during the moment of silence, or just don't have the moment of silence. The same should go for saluting the flag, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, or standing at attention for “The Star-Spangled Banner”, et cetera.

     I do not support requiring all churches to pay taxes on all of their properties. In keeping with the provisions of Land Value Taxation, private religious schools should pay taxes only on their land holdings, and only if they own the land in full allodial title.

     As long as an ostensibly “private” religious school is not subsidized by taxpayers in any way, and as long as a private or religious school does not own the land underneath the building, the owners of private religious schools should pay no taxes on the school building itself, and keep everything they produce on their own property.

Originally Written on January 22nd, 2019

Edited and Expanded on January 23rd, 2019

Originally Published on January 23rd, 2019