This is a continuation of a multi-part series.
11. ESA’s (Education Subsidy Accounts) more Behavioral Conditioning, deception, theft and cognitive dissonance.
Education Subsidy Accounts (ESA’s,) Education Scholarship Accounts, and Education Savings Accounts (the deception label,) expand the role of government regulation, funding, dependency, and inflation into the lives of recipients, vendors, service providers, taxpayers, and current public education on all levels. ESA’s create yet another bureaucracy and bureaucratic demand for standardized content, assessments, testing and third-party accountability measures, as a result of yet, another government redistribution scheme of taxpayer monies.
This scheme is a ubiquitous example of Behavioral Science’s Operant Conditioning, again under the guise of free choice and ‘benevolence.’ “Let us help you get what you have coming to you….and we’ll show you where to spend it.”
This scheme, like most education schemes in the past, does not originate with the parents, but with those who seek to gain from government funded redistribution programs and dependence on those programs. This scheme does not advance, as their propaganda states, “free-market” competition. In order to have a free-market competition, one must use one’s own resources. A free market does not exist in any market in which the competitors are funded by the endless pocket book of the government; the government which taxes taxpayers directly and indirectly to fund its redistribution schemes. (That is the definition of socialism: Government control of production and distribution of goods, services and ideas.)
a. Whose money is it?
These ESA accounts are NOT being filled with personal savings monies, but are created, out of thin air, using taxpayer monies! Read as digital illusions tracked on digital accounts. Creating ‘money,’ even digital “money,” causes inflation of costs to all and reduces the value of all other money and savings. 
b. More Shackles and Submission
“Free” money treats are placed in education doggie bowl accounts in exchange for submission to regulations such as registration with governing authorities; registration in and subsequent withdrawal from public school within designated time frame; private school accreditation, curriculum approval, assessment testing, expenditure documentation submission via specified modality, submission schedule, provider certification, vendor certification, and various sundry ‘accountability’ measures as the redistributors and planners arbitrarily desire.
Considering the Josephson Institute of Ethics ongoing survey results of students who lie, cheat and steal to get the grade on tests or be ‘successful’, and then as adults continue in their pattern of fallen ethics into their adult professions; perhaps, it is no wonder these adults marketing ESA accounts continue in their conditioned patterns of deception, avarice, and taxpayer theft in order to be successful in the goals of their paymasters.
c. Opt-Out….but now, Opt-In? Cognitive Dissonance from the “experts.”
Don’t eat butter! Eat margarine. Hydrogenation is bad, so yes, eat butter. Don’t eat raw foods; pasteurization kills the bacteria; and the digestive enzymes, too. Oops, buy into the raw dairy herd. Don’t eat wheat or dairy, or corn or soy, or palm oil, or GMO, or shellfish, or sugar, or anything, unless it’s stamped ‘fair trade,’ and non-GMO, and kosher. And, make certain your foods don’t leave any footprints on the planet. If folks just stop eating, there won’t be any footprints. (See what happened to food when the government subsidized farming and crop insurance?)
Just as the latest incomplete ‘research’ pumps the pedals of the food marketeers; what is being pushed one season by the education ‘reformers’ is a complete opposite of what was parroted the previous season. Notice that the very same groups of education experts who lead the Ed Subsidy Account (ESA) crusade, which will require assessment testing are the very same crusaders who polished the verbiage and equipped parents to use their weapon of opting-out of testing and assessments of the government subsidized public education.
Yes, to recap— those very same folks who pushed the “Opt-out” of testing, assessments, college placements tests for data tracking reasons, are now advocating ESA’s which will require testing, assessments, registration and more data-tracking.
No wonder the herd is so weary of being stampeded from one canyon to the other; and the young bucks hardened, cynical and survival-oriented.
d. “School Choice” double-speak.
Many of the same groups that promote ESA’s have done this utilizing another deceptive double speak public relations phrase, that of “School Choice.” To the innocent person, the phrase means just what the words say, and what we have always had: the choice of who should fund and direct the education of our child. This choice still exists. Parents may choose privately-funded education or government taxpayer-funded education.
The double speak is that the groups pushing ESA’s use the term “School Choice” to mislead the innocent, while at the same time create legislation that will expand the role of taxpayer-funded government subsidy into private education resulting in placing private education under government control. To do so, will reduce the available options of truly private education. Parents and consumers will, directly and indirectly, subsidize, not only the latest taxpayer-funded scheme but, as more folks are behaviorally conditioned to accept government education entitlement accounts, it will make it more difficult for privately funded education to compete with the market inflation caused by the government’s introduction of “free” ESA money.
Recent evidence of these crippling costs exists in the school voucher program which has escalated the costs to formerly privately-funded religious schools. These schools now find their costs tripled to meet the plethora of demands that the voucher program participation requires such as additional testing, assessments, curriculum, facilities, technology, accreditation, teacher training, additional administrators, software etc.
e. Taxpayer and consumer theft. There is no free lunch and no free service.
Theft is defined as taking something that belongs to another without their consent.
Every consumer is a taxpayer. While not every consumer files a personal income tax return, every consumer who purchases anything, does pay tax. It is these consumer taxes that fund the government and its dependency redistribution schemes.
This ESA scheme follows the same pattern of government expansion, dependency, and control as evidenced in healthcare, healthcare insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, disability benefits, old age insurance, college loan subsidy, agriculture subsidy, industry bailouts, child welfare, mortgage insurance, and the array of tax deferred, government regulated invested accounts such as: 401 K, IRA, SIMPLE, FSA, HSA, 529, ESA, …blah, blah, blah.
Just because something is permitted, promoted, partially-funded or favored via government redistribution of taxpayer funds does not mean that it is right, just or beneficial for anyone. Abortion, which goes by another ‘choice’ mantra, is a clear example of what happens to a society that succumbs to operant conditioning of the masses, fashioning the masses to dispose of people like day-old bread. There is no ‘free’ service; millions of individuals have had to pay for these services with their tax dollars, while millions more have paid for them with their lives. So much for ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
f. Bogus benevolence.
“The least amount of care is given when spending other people’s money on other people.” ~ Economist Milton Friedman who wrote entire books based on this truism.
The middlemen, promoters of any government redistribution scheme whether it be special accounts, favors, tax deferment, tax-exemption, loans, grants, credits, subsidies, insurances etc. etc. practice behavioral science’s mental gymnastics in attempts to market these schemes as benevolent intentions. They are NOT.
It is never humane or charitable to condition a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, nor is it benevolent to remove an individual’s liberty by coercing them into dependence upon others. Nor is it benevolent to redistribute the resources of others without their consent.
If one desires to be benevolent or charitable to others, then one ought to follow the directives pronounced by God and let Him distribute appropriate rewards.
“Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. If you do you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Jesus Christ, as recorded by Matthew 6:1-4
If one desires to be benevolent, then one is to use one’s own personal resources, eliminating the middlemen who forge the shackles of dependence on the socialist welfare state.
So, to all those who promote more redistribution schemes using other peoples’ money to supposedly benefit others, we say,
“Do your own good deeds, using your own resources and leave each of us to use our own resources to do our own benevolence.
We will each keep our own accountability to God and not require the services of any middlemen, nor will we feed the leviathan of bureaucracy which consumes the lives, the liberties, the consciences and the pursuits of individual happiness.”
Partial Resources:
*Beyond Smarter, by Reuven Feuerstein (1921-2014). Professor Feuerstein, developmental, clinical and cognitive psychologist coined the term neuroplasticity,prior to the advent of functioning MRI’s that provide proof of this ongoing structural change in the brain.
Professor Feuerstein, a profoundly gifted, insightful and deeply religious Jew, recognizing that man is created in the image of G-d, and to be respected as such; was vehemently opposed to the use of computers, digital software, artificial intelligence and the like, in the teaching of human beings.
Shmuel Feuerstein, Biblical and Talmudic Antecedents of Mediated Learning Experience
Lord Acton, Essays on the history of Liberty
E.B. Ashton, The Fascist, His State, His Mind
Milton Friedman, Free to Choose
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
J.S. Mill, On Liberty
Daniel Siegel, The Neurobiology of We
Vladamir Turchenko, The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Revolution in Education
Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
E. G. West, Education and the State, A Study in Political Economy
Dr. Dawn Kazmierzak has over twenty years in private practice Optometry. Academic stickers include majors in biology, neurobiology, neuroscience, visual science, doctorate of Optometry; post-graduate work for SUNY and West Point (USMC) in developmental and hospital-based Optometry; cognitive science Feuerstein trained in Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) and FIE (Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment). Having been transmitted a love of learning and commitment to discerning the truth from her parents, she and her husband labor to model this transmission to their daughter.
It was (and is,) the anchors of faith in Christ and Biblical study that shielded Dawn from the operant conditioning that accompanies academic “successes.” These studies and stickers (degrees, certifications) were chosen in preparation for participation in third-world medical missions. If individuals lack the abilities to see, it is very difficult to teach themselves, grow in their faith, or provide for their families. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18 This applies to physical, cognitive(mental) and spiritual ‘sight.’
You, as a homeschool parent, do not need all these stickers to transmit truth to and equip your child for their future; but, in my opinion, one does need a relationship with The Author, who defines what is true, right and just. Genesis 18:19. This relationship will provide all you need.
Blessings on your transmissions of your culture!
Absolutely Excellent! Encore!
Agreed, Amen!