My wife and I have friends in Belgium. We have visited there many times. One of our friends has a daughter we have known since she was two and who is now twenty. I walked her to school one morning and stayed with her until the teachers gathered all the kids up and took them inside. The building was like any other commercial property on the street except it had a play yard.
When I got back, I commented that Yasmine was lucky to have a school so close and her mother told me she picked that school because it was close and Yasmine liked it. Apparently, citizens in Belgium can pick and choose the school where their kids go.
Imagine the horror that would ensue in the American government school monopoly if that was true here?
If you have a child who is not performing in the short amount of the critical learning time he will be required to attend a government school – America’s professional teachers, administration, and other monopolists will not let him go.
My wife and I were picked up at the train station by another friend. She had three little boys we then picked up at school. The oldest was about eight. I sat in the back of the van with the boys until we got to their house. When we stopped, I opened the sliding van door and jokingly said, “Out you go ladies.” One of them piped up, “We are not ladies!” Until that point, I had not suspected they spoke English. I should have known because other kids we met spoke Flemish, French, and English at very young ages.
How these little kids could have learned to speak several languages, read, write, and do the math, was beyond me because I saw their school as well. It had a two-inch wear mark in the granite step outside. It was a stone building. I asked our friend how old the building was. She said it was about 300 years old, like the neighborhood.
How could that possibly be?
It flies in the face of American Government School Monopoly mantra.
In a real socialist country like Belgium, you can pick a better school if yours is not working well. And you don’t need a brand new $30 million sports complex with a library to educate the children.
Why we let so many kids down just to keep this system going boggles the mind. But we do it “for the children.” No, I didn’t misspell it. This how we pronounce the word now.
