Do Republicans Want to Abolish Public Schools?

Here in Virginia the far right and their GOP puppets constantly attack public education and catering to home schooling Christianists and ultra-conservatives who don't want their children in public schools but do want them to be allowed to participate on public school sports teams. With the GOP presidential debates this type of rhetoric has moved to the national level and has become so extreme that a GOP icon such as Reagan would likely be deemed "too liberal" by the increasingly lunatic GOP base. With the GOP increasingly controlled by Christianists, public education is hated because it forces (i) children to learn subjects that are frowned upon and disputed - e.g., science and evolution - and bars religious instruction, and (ii) children intermix with "those people" - e.g., blacks, minorities and, oh the horror, non-Christians and gays. A piece in Religion Dispatches ties this anti-public school mindset to the agenda of Christian dominionists. Here are highlights (Note how Taliban Bob McDonnell's name figures in the article):

In the latest GOP debate, all three candidates who are not Romney showed themselves to be to the right of Reagan-era conservatives who sought to abolish the Federal Department of Education, presumably to return control of public education to the states.

Santorum (who has been talking about this recently anyway) started the round explaining that as a “homeschooling father of seven,” he believes “the state government should start to get out of the education business and put it to the local and into the community.”

The religious right has long had the goal of eliminating public education. Candidates don’t need to be closet Reconstructionists to be influenced by the work of Reconstructionists, but it's worth noting that when R.J. Rushdoony wrote the Messianic Character of American Education in 1963 he argued that education is not a proper function of government. “Government schools” were the vehicle for promoting the anti-Christian religion of humanism and should ultimately be abolished. Few outside his small circle took him seriously.

In Rushdoony’s vision, the single most important tool for transforming the whole of culture to conform to biblical law (i.e. the exercise of dominion), was to replace public education with biblical education. The decades since have brought the rise of the Christian school and the Christian homeschool movements, both of which are rooted philosophically and even legally in Rushdoony’s work.

“How are we going to abolish the public schools? Little by little,” one of them wrote, advocating deliberately overwhelming government schools with meaningless “accountability,” undermining the teachers unions, opposing efforts to build facilities or improve schools, and seeking out people who will work as teachers for incredibly small amounts of money to reduce overall salaries. Another Christian Reconstructionist author (on whom Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell relied in the writing of his Master’s Thesis) said this:

If you run for the public school board, do it with one intention only: to create an orderly transition to exclusively private education. If you can’t be elected on this platform (as seems likely), then become the candidate who wants to reduce waste. (The Biblical definition of wasteful public schools: “public Schools.”) Your real agenda: no more pay increases for teachers, no more school building programs, and a reduction next year in property taxes. Forever.

Again, candidates need not be Reconstructionists in order to be influenced by the work they’ve done over the last half century. In the 1960s, they set out a goal so extreme no one took it seriously; by the 1980s, the goal and certain tactics to achieve it were promoted in their literature and institutions. In the 2012 presidential election, the only candidate not moving in the direction they advocate is the Mormon candidate, Mitt Romney.

Imagine what would happen to the country if the Christianists had their way and ignorance was openly embraced, science was rejected, and religious based lunacy became official policy. It's beyond ironic that the far claims that liberals are destroying the country when their plan would doom the nation to fall decades and centuries backward in time. Indeed, the USA would become the Christianist equivalent of fundamentalist Islamic nations where education is held back by religious dogma.