Catholic Public Policy on Education

Photo of Marty Barrack

by Marty Barrack

Outcome Based Education

The term Outcome Based Education openly admits that government schools have become indoctrination centers rather than places to learn about western civilization. They are aiming for specific government-approved behavior patterns. Each year, the government schools, as well as most colleges and universities, graduate several million more students with the intellect and will of zombies. There is no other way to explain how so many friendly and pleasant young men and women can see the Catholic Church as a threat to unlimited copulation rather than the moral bulwark that has set up strong self-governing orders of women since the Middle Ages. Catholic religious women were running monasteries, hospitals, schools and colleges, etc., at a time when all other women were treated as chattel. Catholic insistence on human dignity for all, because every human being is God’s image and likeness, brought into being representative governments at a time when everyone else accepted the divine right of kings.

There is no other way to accept the widespread acceptance of killing children in their mother’s wombs. There is no other way to accept the widespread acceptance of homosexual behavior which is contrary to God’s law, extremely unsanitary, and repugnant to most Americans. There is no other way to understand the widespread acceptance of “hate crime” and “hate speech” legislation in which the word “hate” is left undefined so that it can be applied to anyone the government wishes to silence.

What We Can Do

These things can be taught because parents do not know, and cannot control, what their children are being taught. The government schools teach their children what the government wants them to know. It is extremely important that we focus all our effort on laws that allow parents to decide which school their children will attend. The slogan has to be: A woman’s right to choose her children’s schools. Perhaps we can ask why a woman should have the right to choose her child’s death but not his education.

The concomitant principle has to be that parents are the primary teachers of their children. Schools are the agents of parents, not of the state. The parent is the school’s customer. If the school does not provide full disclosure and satisfy the customer, the customer has every moral right to send his child to a school that does.

At the same time, we need to apply the principle of informed consent, well established in medicine, to education. Every school should be required to post on the Internet all of its curricula, for all subjects and all grades. The law should require that teachers not receive the curricula separately but would download the very curricula posted and use them to teach each class. Further, copies of all psychological tests given to their children should be mailed in advance to the parents of each child. Parents are providing the children and paying the taxes for their instruction. They have every right to know exactly what their children are being taught. Moreover, the law should provide that any parent should have the right to attend any class in which his child is enrolled, and to record it on audio or video tape, provided that the parent is quiet and orderly. A school that is called a public school should not have any secrets at all, and certainly not from the parents who are their customers.

As soon as parents can back their decisions with financial clout, change will follow. We will start getting classic English literature, accurate history, political science that respects the constitutional principle of subsidiarity, and much more, but only if we make freedom in education our top priority.