!Adios!
From The Editorial Staff

This is our final issue of "Rebound." We originally thought that we might publish three or four issues of this newsletter. But we realize that with this issue, we will have said everything that we have to say to homeschooling parents and to homebirthers at this time.

Some readers have written to us and some have even called us asking us to say more and to keep publishing our newsletters. It is not that we could not say more, because we know enough about the destructive effects of modern education to publish several books on the subject. However, we are interested only in providing homeschooling parents and homebirthing parents (who may one day school their children at home) with the ammunition they will need to fight the educational battles ahead. All the children over whom we have control are grown. This is not our war. The battles that lie ahead (and there will be many) belong to parents with young children who do not want their children to be mentally and emotionally destroyed in this nation's educational system. We believe that in writing and publishing four issues of "Great Education Moves" and now two issues of "Rebound" we have supplied those parents who are committed to saving their children from harm with the best ammunition available to us at this time.

When readers ask us to say more and to publish additional newsletters, often it is because readers have found what we have said to be comforting in the way that listening to one's favorite song over and over again on the FM radio can be very comforting. Some readers want us to keep publishing just for the sake of having their favorite music on the air. But we are not writing and publishing newsletters for the sake of being entertaining. We are trying to communicate only what we know about the destructive effects of modern educational practices to those people who can do something about preventing their children from being harmed.

We are not trying to change the existing educational system nor do we expect to institute any large scale change as a result of anything we might do or say. Any truly corrupt system will ultimately destroy itself. The current educational system is already in the process of destroying itself. The financial burden of this system is already more than what most taxpayers, its products, can afford to bear. It is not likely that the cost of the educational system will decrease in the decades ahead. Inflation alone will cause these already burdensome costs to rise ultimately to the point where cities and towns will be forced to close down the schools.

Furthermore, since the current educational system destroys anyone who is exposed to school past the end of the second grade, all of our government leaders and statesmen who are in a position to change existing educational practices are themselves victims of this system. Our leaders, including our Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, are all trying to solve the problems of this failing educational system with broken down mental apparatus. They have themselves been so damaged as a result of their own educational experiences that they have been rendered incapable of even perceiving the most obvious problems inherent in the current system, never mind solving these problems.

It is possible that there are still some people left who could help this nation recover from the destructive effects of modern education, but these are not people who can get elected to government offices. These are the successful auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians and plumbers, the competent lawyers physicians and engineers who know something about the physical world. These are people who know how things like automobiles work and how things fit together. Auto mechanics have to know, for example, that you cannot just go ahead and connect a radiator hose to an exhaust pipe. They have to know where to attach the radiator hose and how the radiator functions within the overall car. Builders have to know how to construct houses properly. They have to know that you cannot build a house from the roof down, but that you must build from the foundation up. Physicians now realize that they must wash their hands or threaten their patients' lives.

But people who know how to build things and fix things and who still have connections to physical reality are not people who have access to political power. They are people who are looked upon with disgrace and failure while the college degree holders who can do nothing of consequence are applauded as our nation's success stories. People like George Bush, Lamar Alexander and Ted Kennedy are people who cannot fix their own cars; who could not build their own house; and who know nothing about how the world works and how things fit together. Unless a person knows something about the physical world and how it works, he or she is not capable of solving physical world problems like poverty, war, hunger, disease or the problems now found in this nation's educational system. What most educated people do not realize is that the way any human being acquires knowledge of the physical world is by bumping up against the physical world through direct, practical experiences. If you are a plumber, for example, you must install the plumbing system in a house according to very specific procedures if the plumbing is to function properly. It is not that plumbers do not make mistakes, because they do. But when a plumber makes a mistake, the results of his or her error are evident. The kitchen floor is covered with water or the basement floor is flooded. Each time a plumber makes a mistake and corrects it, he or she has bumped up against physical reality. The experience of making a mistake and correcting it lets the plumber know that he is going to have to do things in a specific way in order to get a good result and to stay in business.

People in government positions usually get into these positions by steering away from trades and crafts that would have provided them with real physical world knowledge and skill. These are people who steered themselves into colleges and universities where they could spend four or more years memorizing large quantities of meaningless data which, for the most part, they would never be able to use in their everyday lives. The only available measurement of any person's ability in college is the person's ability to memorize and temporarily retain useless data bits for the purpose of obtaining a grade. Even if the subject matter which college students have to memorize was useful (which it is not), it is still not enough. A person cannot bump into physical reality and acquire real world knowledge by doing silly, meaningless mental things like memorizing data bits.

Educators and politicians do not understand how human beings arrive at real knowledge. It is not possible for any human being to acquire knowledge and intelligence through memory. People cannot become knowledgeable, intelligent human beings by memorizing large quantities of isolated data bits. Educators and politicians operate on the false assumption that if you fill children up with isolated data bits, they will become knowledgeable human beings who can then go out and acquire skill.

But human beings do not work like this. All human beings gain knowledge and intelligence as a direct result of practical life experiences. All human beings, in order to achieve personal greatness, must first acquire physical world skills. Once real skills have been established in human beings, they can then go on to attain more knowledge through books and through life experiences. But always, the establishment of physical world skill must come first and must be the basis from which a person operates in the world. People who do not have real skills are not knowledgeable nor are they intelligent. The educational system is designed so that a few people with good short-term memories can achieve success within that system and can learn to fake competence in life. The majority of public officials and educators in this country are school success stories who have learned how to feign competence and fake their way through life. But any time they are faced with a physical world problem requiring real skill and knowledge, they must get someone else like the plumber, the electrician or the auto mechanic to solve the problem. Because most public officials have no knowledge or skill and have learned to fake their way through life, the economic and life-threatening social and environmental problems facing this nation remain unsolved and grow worse with each passing generation.

People like George Bush and Lamar Alexander and other people in government are themselves victims of the very system which they are now trying to save. They have gotten to where they are without having acquired any real physical world knowledge and, therefore, they do not know how to make things in the physical world work. Our government leaders are making some terrible mistakes in their policies and proposals for the education of our nation's youth. But unlike the plumbers who make mistakes, our government leaders do not have water rushing onto their basement floors. What they do have are millions of damaged children, and all the signs of a failing educational system. But they themselves have been so destroyed mentally and emotionally as a result of their own schooling that they are unable to recognize the damage in the children or to perceive the signs that this educational system has failed. Our political leaders, including our new Secretary of Education, have failed to recognize that children are human beings. Unless educators and politicians start with the reality that children are fragile, vulnerable human beings with very specific requirements if they are to learn and grow, then the educational system will destroy children. The current educational system does not operate on this assumption now nor has it ever operated on this assumption in the past. The government officials and educators who are now in charge of this system were themselves never treated as discreet, unique entities with very specific requirements to be filled if they were to learn and grow. Now, they cannot see what is happening to children because their own ability to realize that children are fragile, vulnerable human beings has been destroyed.

Now, we, as the citizens of this nation, are being told that we are getting a new education reform package and that an education revolution is at hand. But what people do not see is that the new education reform package is just a rewrite of the same solutions offered to us in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The new education reforms call for measures such as paying teachers more money. It does not matter if you pay teachers more money if teachers continue to humiliate, grade, threaten and destroy children psychologically. It does not matter if you pay teachers $30,000 a year or $.30 a year if the result is the same.

Educators and politicians do not look at how this educational system came about. This educational system was never intended to educate young people and prepare them for adult life. This educational system was designed to get young people off the streets and to break down the nuclear family influences over the children. The people who were most influential at getting this educational system off the ground during the 1700s and 1800s were people who felt as though they were at war with the immigrants. During the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a massive influx of immigrants into America. Most Americans were frightened by the strangeness of the immigrants. Those Americans who were already here had not been here long enough as a group to establish themselves in any secure way. They saw the Irish, Italian, Polish and German immigrants as threats to their existing way of life, which was itself still fragile. The people responsible for this educational system wanted to break down immigrant children and get them to fit in with the existing way of life.

Schools were set up in order to break immigrant children away from their parents and away from their cultural influences, and to get immigrant children to conform to the existing way of life. Schools were intended to be daytime concentration camps for non-English speaking children. Schools were and still are places where children are uniformly neglected, uniformly abused and uniformly broken down. The end result of the system is empty-headed, aimless, plain-vanilla high school graduates. The philosophical and existential basis of this system can yield no other result.

The people who were responsible for this educational system did not necessarily represent the desires or wishes of the majority of American citizens. But one of humanity's major weaknesses is its fascination with madmen. The educators and industrialists responsible for this nation's educational system were madmen and their ideas about how to educate children were based in madness and fear. But human beings have always been fascinated by forceful, crazy people. Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein are all cozy people whose personal causes are anchored in madness and who have the ability to communicate those causes to large numbers of people. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were able to set extremely destructive institutions in motion because they had the ability to communicate their causes to people. Many Americans still believe that Ronald Reagan was a genius, in spite of the fact that Ronnie's track record both before becoming President and since is a proven disaster. Ronnie opened the doors to campaign corruption in a way that makes Richard Nixon's campaign style look infantile. This nation will be recovering from Ronnie's influences for another 20 years. It will take America 20 or 30 years to recover from the Pentagon, HUD and HEW scandals alone.

Ronald Reagan's ideas were incoherent, but his rhetoric was irresistible. Washington has not yet begun to thaw out from Ronnie's influences. This nation's government has been paralyzed by his incoherent ideas but Americans are still fascinated with Ronnie.

The people responsible for this nation's educational system were incoherent madmen. They were able to convince parents that enslaving their children for twelve or more years in a negligent and destructive educational system would be good for society as a whole. As a result, Americans have energetically substituted one form of slavery (the enslavement of the black man and woman) for mother--the enslavement of children.

We am not saying that the immigrant children who came to America should not have been offered an opportunity to learn the common language and to learn something about the existing way of life here. Some of the problems found in large cities such as Los Angeles and Miami are related to the fact that them are large groups of non-English speaking children whom parents do not speak English and who have not been able to integrate into the existing culture. But it does not take 7 hours a day for 12 years to teach children how to speak read and write in a common language. It would take 2 to 3 years at the most to help immigrant children learn what they needed to know to get along in a new society. You would not want to teach children for more than a couple of hours a day. And you certainly would not want to promote discipline problems by placing children in large groups of 20 to 40 students per teacher.

Educators believe in a blow-torch approach to educating children. Educators think that it is best to educate all children uniformly regardless of their needs, knowledge of the language or understanding of the culture. If you have children whom parents do not speak the language, then those children need help outside of their homes to speak English and learn the culture. However, no child needs to be taken away from his or her parents prematurely (before the age of 9 or 10) or enslaved in a concentration camp for 12 or more years. No child should ever be denied, under any conditions, the first 9 to 10 years of home life with the parents, for these years are absolutely essential to the well-being of the family (see "Note To Psychotherapists" in this newsletter.) If parents already speak the language and understand the culture, then children should be educated at home.

But, in the blow-torch approach, all children are treated the same. Think of it this way. If you had a house with old paint that was cracked and peeling, you might want to heat the cracked and peeling paint with a torch and scope it off or grind it with a high speed grinder before applying a fresh coat of paint. But if you had a house with a sound paint job that was fading or you just wanted to change the color of your house, you would not want to blow-torch the side of your house nor would you want to grind off the existing coats of paint. Educators blow-torch and grind everything. They are people who have a blow torch in one hand and a paint brush in the other.

If educators and politicians absolutely had to pass legislation that would insure that all children would learn to read, write and do math, then they should pass a law requiring that all 16-year-olds take a competency test. Each 16-year-old would be required by law to know how to read, write and do mathematics at an eighth grade level and to pass a competency test in each of these subject areas at this level Anyone who could not pass this test (which right now, by the way, would include a large number of high school graduates) would be required to take courses offered by the state until each of these subject areas was mastered.

Sixteen-year-olds should also be required to know something about the society in which they live. For example, they should know something about how the state legislature is run and how the town government works. They should know how to vote and how to participate in civic matters should they choose to do so. Sixteen-year-olds should have to demonstrate that they understand and can use the monetary system. They should have to demonstrate that they can open and manage a checkbook, a savings account and that they can fill out a mortgage application, as well as a tax return.

These are the things that educators and politicians should want to insure in the population. If laws which govern the education of America's youth absolutely must be passed, then these are the things that people should have to know. Unfortunately, many high school graduates, who have spent 12,000 or more hours in school, cannot do any of these things.

Educators and politicians of today refuse to look at the faddish nature of education and educational reform. In the early days of education, Latin was the fad. Parents were told that their children should study Latin because in doing so the children would become more adept at using English, as well as other languages. All of the "best" schools offered courses in Latin. People thought that if children took Latin they would become characterologically sound linguistic geniuses. So, what ever happened to Latin? Where are all those linguistic geniuses hiding? Why has Latin been taken out of school curricula?

Then, in the 1950s, when the Russians launched Sputnik and beat America in the "space race," science became the fad. Parents were told that their children should study science because in doing so the children would become better prepared for the future and, as members of the future generation, would be better able to keep up with the Russians. So, what ever happened to the space race? Where are all those scientific geniuses from the 1950s and 1960s hiding out?

Today's new educational fad is mathematics. Parents are being told that their children absolutely must study advanced mathematics if they are to grow up and succeed in business and compete in the world market place. All of the "best" schools now offer advanced mathematics. After all, America must try to keep up with the Japanese and America seems to be falling behind. We are waiting with baited breath for the new mathematical geniuses to come forth and save this nation's economy. Where do you think we will find them? Perhaps we should look in the offices of this nation's psychotherapists, because they seem to be filled with the language experts and scientists.

Educators and politicians have refused to take the time to look at the existing research and to discover for themselves how and why this system came about. Anyone who wants to find out the truth about modern education can do so by reading the research. However, if you are an educator and you decide to read the research, we need to warn you. You will discover that the literacy rate before the introduction of compulsory education was already high. In fact, it was better than it is today in some areas of this country. Political participation, civic pride and morality were also high. But a handful of people with idea systems based in madness, who had the power to communicate those ideas, set this destructive educational system in motion. They knew that what they were doing was very harmful and they went ahead and did it anyway. And when the effects of this system were researched and found to be harmful, people went right on doing hurtful things to children in the name of teaching them how to read and write.

George Bush says that he wants to reinvent the educational system. But people have been reinventing the educational system every year since the 1850s. People are saying the same things now about education that they have been saying since the beginning of the 1800s.

Education in this country does not need to be reinvented. It needs to be un-invented. The educational system in this country needs to be dismantled and replaced with a system that reflects the natural developmental needs of each individual child as well as the needs of the community in which the children live. For a more extensive discussion on how to establish a proper school, see issue number four of "Great Education Moves."

Educators and politicians today are suggesting that we can prevent children from being harmed if we keep the system the same and make a few minor, politically favorable changes. But this is not true. Manure is still manure. It does not matter which cow manure is on top and which cow manure is on the bottom. Educators and politicians are trying to tell us that if we take Flossy's cow manure from the bottom of the bucket and Bessy's manure from the top of the bucket, and we mix them up, that we will get something other than cow manure.

What educators and political officials who are responsible for our latest educational reform package have not done is to look at the results of current educational practices. Educators and political officials need to look at the condition of children and teenagers in America. They need to look at the distressed, empty-headed, incompetent, unskilled, aimless high school graduates which this educational system produces. These are bad results. Most educators and political leaders are not able to see the bad results, nor are they able to see the reason for these bad results. Educators and political leaders think that low grades and low test scores are bad results. And, they are busy trying to correct these "bad results." But in figuring out how to raise children's grades and test scores, educators and politicians have still failed to acknowledge the fact that children are human beings. They have assumed that children are godless, soulless, witless, mindless, programmable, grade-making machines. Low test scores indicate that educators are not doing a good job of downloading this nation's programmable, grade-making machines.

In reality, test scores are irrelevant. They are especially irrelevant in light of the level and degree of mental and emotional harm which children are incurring in school. What is relevant is the distressed, burnt-out, damaged condition of this nation's youth. But, if you do not start with the assumption that children are human beings, then you are not going to be looking for a result that involves a healthy, competent, well-cared-for, knowledgeable human being. You are just looking for higher test scores.

The existing educational system is in a state of decay and is due to fail. Following the second law of thermodynamics, any closed system in a state of decay continues the process of decay unless there is some outside intervention which prevents or reverses the decay. For decades, a few rare people believed that the educational system could be salvaged by introducing certain positive measures such as the open classrooms and the schools without walls. But these changes were actually coming from within the system to compete. Each time positive ideas were introduced into the existing educational system,

these ideas were crushed the moment the positive idea threatened the status quo of the existing structure. (Unfortunately, the men and women who attempted to implement positive ideas were often crushed as well.) It then appears that intervention that would interrupt the natural self-destructive process of decay which this educational system is now in is very unlikely. So far, none of the "revolutionary" educational reforms of the current administration threaten this cycle of decay. If we are all very lucky, however, the present administration will institute enough of the same old cow manure to speed up the process of decay. Maybe George Bush and Lamar Alexander will put in enough decomposing material to help break this system down even faster.

The best thing that our present Secretary of Education is doing is talking about choice in education. Saying that parents are free to send their children to the school of their choice is the same thing as saying that parents are free to choose the death camp of their choice. They can either send their children to Dachau or Auschwitz. Although our present Secretary of Education is intending to talk only about the right of a parent to choose a school for his or her child, it has been a long time since anyone has talked about the parents' right to choose anything regarding the education of their children. The idea that parents have the right to choose where or how to educate their children was lost in this country with the introduction of compulsory state-run school education. At that time, states took the right of educating children away from parents. The idea that parents have any rights or freedoms regarding the education of their children is something that we desperately need to reestablish in this nation. If parents have the right to choose which school to send their children to, maybe parents also have the right to decide whether to send their children to school at all. Using words like parental choice regarding education may prove to be politically dangerous for any Secretary of Education and may prove to be tantamount to pulling the pin on his own hand grenade.

Finally, we apologize once again to our readers for our writing style. Throughout the newsletters which we have published, we have attempted to use the best right-wing, Republican conservative, Texas-style rhetoric that we could come up with. We have done so because this is the kind of writing and speaking style which educated people are most responsive to. This is clearly evidenced in the popularity of men like Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Jerry Falwell. We are not radical, left-wing, pagan fags with a hidden anti-Christ agenda.

It was particularly important for us to use this writing style because in the course of our newsletters we were telling readers the truth about the destructive effects of existing educational practices. Educated people are generally incapable of responding to the truth. We felt that we needed to take every advantage possible, including the use of conservative, right-wing style rhetoric, if we were going to try to tell educated people the truth about the destructive effects of modern education. The way that readers can know that educated people are incapable of responding to the truth is to think about some of the stories that are regularly presented on evening news programs. For example, newscasters regularly report on the famines in Africa. Millions of educated Americans see the starving Africans on their television screens and millions of Americans hear the truth about how the African people are starving. Yet, no one is inspired by these stories to try to do anything to help stop the starvation and famines from taking place. Similarly, in the months following the Gulf War, newscasters have regularly reported on the poverty, disease and homelessness in America, particularly among America's children. It appears that newscasters are trying to get George Bush and the current administration to respond to America's domestic difficulties. The stories which are being presented about America's poor and hungry children are truthful stories. But neither George Bush nor anyone else educated in the current system is capable of responding to these problems.

We realize that our writing style is offensive to some readers. Unfortunately, we have not been able to offend enough of our readers. We use this particular writing style because we know that once people have been exposed to current educational practices, their mental and emotional apparatus are flattened out and destroyed for the most part. The only thing that can be done to incite a destroyed mental and emotional apparatus is to irritate it. If you can irritate it enough, then it will do something to relieve the irritation. It is like placing a grain of sand inside an oyster in the hope that if you irritate the oyster enough in the proper place it will one day produce a pearl. Unfortunately, we were not able to irritate very many people. Most Americans who have been exposed to the current educational system are so aimless and brain-dead that you cannot even irritate them. They are just too destroyed mentally and emotionally to be able to respond to that kind of stimulation. Once we discovered this, we realized that our newsletters would be of very little value. We decided to go ahead and publish them anyway for those few individuals, such as some homebirthers, who could be irritated and who might one day use that irritation to school their children at home. So, while we apologize to readers for having used an inherently offensive writing style, we can only say that if you were offended or irritated by our newsletters, then you are one of the rare fortunate ones who can still be irritated.

We must also mention that some of our readers have been irritated by our newsletters because, in their view, we said these things about education first. These are people who, under the influence of current educational practices, believe that it is more important to be the first to the top of the mountain than it is to solve the problems of current educational practices. In reality, we are not the first to say these things. Some of these things were said over two centuries ago. The destruction of human beings that is taking place is far too serious for any of us to be concerned over who said what first. We know that there are many people out there who could say a lot about current educational practices, and who could say it much better than we have. And we hope that these people will help themselves to any of the information in our newsletters and will say these things in as many ways and as many times as is humanly possible. What is happening in schools today is far too serious for anyone to try to stop this information from going out by hiding behind copyright laws. We hope that those people who are angry at us for being first (often found in some kind of leadership position in homeschooling organizations or similar groups) will see that the competition to be the first to the top of the mountain is only another destructive effect of current educational practices. Your "educational" experiences have caused you to want to be the first to the top of Mount Everest and then to be reimbursed forever (through the use of copyright laws) forgetting there first. What is happening to children in this nation's schools is far too serious for anyone to try to make a claim to any of these ideas.

We have also tried to write our newsletters in a way that will shake readers out of the mental traps they are caught in as a result of existing educational practices. To do this, we have tried to juxtapose ideas in a way that jolts readers out of these mental traps. For example, the educators' myth is that high school graduates will always be better off than people who do not graduate from high school. The truth is that as the number of high school graduates has increased, so have poverty, crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide and other forms of mental illness. We juxtapose ideas in this way because educated people have been forbidden to think about these things. You can know this because as you read this newsletter you have been shocked by some of the things we have said simply because educated people have been forbidden to tell the truth about the educational system. This is also evident in almost all of the history and social science books that have been written in this country. There are volumes of information about the subject of education that are simply missing from history and social science books. What has been written has been so whitewashed that it has almost no basis in reality. In recent months, we have been working on a book called "The Legislator's Guide To Solving The Problems Of Modern Education," which we plan to publish in the spring of 1992. In researching this book, we have found that doing research on the subject of education and trying to find out the truth about the existing educational system is, in some cases, like reading papers that have been written by Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law about what happened during the most recent war with Iraq. You find about the same level of accuracy, intelligence and truth as you found in Saddam Hussein's speeches to the Iraqi people during the time that the war was taking place.

As we come to the end of our newsletters, we are sad to say that we have not been able to figure out a way to communicate to people how destructive current educational practices are to human beings. We have been unable to communicate to people the depth and breadth of the tragedy that this nation must now face as a result of the harm that has been and continues to be done to children in our schools. We are not big enough or rich enough or powerful enough or influential enough or smart enough to figure out a way to tell people what we know. We have no choice but to stop publishing newsletters on this subject before we ourselves are plowed under by it. All we can do now is bail out, before we are crushed. We predict that 20 years from now the current educational system will no longer be able to function for all of the reasons we have just described. As we have said before, the battles that lie ahead are not ours to fight. These battles belong to parents with small children who do not want to see their children harmed and are willing to do what is necessary to keep their children at home and out of school. With this newsletter, we say, "Adios!" We have done what we can to help and we can do no more.