David McElroy

We used to laugh in this country at the crude propaganda the the government of the Soviet Union used to brainwash the people under their rule. In the United States, we don’t call it propaganda. We call it education, but the government has a very conscious mission to brainwash Americans to buy into the system.

A reader who’s going to remain anonymous shared with me this scan from his kindergarten child’s homework, presumably for Presidents’ Day. The students had to read the material and then answer a question. Some of it is just factual, such as the White House being in Washington. Others aren’t so factual, such as, “Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President, was an honest man.” Oh, really? And, “The president works hard every day to protect our country, the USA!” Do they know the difference between opinion and fact?

Do you believe Barack Obama works hard to keep us free? Do you believe that George W. Bush worked hard to keep us free? Or do you believe that each of them had his own political agenda — and that achieving that agenda was far more important than “keeping us free”? (Of course, the question ignores the little matter of what freedom is, too.)

If you grew up in government-run schools and haven’t given a lot of thought to what you were taught, you might look at these statements and find it bewildering that anyone would object to them. But these statements have nothing to do with educating children about how the world works. They have everything to do with getting children to accept and believe national fairy tales.

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Conservatives keep telling us they want “limited government.” When you think about their positions, you might think they just don’t understand limited government. There’s a more serious problem, though. “Limited government” is a mythical beast that can’t exist.

Take this tweet from Rick Santorum last week. It sounds very appealing to those of us who love individual freedom. A libertarian or anarcho-capitalist could have said this. But think about the rest of what Santorum favors and you quickly realize he doesn’t mean what these words say.

If Santorum and other conservatives believe that government can’t force us to pay for things that violate our beliefs, does this mean he’s going to fight to get refunds for those of us who’ve had to pay for wars against our will? Is he going to try to get us refunds for the money that’s been taken from us to give to other countries in the form of handouts and military hardware? Is he going to prevent our money from being used to support various kinds of social and economic welfare programs that we don’t believe in?

“Government” is force, whether it’s open or hidden. By definition, if a government can’t force you to do anything, it’s not a government. It’s just somebody making suggestions. The real question is whether any kind of government has any moral right to initiate force against anyone.

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Most of us had lousy teachers at some point. I had a physics teacher who absolutely didn’t understand the subject she was teaching, but she was politically active, so she ended up as president of the state teacher union. I had a chemistry teacher who couldn’t speak louder than a mouse and couldn’t control his class, so I learned nothing. But none of them compare to the basketball coach I had for math in the seventh grade.

I lived on the beach in Pensacola, Fla., that year. (It sounds nicer than it is. All the sand gets really tiresome.) The beach is in the Pensacola city limits, so the beach kids were bused into the city. Every day, our bus drove us through a suburb with good schools and deposited us at terrible schools — filled with bad teachers and unmotivated students from poor homes. It was my only experience in a majority-black inner-city school. It felt strange being one of only two white boys in the seventh grade.

My math teacher was a really likable guy, but he was a basketball coach — and he didn’t care that much about math. Even though we were in the seventh grade, they were just starting long division. Since I’d been in pretty good schools until them — and had already been taught basic algebra at home — the class seemed like a joke. I was bored.

When the coach found out that I knew more about math than he did — and I admitted how bored I was — we made a deal. For a six-week grading period, he turned the class over to me. It was at the beginning of basketball season, so he used the time to prepare for basketball and he handed me the teacher edition of the textbook. For six weeks, I taught the class. I was much tougher than he was, but grades went up. Since we didn’t get caught, it was actually a very fun experience.

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