The first American Revolution officially began on July 4th, 1776, when the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. And it didn’t end until 1781, when General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and the Treaty of Paris was signed with Great Britain in 1783. In other words it took seven years of hard struggle before the colonists could become the free and sovereign United States of America.
At first the new government was ruled by the Articles of Confederation, ratified by the states in 1781, which provided virtually no power to the central government. The leaders of the new confederation then decided to construct a more efficient and viable form of government under a new Constitution. The result was a federal republic in which power was effectively separated into three branches: the Executive headed by a President, the Legislative composed of a Congress with a Senate and a House of Representatives, and the Judiciary, a federal court system headed by the Supreme Court.
Thus was formed a government of limited powers in which the basic freedoms of American citizens were constitutionally protected against encroachment by any branch of government. All of this worked fairly well until the turn of the last century when socialists began a long-range conspiracy to change America from a constitutional republic with limited powers into a European style parliamentary social democracy with unlimited powers, thus abolishing our God-given individual liberties. This was done through incremental steps that expanded the power of the federal government in all areas
Which brings us to the present. The socialists finally took complete legislative power in Washington with the election of Barack Obama as President and a Democrat-controlled Congress. Their plan was to end our constitutional republic. But what the socialists didn’t count on was the rising up of the majority of the American people in opposition to their scheme. That uprising became the Tea Party Movement, made up of ordinary and extraordinary Americans who are determined to restore America’s form of government to what the Founding Fathers gave us.
And in November 2010 the Tea Partiers gained control of the House of Representatives, marking the beginning of their counter-revolution. But the socialist revolutionaries used the lame-duck Congress to push through as much of their agenda as possible.
What should the Tea Partiers do when they take their seats in Congress today? First, they must repeal all of the socialist legislation that virtually ended our constitutional republic. This initial effort may be vetoed by our Alinsky-trained President. But in 2012 the Tea Partiers may be able to get rid of this Marxist revolutionary at the top. Next, they must begin to dismantle all of those federal departments and bureaucracies created by previous liberal administrations to expand the control of government over the lives and activities of the American people. But where to start? A good place to start is by abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 via the Department of Education Organization Act, approved by a liberal Congress.
Actually, a Department of Education had been created in 1867, but a year later was reduced to a mere Office collecting education statistics, a minor bureau in the Department of the Interior. In 1939, the bureau was transferred to the Federal Security Agency where it became known as the Office of Education.
Upgrading the Office of Education into a cabinet level department was opposed by Republicans who saw the department as unconstitutional since the Constitution didn’t even mention education. But when Ronald Reagan became President in 1981 and tried to abolish the department, he was prevented by a Democrat-dominated House of Representatives. He was also sabotaged by his own RINO statists.
During the 1980s, the abolition of the ED, as it is now called, was part of the Republican Party platform, but President George H. W. Bush declined to implement the idea. In 1996, the Republican Party made abolition of the department a cornerstone of their campaign promises, calling it an unconstitutional federal intrusion into local, state, and family affairs. The GOP platform stated:
The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.
During Bob Dole’s run for the presidency in 1996, he promised to abolish the ED. And in 2000, the Republican Liberty Caucus passed a resolution to abolish the Department.
But when George W. Bush became president, instead of initiating an effort to abolish the department, he joined with liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy to enact the No Child Left Behind act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 passed by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society administration.
It was George W. Bush’s big government Republicanism that disillusioned many conservatives with the GOP and led to the election of Barack Obama. But what makes the abolition of the Department of Education much more possible now are two things: the huge federal debt and the need to cut the cost and size of government; and the fact that the department has not improved education. In fact, it has made it worse.
Indeed, it was Charlotte Iserbyt, a former Senior Policy Advisor in the Department of Education during the Reagan years, who blew the whistle on the ED’s nefarious activities by writing the Deliberate Dumbing Down America, based on documentation she found in the Department‘s own files. In her expose she proved that the Department was financing the dumbing down of Americans through grants to socialist academics in our universities. In other words, the Department of Education had become destructive of the American mind, and therefore should have long been abolished for that reason alone. (Iserbyt’s book can now be downloaded free of charge on the Internet.)
So there is now more than enough evidence that the Department of Education is a destructive force with power to dictate what goes on in American schools. The sooner it is gotten rid of, the sooner Americans will be able to achieve one of the Tea Party’s chief goals: a free nation, enjoying the benefits of educational freedom, without federal control over our schools.
Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of nine books on education including NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, The Whole Language/OBE Fraud, and The Victims of Dick & Jane and Other Essays. Of NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, former U.S. Senator Steve Symms of Idaho said: “Every so often a book is written that can change the thinking of a nation. This book is one of them.” Mr. Blumenfeld’s columns have appeared in such diverse publications as Reason, The New American, The Chalcedon Report, Insight, Education Digest, Vital Speeches, WorldNetDaily, and others.
