In the Grangeville area we are blessed with a few private and religious schools that are flourishing even as the public school system is in serious trouble.

Those that have money, like doctors, politicians, financiers, tradesmen, and businessmen are sending their kids to private options. The loss of a public school system will not cause the loss of those that have resources. The exact opposite will happen. Those without resources or the inclination to teach their children privately will have to leave should public resources fail.

I am known as “The Chess Guy” and I have been teaching kids chess in this area for almost 20 years. I feel our kids need to learn “how
to think” more than anything else. I have had a hard time finding a welcome at the public schools because their curriculum is too inefficient and externally mandated for them to free up an hour a week and a place for me to teach them. This is not nearly as much of a problem in the private and religious schools.

Our area is blessed with a strong community of people that support our youth and education and this is great.

If you have never seen what can be done privately you are missing something very exciting. When a community decides it wants to do something, it can muster amazing resources in a very short period of time – especially if it is not overburdened with taxes. Local control, true control, allows for all kinds of innovations and alternatives that a centrally controlled or influenced systems simply cannot offer.

Curriculums, proven from as long ago as Greek times, are available that work, yet our public school system seems to constantly experiment with some pretty strange ideas like gender identity, racial equality of outcome, random and whacky math curriculums, and of course the absolute prohibition of religious practices on campus.  This isn’t coming from the community but from government and sometimes unions.

When one looks back into the sources of our current school system, we see why it has become an assembly line of curriculum taught by age, which has almost no relationship to talent or inituitive or character, all backed by truency laws. One sees socialist experiments used to mold the future citizen of an imagined utopian system of governance – these ideas are at the foundation of a lot of our failures in public education.

With the advent of communications technology, the need for physical, socialized, government run public education is almost antiquated.

Anyone that wants to learn anything they want to only needs to know how to read and click. I would definitely support a 3 year free public education system that teaches moral maturity and how to read and click – attendance not being manditory of course.

Libraries are unnecessary. Chalk-boards and classrooms and desks are also unnecessary. Really, all you minimally need is a smart phone.

The only compelling need for a social setting is just that – for socialization reasons, the most important being, moral instruction. Socialization can be done in one’s living room or garage or at the local park at no cost and, being decentralized, reduces the risk of training everyone to think the same and fall into some massive collectivized trap of error – which I think we are struggling with right now.

If, worst case, we end up losing our local public school system, will that really be so bad? Admittedly, many workers such as administrators and counselors, PE teachers, etc. will lose their jobs sucking off of the public tit of our taxes, but I don’t see that as such a bad thing in the long run. 

This is not to say that I want the public educational system to fail – that would be tragic.  There is insufficient freedom and motivation for the system to be efficient and flexible and that is what is killing it.  Lack of money is not the root problem here.

When the life of a public school system starts to threaten the very private property of a significant portion of the population who are (or were) generally the most productive ones in society, it becomes a serious question if such a system should exist any longer, especially when great alternatives are available and generally at less cost.

There is, however, a very scary alternative if the local community does not step up to solve this problem.  AI will become the programmers of the next generation and things will get FAR WORSE.

Sanford Staab