While the following is based on observations made fifteen years ago, the words are still applicable to the state of affairs in public education that are spotlighted by the Lower Merion School District’s Laptop Spycam case.

A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.

~ Former U. S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 1977

Here in the “land of the free,” we dealt a blow to the most literal form of bondage when Lincoln freed the slaves. No more would there arise such a blatant violation of an American man’s right to pursue liberty. The double standard piercing equality of all men disappeared. (For simplicity’s sake you have to forget that women weren’t included in this discussion.)

This view of freedom carries boatloads of refugees to American shores, for the call sounds loudly in the hearts of humankind no matter where they happen to be born. It’s the same notion of freedom protecting our speech, press, right to assemble, bear arms and choose a personally acceptable religion.

Public inattention makes oppression so doggone easy; it’s simply a matter of conditioning masses of young chicks while no one stands guard over the hen house.

This is the way we normally think of American freedom, related to physical activity and movement within society. It’s the idea of American freedom permeating classroom lectures from Maine to California. But just as the idea of true education moves beyond teachers and classrooms, so can the idea of freedom transcend the mere physical aspect of humanity. Let’s first take a closer look at the definition of freedom, compliments of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: When we get past the typical, physical connotation, we find “Liberty of the person from slavery, oppression, or incarceration,” and further on “immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority,” as well as “the capacity7 to exercise choice; free will.”

Anyone who has attended public school has not spent her life free of “arbitrary exercise of authority.” If you are one of millions of parents today asking for choice in education, you do not possess “the capacity to exercise free choice” or you wouldn’t be asking your legislators to give it to you!

But let’s move beyond these obvious examples of the fallacy of freedom. Lincoln freed Americans from slavery, and in so doing bestowed a sense of equality. But what about oppression? The same dictionary says oppression is “a feeling of being heavily weighed down, either mentally or physically; depression, weariness.” Aren’t these the symptoms of what those in politically correct circles term psychological illness? And aren’t there a frighteningly huge amount of people seeking counseling and/or taking drugs for these symptoms?

One might say Americans are not suffering from migraines, depression, the weight of stress (mental and physical), burn-out, and behavior disorders of all shapes and sizes, most obvious in our culture in the form of addictions like gambling, eating, not eating, sex, shopping, making money, power, etc., etc. Americans could be said to be suffering the symptoms of oppression.

If that’s the case, we don’t need to sink into further dependence on “experts” or counselors who merely put Band-Aids on our tumor. We need true freedom – independence – in a dose large enough to wipe out the symptoms’ root cause – oppression.

Oppression of spirit is not on the public school curriculum. Rather, it is a noxious by-product produced while stewing schooling in a pot with unions, administrators, multi-billion dollar budgets, state education departments, and school boards, then letting politicians control the heat.

Americans have equality (at least in the law books), in large part because equality has long been an important issue here, noticed in 1835 by Tocqueville, a French statesman who observed America and Americans before writing Democracy in America: “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” (Vol. II, pt. 2, ch. 1) American interest in and acquisition of “equality” overshadowed the deeper, more meaningful aspect of true freedom, freedom of spirit, in part because we have, as Thomas Jefferson feared, “become inattentive to public affairs.”

And just as Jefferson warned, over time many of the politically elite transformed into wolves. Our institutions, including education, roll on dominated by the politicians’ pack (and today’s “PACs,” political action committees, of various species, as well).

Public inattention makes oppression so doggone easy; it’s simply a matter of conditioning masses of young chicks while no one stands guard over the hen house.

There is no “slippery slope” toward loss of liberties, only a long staircase where each step downward must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

~ U. S. Senator Alan K. Simpson, 1982

From The Art of Education: Reclaiming Your Family, Community and Self by Linda Dobson, Foreword by John Taylor Gatto, Home Education Press, 1995

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