The
Simple-Ideas Occasional
A publication dedicated to the study and celebration
of com m on se nse an d repe atable ex perim ents
Education Finance? My Grandpa Would know . . .
Recent newsworthy stories c oncerning Kansas sch ools
have chronicled the acts of judges who legislate from the
bench for the p urpo se of influencing the financing of state
schools. Legislators and regulators on taxpayer funded
payro ll have debated the teaching of biological sciences
on several occasions spanning decades. A recent
“buzz-news” item suggests schools should be compelled
to spend some minimum percentage of total budget on
teachers and supp lies: The 65% solution?, Wichita Eagle,
08/14/05.
As the latest discussion heats up, we’ll no doubt read that
some individuals champion a 68% level while others may
suggest that 63% is “sufficient.” These discussions are
classic examples of single issue decision making by
committee and/or judicial dictate where the true mission is
obscured in an emotional fog of no-value-added debate.
Permit me to elaborate.
My grandfather moved to Kansas early in the last century
and set up shop in Wichita as a carpenter. He became a
successful nurseryman, contractor and farmer and did
quite well. I’ve often hypothesized about what my
grandfather would say if he ob served the endless
bureaucra tic agonizing over features in our state’s
educational system. I think I know.
He would remind me that to build a house, you first lay a
foundation. You add floor joists, and walls on top. Rafters
and roofing goes on next along with siding, wallboard,
windows and do ors. These fund amental compo nents of a
house should be the very best you know how to do. The
goal is to produce a structure that will stand the test of
time and b e serviceable perhaps 100 years from now. He
would advise that decisions about carpet versus wood
floors, plywood versus oak cabinets, central vacuum
systems, swimming pools, and the like are not fundamental
to the builder’s craft. These are features that will come and
go over the lifetime of the house depend ing on willingness
and ability of the owner.
Grandpa would caution that compromise of the
fundamentals in favor of transient options puts the entire
Copyright © 2009 by Robert L. Nuckolls, III. This document may be reproduced in any form or venue when authorship is
properly cited and the work is not exploited for the purpose of securing a profit or obscuring context.
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Robert L. Nuckolls, III
Medicine Lodge, KS
Number 100, Revision A, August 29, 2010
project at risk. One can spend up to half the value of the
house to replace a faulty foundation. A roof that collapses
under a snow load will be expensive to repair in addition
to destruction of contents by expo sure to the elements.
These simple-ideas are ingredients that go into a recipe for
success. The same simple-ideas are equally applicable to
taxpayer financed discussions amongst those who claim
to have great concern for our children’s future. T heir
debates invariab ly move toward compromise – a
“solution” that upse ts the le ast number of debaters. My
grandpa would be astounded at the idea of setting some
arbitrary fraction a total budget to finance fundamentals of
the task at hand. The funds you have are the funds you
have. Grandpa wo uld tell us that the mission is to first do
the best you know how to do with the assets available..
Lay foundations having a promise of enduring service.
You first assign ALL of those funds as need ed to
successfully achiev e fund ame ntal requ ireme nts.
Fund amentals must come first and only then are you are
free to spend what’s left over on transient amen ities.
Supp ose the latest deliberations by our esteemed pub lic
educators set the “magic” allocation of teacher and
supplies funds at 67%. What would this guarantee?
Applying a similar “magic” number in the building of
houses could mean that some houses have hot tubs but
only three walls. Suppo se the 67% compromise produces
really nice looking brick houses that crumble in a few
years because the foundations were too thin?
May I suggest that “comp romise” is one of the ugliest
words in the English language when it describes a sacrifice
of fundamentals in favor of upsetting the least number of
people. No netheless, every decision by bureaucra tic
committee has and will continue to offer up endless
streams of compromise.
It’s interesting to note that cost to taxpayers for U.S.
schools continues to climb while they produce students
with declining stature among their peers worldwide. Too
many of our children know how to put a condom on a
banana, organize a letter writing crusade to protect the
yellow-bellied tree frog, and express themselves with art
. . . but are unable to read, write, or solve a elementary
algebra problem.
My grandpa could tell us exactly how this happened. He
would suggest that we’ve arrived at this sorry state
because parents have lost control of the Prime Directive in
child raising. It is the p arent’s d uty to educate their
children for transition from a state of dependency-and-
fear-of-punishment to a state of self-sufficiency-and-
understanding with skills and attitudes that maximize
prob ability of success as honorable citizens.
The endless parade of discussions to slice and dice every
non-issue down to its m ost trivial co mpo nent is a terrible
distraction from the real mission of any educational
endeavor:
• Bring capable teachers together with willing
stude nts so that the exploration and
understanding of simple-ideas can be exchanged.
The well-founded graduate will have both oppo rtunity and
capability to indulge them selves in the acq uisition of solid
oak cabinets and nice cars to store in attached, three-car
garages. But lacking fundamentals, their lives will be a
repeating experience of trying to recover from personal
decay and collapse precipitated by their compromised
education.
These goals are obviously not the focus of legislators,
judges and administrators who have hijacked parental
control over the education of our children. W hen seductive
government offers to take on the task of education, the
student falls prey to the real mission of government
schools.
150 years ago, Fred eric B astiat wro te abo ut his
observations of the huma n condition and took sp ecial no te
of that bright star on the western Atlantic, the United
States of America. In his pamphlet entitled, “The Law” he
makes note of a long standing practice of legislators to
take over the education of children wherein he wrote:
On an u ncultivated island that you are
populating with children, you need do
nothing but let the seeds of truth germ inate
along with the development of reason.... But
when you resettle a nation with a past into a
new country, the skill of the legislator rests in
the policy of p erm itting the people to retain
no injurious opinions and customs which can
possibly be cured and corrected. If you desire
Copyright © 2009 by Robert L. Nuckolls, III. This document may be reproduced in any form or venue when authorship is
properly cited and the work is not exploited for the purpose of securing a profit or obscuring context.
2
to prevent these opinions and customs from
becoming perm anen t, you will secure the
second generation by a general system of
pub lic education for the children. A prince or
a legislator should never establish a colony
without first arranging to send wise men
alon g to instruct the youth...
A diligent student of history and skilled organizer of
simple-ideas, Bastiat accurately identifies the risks of
turning education of any citizen over to the will of the
legislature. He points out two centuries ago that the goal
of a legislato r is not to cultivate individuals disp osed to
honorable, liberty loving behavior and armed with
understanding of fundamentals. He suggests (and history
demo nstrates) that the legislator’s fon dest wish is to mo ld
society into docile, mallea ble sub jects co mpliant with the
law giver’s every whim . He corre ctly suggests that it takes
but a few generatio ns to achieve the idealized state of
public acquiescence if not dedicated obedience. One needs
only to achieve command and control over the nation’s
schools.
M y grandpa never made it past grade scho ol but ultimately
achieved his GED . If he were alive today, it’s a certainty
that he would be disheartened by the present state of
public educ ation. H e would be astou nded that Congress
finds it necessary to craft law like “No Child Left Behind”.
NCLB is equivalent to a law like “No Car Left
Un-repaired”, or a “Healthy Foods in Restaurants Act”. It
is a sad if not dangero us time when givers of law find it
necessary or even useful to regulate both quantity and
quality of any product while simultaneously subsid izing its
cost of pro duction. W hen go vernm ent inserts itself into
the supplier/consumer relationship of honorable citizens
the outco me is alw ays fraught with failure and unintended
conseq uences. There is no agency or activity of
government filtered thro ugh the free-ma rket of liberty
loving people. It follows that No Child Left Behind had no
higher probab ility of success than thousands o f similarly
unconstitutional bits of legislation. It served only to allow
an increasingly statist congress to drive one more tiny
wedge into liberty and freedom.
Like every other manner in which government has taken
over a segm ent of our lives, education is doomed to the
same future as the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare,
W elfare, Amtrak, etc. etc. The costs of all these endeavors
is spiraling upward while dwindling quantity of availab le
service becom es rationed as q uality of service degrades.
The hijacking of education is more onerous and evil than
any and all other endeavors of governmen t. The
incompetence of government in the management of
education is toxic to the hum an’s ability and willingness to
be independent, free, productive and prosperous members
of a liberty-loving culture. An ignorant, dependent and
incompetent populace threatens to return our economy and
living standards b ack hund reds of years. W orse yet, it
makes our nation vulnerable to attack from interest outside
our borders that would be delighted to make Chinese,
Farse, or perhaps Russian the national language.
One cannot replace experience and comm on sense with
policies and procedures. One cannot replace the
parent-student-teacher relationship with laws, judicial
fiat, and boards of education. My under-educated,
common-sense grandpa could and would offer simple,
high-value, no-charge advice that a room full of bickering
comprom isers will never understand - much less achieve.
Robert Heinlein, an astute observer and analyst of the
human condition once wrote:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal
condition of man. Advan ces which perm it this
norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now
and then -- are th e wo rk of an extrem ely
sm all minority, frequently despised, often
condemned, and almost always opposed by all
right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny
m inority is kept from creating, or (as
sometimes happ ens) is driven out of a society,
the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck".
W hile the bureaucrats and politicians attribute the fall of
a nation to bad luck, I’ll suggest that it simply a matter of
getting what we voted for and then financed. That’s the
true irony of what we’re witnessing in the United States
today. The very folks who made this country the political
and economical miracle of the 18 th and 19 th centuries are
now paying for their own destruction and rewarding the ir
tormentors hand somely to bo ot!
W hether one coaches basketball, builds houses, or raises
children only those who understand and embrace liberty,
Copyright © 2009 by Robert L. Nuckolls, III. This document may be reproduced in any form or venue when authorship is
properly cited and the work is not exploited for the purpose of securing a profit or obscuring context.
hono rable behavior and a knowledge of fundam entals
(simple-ideas) will be those who ones who succeed in the
creatio n of wealth and ever expanding opp ortunity.
The burden imposed by can’t-do individuals (politicians
and their obedient constituents) is becoming so great upon
those who can do, they will soon be unable to sustain the
whole. That is the time we can look forward to total
economic collapse of a once great nation.
M y grand pa would tell us that the b lame rests totally in the
laps of parents who brought new citize ns into the world
and then allowed them to become the clay from which
legislators are molding a compliant nation. After two
generations of paternal malfeasance, the government
schools have broken the bond to enlightenment. As
products of government educational poison, modern
parents do not know what they do not know.
Should efforts to correct his horrible condition become a
threat to statists and law-givers, those who agree with my
grand pa’s assessment will become targets of abuse and
perhaps even force of retaliatory law.
But my grandp a’s logic is unassailable. Houses nor
nations will stand the test of time and human shortcomings
unless they stand upon solid foundations. The nations
foundation is its liberty-loving citizens. The future of our
nation is dep endent on us and our children ’s ability to
overcome the evils of an honor less, self-serving
government that seeks an ever growing power over our
lives.
If you are a parent and you would like for your children to
be one of H einlein’s ca pab le mino rity, then the way is
clear. The solution is total divorce from government
schools that are and will forever be mired in debate and
comp romise over percentages, processes, curriculum,
social issues, union rules and obedience to government
while remaining purposefully ignorant of the duty of
honora ble and capable parents, teachers and students.
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