Wonderful column.  We don't need taxes (stolen money) to fund any schools.  Stolen money seems to corrupt and destroy everything it touches.

 Have you read Gatto's new book?  "Weapons of Mass Instruction".

If we could wake enough people up about the Poison Drops report and
the Pygmalion effect maybe we could end this evil nightmare.

The bureaucrats in the gov't schools very carefully brainwash most of
the "bad kids" to be bad. I watched it in MN, CO, AZ and NM.

My family and I went through hell in those schools.

You might read Poison Drops:
The report (Poison Drops) to the senate in 1885, said that gov't
school states had higher rates of crime, pauperism, mental illness,
and suicide than private school states, and the longer they had gov't
schools the higher the rates were
I see poison drops is back online:
at:http://books.google.com/ books?hl=en&id=A0VDAAAAIAAJ& dq=%22poison+drops%22& printsec=frontcover&source= web&ots=OtAI59EnXg&sig= fCcgYZYARFptb-grvpzadsvRVBI# PPA2,M1

Critics of the public schools, particularly in urban ghettos, have
long argued that many children fail to learn simply because their
teachers do not expect them to. That proposition is effectively
documented in a new book called Pygmalion in the Classroom (Holt,
Rinehart & Winston; $4.95). The book tells of an ingenious experiment
involving several teachers at a South San Francisco grade school who
were deceived into believing that certain of their students had been
spotted as "late bloomers." Eight months later, the children's
academic abilities showed dramatic improvement.
Friday, Sep. 20, 1968
http://www.time.com/time/ printout/0,8816,838752,00. html#
 

 "The original goal of compulsory public education was universal education."

No. It's worse than that. The original (explicit) goal of compulsory attendance statutes was religious indoctrination. Search " 'That Old Deceiver Satan' Act". The stated purpose of the first compulsory attendance statute in British North America was  not that children were not learning a trade, and not that children were not learning to read and compute, but that parents were not indoctrinating their children into the State religion. Later, when waves of Catholic immigrants to the post-Revolutionary US provoked an allergic reaction in the resident Protestant majority, legislatures switched from subsidizing church-operatd schools of the parents' choice to government-operated schools. The US "public" school system originated in anti-Catholic bigotry.