There is so much talk in the newspapers, especially here in Virginia,  about a War on Women. The Democrats have been very clever about turning Sandra Fluke's sex life into a so-called War on Women.

It's not just that Democrats took something and made it into a lot more. It's that there is a much more serious war going on in America. And the phrase "War on Women" suggested the obvious parallel phrase "War on Children."

At first, this phrase was a shock and almost painful to think. But everything that I've figured out about our public schools is very nicely summed up in those three words: war on children.

It starts in K and goes to 12. It's a sort of dumbing-down, if you like that phrase. One might also call it anti-education. One might call it systematic leveling. The people in charge (what I call the Education Establishment) are mostly some sort of socialist. For them it's an ideological given that children should be kept more or less equal. That's why these wannabe commissars are so effective and so dangerous.

 They don't think of themselves as destroying the minds and dreams of children. They think of themselves as building a brave new world, and if children have to be sacrificed to that dream, well, as the great Walter Duranty said, you can't make omelets without breaking some eggs.

 So they can happily promote educational methods that basically don't work, at least in an educational way. But they do work in a collectivist way. They make students more or less the same. That is, they make students mediocre.

 That's the vision that glows in the minds of our Education Establishment. All students hold hands and sing in gentle harmony. They play well together. The big enemy is individualism; it must be stamped out. Children must learn to be cooperative, not competitive.

Maybe if all children were more or less equal to begin with, this whole process wouldn't be so  destructive to most of them. Maybe if we didn't have any enemies in the world, we could get away with putting so much money and energy into social engineering.

The problem is, every child is different. They have hugely different potentials. We can't know what those potentials are unless we push them gently along. That approach is obviously best for each individual person.

Meanwhile, the world's gotten more complicated but the schools have gotten dumber. This just makes no sense to anyone (except our enemies).