Dear Editor:

Everyone should agree on the importance of giving our children the best education possible. Nature has provided a window of critical time in learning during the time the prefrontal cortex is transitioning to the adult brain. Our country’s education system recognized this and emphasized the importance of early education. Vladimir Lenin’s “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted” is a more sinister recognition of the same window.

Now it seems we are in a battle for control of those developmental years. The value was recognized by Lenin and later by Hitler with his implementation of Kindergarten and the Hitler Youth Movement. Both represent Marxism, one being Communism, the other its twin, Socialism. It is a softer battle today.

The Federal Government, the Department of Education with national standards and mandates, the teachers union, and now the FBI are facing off against parents and children who believe in their right to make personal choices in education. It wasn’t always this way.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1916. In 1960 only about one third of U.S. teachers were unionized. The Department of Education, as a Cabinet-level department, began operating in 1980. So, what have the federal government and the teacher’s union done for our children’s education in the past 40 years? In this writer’s opinion, it has been a disaster. Grades are falling and our children are suffering. Chicago and Baltimore made the news last week. Two quotes, “Chicago Democrat sounds alarm as 55 schools report no proficiency in math or reading” and “An analysis of (MCAP) test results revealed that not a single student in 23 Baltimore schools was proficient in math at their grade level.”

I would like to include Maine’s scores, but Maine received a federal waiver exempting it from the reporting requirement and is not reporting results. Ever the skeptic, I wonder why. Do they think we can’t handle the truth or that we would not like the results? I think the latter.

Joe Grant

Wiscasset