Being Watched Over? Or Just Watched?

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

On May 30th Tyler Durden had an informative article up on https://www.zerohedge.com that was written by a former Green Beret on http://www.SHTFplan.com

It was definitely food for thought and something we should be aware of.I am going to quote a bit of it here and urge folks to check it out on their own.

The author wrote: “We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state. Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and  practically abrogated.”

And he continued: “The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, with the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.”

With the article is sort of a poster, showing a line of kids with the tops of their heads open and something being poured in.The poster reads Education is not a right. Knowledge is power. Power is dangerous. Keep them stupid.

The author observes the increased police presence in schools and then he says: “…as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students. Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the ‘troupe’ of juveniles, driving the herd. Collective, community thought is the mantra…Gone is  personal development, let alone fun, the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective ‘consciousness’ has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed…directed by authorities or ‘approved’ controllers/managers…”  You might label such people as change agents   because that’s exactly what they are. They are there to change your kids’ mode of thinking from what you taught them to what they want them to “learn.”

One thing this author notes is our “fostered dependency” on electronic gadgets where many, if not most people, think that they absolutely cannot do without them, especially the latest models of most of them. He says “Every week a new report or story surfaces that shows just how far the government and the corporate interests are pushing this electronic dependency, while the schools are shaping the consciousness of the public and  making it ever more malleable. Toward what end? Toward the one that recurs throughout history. We have been warned by Orwell, by Solzhenitsyn,  and many others. Whether we will heed those warnings and take preventive measures remains to be seen…”

The Deep State is all about power (holding onto and expanding it) and money (stealing all they can from the public while telling us it is all for our own good).

No matter who sits in the White House, this continues to go on, and I am not sure any sitting president can really do all that much about it, well intentioned though he might be.

One thing some folks can do, though, is be aware of just how much your pubic school system contributes to all of this and take steps to get your kids out of it and into private Christian education. The public (government) school system is a major contributor to all of this and you need to be aware of that–and act accordingly.

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“Maryland, my (home schooling) Maryland”

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Home schooling is one of those things that scares the living daylights out of the Educational Establishment and the Deep State. Home schooling, and Christian education in general tend to be areas where the participants  do not always (usually) accept the Establishment version of history and/or politics.

From time to time, as they feel they can get away with it, the “change agents” in the educational bureaucracy  seek to remedy this situation by trying to find reasons to enforce new controls that will give them more power and control over home schooling, its curriculums, and its participants.

During the 1980s Rev. Paul Lindstrom, of the Church of Christian Liberty in Illinois, traveled around the country testifying in various court cases that helped and enabled parents to regain their right to home school their children which had been usurped by the Educational Establishment. By the late 1980s, home schooling was legal, in one form or another, in all the 50 united States. That fact did not, and does not, however, prevent the Establishment Education Czars from looking for any chance they can to reverse that trend–and if they can’t reverse it they can at least try to again regulate home schooling almost out of any real existence.

So it was no surprise to me when I came across an article on http://www.thefreethoughtproject.com  by Matt Agorist for March 11, 2018 that dealt with the latest attempted Establishment Educational usurpation in Maryland.

Mr. Agorist wrote: “Under the guise of preventing child abuse, lawmakers in Maryland have introduced a bill that will allow the state to intrude in the lives of innocent families, keeping tabs on them, and destroying their right to privacy. The bill, HB 1798–County Boards of Education–Home Instruction Program–Observation of Instruction and Reporting of Abuse and Neglect,  lays out some fairly ominous requirement that will persecute otherwise entirely innocent families for doing nothing other than teaching their children at home…The bill also lays out the framework for involuntary home inspections in which state agents will enter a family’s home multiple times a year–likely unannounced–and observe and inspect the homeschooling process.”

It seems as though there was a family in California that was guilty of massive child abuse and they were registered as home schoolers. So now the Education Czars in that “Sanctuary State” have automatically assumed that all home schools are probably guilty of those same abuses and need to be constantly regulated so they aren’t beating and starving their kids. It’s the same old bureaucratic “You’re guilty until you prove yourself innocent” routine that is practiced by so many government types in their efforts to gain control over other people’s lives. This is one thing politicians and bureaucrats always seek to do to justify their existence. They have to try to run everyone’s life, down to the minutest detail because, somehow, that seems to give them some sort of power trip. Being control freaks is what they live for. And it would seem that the “change agent” Educational Czars in Maryland have taken note of this instance in California and seen a real possibility in their state to assume more control over the lives of a group of people they only tolerate because the present state law forces them to.

It’s somewhat the same situation you see with all these school shootings. Some Leftist nut, usually on some exotic type of medication, kills a batch of kids and teachers in a school “gun free” zone and the bureaucratic  conclusion is that all gun owners must be potential terrorists and need to be regulated (and their weapons hopefully confiscated) as soon as possible, if not sooner!

Mr. Agorist accurately notes that: “Instead of realizing that the problem of child abuse has nothing at all to do with homeschooling,  lawmakers across the country are using this moment to demonize parents who wish to teach their children outside of the state…The audacity of the state to require that your children be inspected by them to prove that you are not guilty of child abuse is stunning and speaks to the nature of the cradle to grave mentality of the almighty controllers.” If this trend is allowed to continue it could, again, reduce the fundamental right of parents to home school their children back to the status of yet another state-regulated entity. I am sure that possibility has not been lost on the Educational Elite who seek to indoctrinate your children rather than letting you educate them.

Let’s don’t kid ourselves. This, in spite of the Establishment’s pious pleading, is not about the welfare of children–it is about who will control how they are educated and what they are taught. To educate your children is a parental right, and the Educational Elite (a major part of the Deep State Swamp) is not about to allow parents to assume this God-given responsibility  without a struggle to deprive those parents of that right.

Why Our Kids Never Went To Public School–Fifth and concluding part

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

As my wife and I settled into the concept of home schooling we found that we needed some sort of structured curriculum that we could be comfortable with. Even in the late 1980s there were quite a few home school curriculums out there, though probably not as many as today. One of our daughter’s friends, one time, commented to us “You guys home schooled before home schooling was cool.” I hadn’t thought of it that way but I guess she was right. In 1986 it hadn’t been all that long since people in some states had had their kids removed out of their homes because they refused to put them in public schools. After all, for many officious bureaucrats Government schools were the sacred cows of the hour.

So my wife and I started attending home school book fairs and conventions when we could get to them. We started checking out books and listening to various speakers.

One thing I found with various home school curriculums was that the selection of history books was, for me, somewhat discouraging in the main, and the same held true for books I saw on government. Some of the books I saw at fairs looked pretty much like government school material with a few Bible verses sprinkled over it–just enough to make them palatable to home school families that didn’t know an awful lot of history (and weren’t likely to learn much with some of these books).

We finally came up with a curriculum for our kids, but I didn’t use their history material. For our son I came up with a five volume series by Clarence B. Carson called A Basic History of the United States. It was published by the American Textbook Committee of Wadley, Alabama, originally copyrighted in 1983. It was a good, solid basic U.S. history that didn’t dwell on a pile of politically correct drivel and I found that, when it came to the volume on the War of Northern Aggression, they got it right. Our son worked in that series until he completed high school. I also had him read current events articles out of the New American magazine and write out short reports on these.

For our daughter we came up with a book by Donzella Cross Boyle called Quest of a Hemisphere for American history. I liked this book because it went into the differences between republics and democracies–something most history books almost totally ignore. Our daughter was three years younger than our son and that seemed a better choice for her at that point.

In early 1989 we moved from Indiana to Illinois and my wife and I went to work for a Christian home school program there. The folks in our church in Indiana gave us a going-away party, at which they presented me with an electric typewriter. As I stated earlier, they were not bad folks, but I think some of what I did made them nervous and some of them were probably relieved to see us go. I seem to have had that effect on a couple churches over the years.

For awhile our daughter worked in the curriculum used by the home schooling program we worked in. One of the books they used for American history was an A-Beka book. This was a high school book and the title escapes me at this point. The home school program in Illinois used this as a two-year course in American history. So our daughter started reading in it and working through it and she finished the entire book in less than six months. Her comment to me at that point was “Dad, can we go on to something else for American history? This book was shallow.”

So we did. A friend I worked with lent me a home school American history course that consisted of 16 cassette tapes, a whole book of notes and a great big bibliography to go with it. It had originally been done as a series of lectures by Pastor Steve Wilkins when he was still in Forest, Mississippi. It was called America–the first 350 years. Contrary to much of what I had seen for American history over the years, this was history with some meat on the bones! This series had all the stuff most history books, even for the home school audience, either ignored or played down. The man who put this series together was not just a pastor, he was also a historian, and a historian from a Reformed Christian perspective. This was history our daughter could sink her teeth into–and she did–nothing shallow here!

We did the series together, tape by tape, late at night when it was quiet and if we came to something on one of the tapes she wasn’t sure about, we shut the tape off and talked about it. She sat with a notebook on her lap and took notes through the whole thing. She finished her home schooling with this tape series and both of us learned much we had not known previously. This was like “all the history the historians leave out.” The series started with Columbus, though Pastor Wilkins commented on possible European involvement here before Columbus–and it went through the end of “reconstruction” after the War of Northern Aggression. It stopped after that. Later, someone asked Pastor Wilkins why he had stopped after that, and I never forgot his reply. He said “Because everything after reconstruction was Post-America.” In other words, everything after “reconstruction” was not the America the founders had given us–it was a whole different animal. He was right. None of us alive today has ever lived in the “real” America passed down from the Founders. We have lived in a clever counterfeit and most don’t even realize it. The War of Northern Aggression was our French Revolution, and like France, we have never recovered.

Rev. Wilkins’ history series was pivotal in our daughter’s understanding of accurate American history and it made enough of a difference in her outlook that our grandchildren, who were home schooled, used this series also. The cassette tapes are long gone, but I think you can still find the series in MP3 today.

Had our children attended government schools, especially in the North, they would never have had the opportunity to learn accurate history. All they would have learned of history in the government schools would have been the “cunningly devised fables”, taught to government school students, and that bemuse most evangelical Christians in our day–in other words, it ain’t real history!

After working with the home school program in Illinois for several years, my wife and I moved to  North Louisiana, where the church we attend has a classical Christian school and where the youngsters are taught correct history, not politically correct history.

Some may think I belabor the history question too much, but history is the area my calling has been in, and I have learned over the years, that if you don’t get your country’s history (and the world’s) history correct, then you will most often come down on the wrong side of every political and historical discussion you ever get into because you will not have done the homework. Ask your average evangelical Christian, even in the South, what the War of Northern Aggression was fought over and 90% of them will say “slavery.” And that is the culturally Marxist reply. It’s not that these folks are intentionally Marxist, it’s just that they don’t know. The government schools most of them attended only ever gave them the culturally Marxist  answer to the question of what the War was all about.

Among evangelicals in our day (and before) this has been a major problem–in the main, we don’t know our history–and we will seldom get it in government schools. This is not said to belittle the efforts of those in government schools that try to teach accurately, but it is a sad commentary on the system they work for, that does not want them to teach accurately, no matter what the educational apparatchiks try to tell you. Until our evangelical brethren begin to understand this and remove their kids from the government school leviathan, not much will change. I have said this in the past, but will repeat it here in closing–if our view of the past is faulty, then our vision for the future will be also.

Part Four–Why Our Kids Never Went To Public School

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

The reactions to our decision to home school our kids were fairly quick and followed certain patterns. A couple of folks decided that, as long as we were going to do this, they could help us out by giving us lists of books we should get and make sure our kids read. I recall two such lists, if I remember correctly. I did look over the lists to see what they had.

Interestingly enough, one of the books near the top of both lists was Catcher in the Rye. When I had worked at a college back in the East, many of the kids I knew there had that one as required reading, so I had a chance back then to browse through it on several occasions. Now maybe it’s just that I am old fashioned, but my first reaction to seeing that on both lists was “I don’t want our kids reading that!” Maybe some of you all have read that one and don’t think it was as questionable as I did. There were several other offerings on both lists that I frowned at. There wasn’t an awful lot on either list that I wanted our kids messing with. Now our kids were both readers and we bought them books when we could afford to and they read and reread many of them until the covers literally fell off them. We bought them C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series and they read those until they were literally falling apart. I realize some folks disagree with some of Lewis’ materials, but it was a lot better than some of what was out there. Anyway, the book lists were a flop.

Later on, after that, (and I didn’t find this out until our kids were grown and our son told it to me), some of the ladies from the church pulled him aside one day and asked him if he wouldn’t really rather go to a public school than to have to learn at  home. I assume they were trying to get him to persuade us to put the kids in the local government schools. That didn’t work either. My son told them that if he had to end up in a public school, he would just quit. At that point he was 16 and, therefore, old enough to do that.

In retrospect, that bothered me a little. My wife and I had made certain decisions that we felt were best for our children and they were trying to “rearrange” those decisions to what they thought was best.

So, with those two agendas not working, the next project was to send the pastor out to talk to us and talk us into doing what many, if not most, in the church figured we should do. You see. some of these folks had a problem with the fact that neither my wife nor I had a college degree, and in their minds you couldn’t do anything without a college degree, preferably several, with a whole batch of letters strung out after your name. I don’t think they felt we were stupid–it was just that we were ignorant and didn’t know what we didn’t know. I had tried to tell some of them who didn’t know what the government schools in West Virginia and other places were doing and they didn’t want to know that. So I guess that made us even!

Understand, when I say all this, these were not bad people. I think some of them had a genuine concern, but their worldview was not our worldview and they never could quite grasp where we were coming from. All they knew was that much of it turned them off and part of their solution to our situation was to try to make our kids as much like theirs as possible.

Anyway, the pastor came out one evening (his kids were in government schools which he thought were just great). And he was going to talk us into “doing the right thing” for our kids. So he gave us all his reasons why he thought the government schools were the only way to go with our kids and they would probably grow up culturally deprived if they couldn’t attend them.

After he had completed his recitation, I said to him, “You’ve told us all the reasons you think we should put our kids in public school and now I’m going to tell you all the reasons we are not going to do that.” And I had a list of reasons, not on paper, but in my head and so I started telling him what we knew about government education and our problems with it. When I got through, he said to me “You’ve thought this through pretty well haven’t you?” I assured him we had, which was no lie, and then he said to me (and I have never forgotten this) “In light of what you have just told me, what I am suggesting to you must sound like blasphemy.” To which I replied “You’re getting pretty close.” I guess I had made our point, either that or they all thought we were totally hopeless, I don’t know which, because no one at church ever mentioned the education question to us again. From the pastor on down, they just dropped it.

And although this incident I am about to mention doesn’t have specifically to do with our kids’ education, I mention it anyway, because it is an educational issue. I had been asked to teach a Sunday School class, and there was a lot of “safe” material out there that I could have used that would have threatened or challenged no one. However, I chose to try to teach a class about secular humanism. They all professed to be “agin it” but most of them knew little about it or how it had infiltrated the churches.

This came up because I had previously taught a one session class about this and quoted extensively from The Humanist Manifesto 2, which they were obviously unfamiliar with. At the end of that class, one lady asked me if what I had used was John Birch material. I told her “I didn’t use any John Birch material.  What I gave  you today was right from the Humanist Manifesto 2. What I gave you was right from the horse’s mouth.” They were astonished, they didn’t have a clue.

Anyway, I don’t know for sure, but I think that may have had something to do with my getting the invitation to do the Sunday School class. In order to have something for them to go by, I bought a book from the local Bible book store about secular humanism and showed it to the pastor.  He took it, showed it to some others, whether it was the elders or not I don’t know, but then he came back and told me some folks had problems with some of what was in the book. So he hemmed and hawed about it and so I just asked him up front, seeing that there were problems with parts of the book “Would you rather I just didn’t do this?” I figured if the book was too rich for them, that gave them an out, but I wasn’t planning on teaching something that made folks feel good. There isn’t much education or challenge in “feeling good.” They could get someone else for that.

The pastor came back in a week or so and said to go ahead and use the book. So I did, and I prepared a lesson for the first week and typed up a batch of material, both from the book and other sources, on secular humanism I had or borrowed. Every week that I did the class, which I think lasted for 3 months or so, I had a batch of reference material to hand out to everyone in the class so they had something on paper to take home with them and look over (I hoped).

But even though they finally agreed to let me do the class, there were still obvious reservations–to the point where they printed a disclaimer in the church bulletin each Sunday letting the congregation know the church probably didn’t endorse everything in the book, so anyone who took the class did so at their own risk.

Interestingly enough, the class was packed–all kinds of people from the elders and deacons on down. I have never been sure if all those folks sat in because of what they could learn or if they were there to make sure I didn’t go too far off what they considered was the deep end.

To be continued.

Why Our Kids Never Went To Pubic School–Part Three

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

As I previously noted, it was not until we moved to Indiana that I grasped why most evangelical folks would not object to nor protest what went on in government schools.

In Indiana we found and attended an evangelical Presbyterian church because it was the only Reformed church we could find in the immediate area. We found a Christian school for our son to enter. Our daughter would not be ready for school for another year yet. Our son had previously been in a Baptist school in West Virginia. The new school in Indiana wasn’t everything we could have hoped for but it was still better than a government school. At least we felt that way–many of the folks in the church we attended were not quite sure of that. Just about all the families that attended this church had their kids in government schools, which they were quite satisfied with. And they thought our kids would be much better off in a government school than in a Christian school. I hope, at this point, no one tries to tell me the Christian faith in this country hasn’t been tampered with.

I think many of the people in our church in Indiana probably felt we were a little weird and as I talked to some of them I found that many, if not most, of their political convictions were not mine–and mine would never be theirs. I had seen too much to take their Pollyanna approach. I had a basic distrust of government. They thought I should love government.

After the time we had spent in West Virginia there was no way under Heaven our kids would go to a government school. They disagreed. They thought government schools were just great. They talked about how the local government schools had great sports and music programs and how our kids would benefit from all that. Although I didn’t say it out loud, my first thought at those sentiments was “I’m going to sell my kid’s souls for a good music program???” When I tried to tell them some of what I had seen in West Virginia it was simply beyond their ability to grasp. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe the government education system would ever do what I described to them. Surely I must have been mistaken, or misunderstood what was being done down there.

They simply could not grasp the idea of little old ladies with broken shoulders and their arms in slings because the local and county law enforcement had hit them with billy clubs while they were breaking up textbook protest meetings. That simply was beyond their ken.

I recall one court hearing I attended, where the local gendarmes had arrested several protesters and one of them was one of the major protest leaders. His “crime” had been to talk to one of the police officers, asking them, please to not do what they were doing to these people. When the officer who had arrested him took the stand he could not even tell anyone what he had arrested the preacher for. He was asked several times by a lawyer that had been brought in to help the protesters and he remained mute–no reply. Justice in West Virginia! But the folks in our Indiana church didn’t want to hear any of this. The government school system would  never do what I said went on in West Virginia–end of conversation! So ours was most definitely the minority opinion in our church, but then, I guess that didn’t surprise me all that much. Mine has been the minority opinion most of the places I have been in my life.

But the education question never totally went away, and at one point, we even got them to agree to listen to the headmaster of our Christian school one Sunday evening after prayer service. At that time, the headmaster of the Christian school our kids went to was from Southern Indiana and he described himself as a “Jeffersonian Democrat.” He and I had many viewpoints in common, educationally and otherwise. Although the church folks listened to what he had to say that Sunday evening about Christian education, they didn’t really buy it, and you could tell from the comments that followed. If we wanted to do it, well, we were a bit odd anyway so it was “probably okay” but they weren’t having any. The following year he left the school and went back to Southern Indiana, for some pressing reason, I don’t just recall why at this point. The headmaster that replaced him was less satisfactory. He was a nice guy, but he didn’t know upside down from inside out and seemed to think he had it all figured out. He had a long way to go.

Awhile after that, due to circumstances I will not go into here, we switched schools and our kids ended up in a school run by a Nazarene church in a nearby town. Now these folks were doctrinally far away from us, but again, the school headmaster there had learned to think outside the box and he had read some of the same material by R. J. Rushdoony and others that I had read, so whatever doctrinal differences we might have had, we shared the same worldview when it came to Christian education.

In each of these Christian school situations we had needed help with tuition. My wife and I both worked, but we didn’t make lots of money–no fat checks coming in from George Soros or the Rockefellers every month, and it wasn’t easy. It was a sacrifice for us even with help.

Yet, how many evangelicals did we run into in Indiana that “just couldn’t afford a Christian education” for their kids?  They had two cars in the garage and a television screen in the living room that covered half of one wall, but a Christian education for their kids was simply “unaffordable.”  I said to my wife on several occasions “We are probably the poorest family in the church and yet we can, with help, manage it. Why can’t some of them?” Actually, it was a matter of priorities. For most evangelical Christians in this country Christian education is just not a real big priority.

However, one year, we reached a point where there was no more help with tuitions available–anywhere. So, at that point, we had to make a decision as to where we would go from there. For us it was not all that difficult. The government school was never an option, and so we started checking into home schooling programs. When the church we were attending heard that, some of them went through the roof!  They were willing to tolerate us with out kids in  a Christian school, even though they would have rather had them in a public school, but when we decided to home school them, we had moved beyond the pale. That was just too much!

To be continued.

More Home Schoolers Because of “Commie Core”

by Al Benson Jr.

Just this morning someone sent me an article from the Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, North Carolina, http://media.charlotteobserver.com  about the recent rise in home schooling in the state of North Carolina.

The article noted: “North Carolina’s home schools are growing at a record rate and are now estimated to have more students  than the state’s private schools. New figures from the state show there were 60,950 home schools in the 2013-14 school year, a 14.3 percent increase from the prior year and a 27 percent increase from two years ago. The state estimates there are 98,172 home-schoolers, marking the first time that North Carolina’s home school enrollment surpassed the number in private schools.”

Kevin McClain, president of North Carolinians For Home Education, which is a state-wide support group for home schoolers stated: “You can send your child to a private school–which is really expensive–or you can home-school. The economy means that, for many people, you home-school.” My wife and I can identify with that. When we could no longer afford to send our kids (now grown) to a Christian school, then we started to home school them. That was the only other option open to us. Sending them to the local government school was never an option because we knew the real history of the public school system, and no way were our kids going to be part of that. Thanks be to God, our six grandchildren are now being home schooled.

When home schooling first became legal in North Carolina way back in 1985 there were about 2,300 home schooled students in that state, so you can see how the movement has grown in the last twenty five-plus years. 

And the Charlotte Observer article observed that: “The recent growth spurt has coincided with the use of the Common Core standards in math and language arts in North Carolina’s public schools. While hailed by supporters in more than 40 states as providing a more rigorous education, critics have charged that Common Core is not appropriate for some students. ‘Common Core is a big factor that I hear people talk about’ said Beth Herbert, founder of Lighthouse Christian Homeschool Association, which has around 350 families, largely in the northern Wake County area. ‘They’re not happy with the work their kids are coming home with. They’ve decided to take their children home’.” In July the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation to create a commission that would recommend standards that would replace Common Core, or “Commie Core” as those who had studied this program now refer to it. All I can say is good for North Carolina!

Those who have studied the educational process now going on in this country, if such it can still be called, have come to realize that this whole Common Core program is nothing more than the educational arm of the Marxist Critical Theory agenda. On the 8th of August I did an article dealing with this for this blog spot. Go back and check it out.

It seems that the Critical Theory problems with Common Core have finally gotten some people to sit up and take notice of what is going on in public schools. This Marxist project won’t wake everybody up–there are some folks that will never wake up to what goes on in public schools–but more and more are beginning to see that these indoctrination centers we call schools have some real problems and that the result of those problems will be dumped on their kids if they leave them in those institutions.

Over the years I have advocated, for Southern folks, that they best thing they can do for their kids is to secede from the public school system. That would be one small step, but a major one, that people could start to take in the process of Cultural Secession. Lots of people today claim they have no confidence in the government anymore. If that is true, then why do they still have confidence in the government’s schools? The “educational” arm of the government is just as corrupt as the rest of it, and we are naive if we think any differently.

To Preserve Your Confederate Heritage Homeschool Your Kids

By Al Benson Jr.

Just today I received a short article from the Southern Legal Resource Center http://slrc-csa.org
which dealt with what goes on in public schools in regard to Confederate Heritage. The article stated, in part: “With little more than the stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court of the US has denied Certiorari in the Candice Hardwick Case. Thus ends 10 years of the struggle to vindicate the right of South Carolina Government School Students to peaceably wear Confederate emblems. The 4th Circuit Decision, which the Supreme Court has let stand, affirms the school’s prerogative to trample student rights. This decision affects students in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. Anti-student free speech decisions involving Confederate symbols in the 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th and 11th Circuits of the United States Courts of Appeals are left standing by the Supreme Court Hardwick denial.

And so the Southern Legal Resource Center has some sound advice for families that want to protect and preserve their Southern heritage—get the kids out of public school—homeschool them!

It’s good to see some group in the Confederate Movement standing up and advocating what desperately needs to be said to families that want to protect their Confederate heritage and maybe display it now and again by wearing a t-shirt with a Confederate flag on it. I don’t know how many people in the Confederate and Southern Heritage movements I have talked to over the years that hate what the public schools are doing to their kids, but when you suggest to them that one solution might be to remove the kids from public schools they stare at you as if you had three heads or had finally found a way to make Obamacare work. The concept of taking the kids out of public school totally eludes them and for the life of me I can’t see why, but it does.

Oh they will gripe and moan about what the schools are doing to deep-six their heritage but they will not take the kids out and so after twelve years of anti-Confederate indoctrination the kids end up hating their heritage and calling it “racist” and the parents stare wide-eyed and wonder what happened. You let anti-Christ educate your kids that’s what happened and now you live with the results and you don’t like it. Maybe you should have done something when you could. Depending on your family situation, it still might not be too late to help your grandchildren.

Chief Trial Councel Kirk D. Lyons has observed: “The school and the courts will not respect your children’s inalienable right to proclaim and be proud of their Southern Heritage, and in all areas of traditional culture it will only get worse. Get your kids out of the Government schools, and encourage others to do so. Whatever your inadequacies as a teacher, in most cases you will do a better job at teaching your kids, and they can wear Dixie Outfitter shirts and have Robert E. Lee’s Birthday off as a school holiday.”

The SLRC is planning on developing some on-line resources for those families who choose to homeschool their kids. There are other private organizations doing the same thing. I believe that Ron Paul’s organization is planning a homeschool curriculum and I’ve heard about others that I can’t call to mind right now. And there are all sorts of homeschool organizations and co-ops in many states that will help and work with parents. When my wife and I homeschooled our kids back in the late 1980s you didn’t have too much of that. I remember one lady that said to me “You homeschooled before homeschooling was cool.” I guess we did. I had never thought of it in those terms. It was what we did when we could no longer afford Christian schools because public schools were never, and I repeat, never, an option, much to the chagrin of the church we attended at the time.

Neill H. Payne, Board Chairman of the SLRC has noted: “It says something for the state of this country when Candice Hardwick peaceably displays a Confederate Flag over 4 years in situations that do not cause a single act of disruption (facts conceded by the school) and the rule of law fails to protect or even respect her rights.” Let’s face it, those who defend and protect Confederate heritage have no rights. As H. K. Edgerton said: “For Confederate kids the rule of law doesn’t exist.” He’s right. Everybody else get protection but the white, Christian kid who happens to believe in his Southern heritage and culture has no protection. He’s hung out to dry so the Je$$e Jacksons and Al Sharptons and the rest of the race-baiters can use him for journalistic and scholastic target practice.

And even with homeschooling you have to be careful with what you use, especially for history. My wife and I used to go to homeschool fairs and the first thing I would check out was what the different companies had for history material. A good deal of it was abysmal—little more than public school material with a few Bible verses sprinkled over it. At that point I worked at developing a mini-history series of booklets with tests that dealt with the period of the War of Northern Aggression. I ended up with five booklets in the series and I still have a few copies in my office. I wanted homeschooled kids to be confronted with a Southern view of the War and what it was really all about because what I saw in the homeschooling history books I viewed was not giving them that. Unwittingly or not, much of the “history” that was presented in some of these homeschool history books was little more than Yankee/Marxist propaganda. It would have been nice if the writers had done some homework as to accurate history, but it seems that, in many cases, they did not.

I am glad that the SLRC is advocating that people take their kids out of public schools and teach them at home. It would truly be great if every time some youngster’s Southern heritage is violated in his public school his parents would lodge a protest with the school and then inform them “My child will not be back here again for you to kick around with your anti-Southern agenda.” This is what we need to start doing. May the Lord help us to do it.

Government Educrats Are Afraid of Thinkers

by Al Benson Jr.

Awhile back I read an article in the Monroe, Louisiana newspaper about homeschooling. The article surprised me in that it actually took somewhat of a positive attitude toward homeschooling. It mentioned several families in Northeast Louisiana that home schooled their children and how well the children responded to learning in the homeschooling environment.

The article noted some interesting statistics. It observed that: “According to a 2003 National Home Education Research Institute study, home schooled children are more active in the community and government as adults…Seventy one percent participate in an ongoing community service activity, compared to 37 percent of adults in the overall US population…Only about 4 percent of home school graduates surveyed consider politics and government too complicated to understand, compared to 35 percent of the total adults.” All of which means that the home schooled kids have mostly not been dumbed down like their public school counterparts. Were I a betting man (which I am not) I would be willing to bet that such figures scare the living daylights out of the public school educrats. It would appear that the growing home school population in this country has a much firmer grasp of what is going on than the population in general, which will eventually bode ill for the Establishment. The home school graduates are not afraid or uninformed about politics or government, as they seem to have, in the main, a firmer grasp of how these things really work than does the average person who got his knowledge (or lack thereof) from the public schools. That has to bother the public school educrats who would much rather have a more uninformed and docile populace that has no real concept of how government really works, or should work given the constitutional restrains that supposedly have been put upon it. What they really want is a people who will just continue to ingest whatever socialist dogma is fed to it by the “experts” who are really only expert at making sure no one really learns much of anything.

I have never forgotten the story I heard years ago about the father who asked his son what he had learned in public school the past year. The son replied to his father “I learned absolutely nothing and now we are reviewing it.”

The home schooled population does not fit well into that little box the public educrats would like to fashion for it. Neither do many youngsters that are educated in either classical Christian schools or even traditional Christian schools. The public educrats, looking ahead, may be beginning to be a little afraid of what the next generation of privately educated youngsters are learning. If the homeschooling and Christian school movements continue to grow these folks may begin to lose control of the thought processes of an increasing number of American youngsters–and really, their controlling those thought processes and channeling them in a direction acceptable to the Establishment is really what public school education is all about. The “three R’s” really have almost nothing to do with the public school experience. They are emphasized just enough to fool most parents who don’t look too deeply at all the other things going on.

The only thing the public school educrats have available to drag out in their defense is that old, hackneyed saw about the kids not being properly “socialized.” In plain English that means that home schooled and other privately-educated kids are not subject to the educrat’s propaganda machine, nor to the extreme peer pressure which that machine engenders. One homeschooling mother has noted that: “In the world you have to be able to relate to people. In school, you’re in a situation with people just your own age.”

One home schooled student mentioned in the news article, along with her classes at home, worked as a radio disc jockey. She also attended Christian music concerts and spoke to youngsters in local churches about purity and abstinence. She was able to do all this as part of her homeschooling education. You can bet this would have been totally frowned upon in public school circles, where they are busily attempting to force students to accept all manner of perverse “lifestyles” in the name of “cultural diversity.” Note the “gender liberation” movement that I mentioned in a previous article. That is a prime example of what public schools are really all about, and as Ive said before “it ain’t education.”

One local school official noted the growth of homeschooling in this area and commented that he was concerned about what the home schoolers might “miss” by not being subjected to the public school system. Supposedly he meant things like band and sports programs. Supposedly. However, in our day, many home schooled students, through homeschooling associations in their areas, countrywide, are able to take part in all manner of activities, field trips, etc. So what do they “miss” by not being in public schools–classes in sex education, death education, multi-culturalism and a plethora of other socialist programs?

Many public school officials stress their concern that home schoolers or those in Christian schools will not “think” like their students do. They will, somehow, be “different.” Looking at what the public schools today are doing, is that possibility all bad? I don’t think so. Our kids went to both Christian schools and were home schooled and through all their school years we never had a class in cross-dressing or “gender liberation” or any of this other garbage. Our kids missed all that.

However, for these education bureaucrats that want every child to fit into their socialist mold, it is indeed, bad. It means they are starting to lose total control of the educational program in this country that it is their job to control. When home schooled and Christian-schooled kids, having been differently educated and taught to think, grow up, they might become involved in government, and with different ideas about the omnipotence of government that what is taught in public schools, they might begin to work to change things. My, wouldn’t that be a disaster?

It is my prayer that the Lord will direct and use the growing home school and Christian school movements for His glory–and to change those things in government and in our culture that need changing.