I read with interest the article “Stitt makes education a priority at Inauguration,” which appeared in the Tulsa Beacon recently. I appreciate the governor’s passion to improve the public schools in Oklahoma and to attempt to get the schools ranked higher. However, even if he were to lead the way to make Oklahoma number one in the United States regarding education, Governor Stitt is on a fool’s errand.

The issue is this: Can anyone please show me in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the writings of the founding fathers where the education of children is a legitimate role for civil government? What I found was the following from James Wilson, who many suggest is the second most important framer of the Constitution:

It is the duty of parents to maintain their children decently, and according to their circumstances; to protect them according to the dictates of prudence; and to educate them according to the suggestions of a judicious and zealous regard for their usefulness, their respectability and happiness.—from his Lectures on Law

According to Wilson, the parents’ duty is to maintain, to protect, and to educate their children. The authority to educate anyone stems from the family unit, and any “public education” (falsely so-called), is illegitimate and is not derived from nature, but by force. One cannot simply reform or improve an illegitimate role of civil government.

Let me make it perfectly clear: the educational bureaucracy could not care less about any child’s education, whether the youngster is rich or poor. The governmental public school lives, moves, and has its being by acquiring more power to control—and not to educate. In addition to this, the various teacher unions have failed both teachers and students, because the unions exist for political reasons, motivated to undermine the entire system through Marxism. And yet we in Tulsa are always wondering why our money-devouring school system is producing such shallow, mediocre examples of humanity. Public education is the only business I know that the more it fails, the more money it receives.

Frankly, I wonder about the fitness of parents who willingly subject their precious children to Critical Race Theory, gender confusion, pornography, and a host of other evils prevalent in the schools that have no relationship to education whatsoever. Indeed, a case can be made that the current agenda in tax-supported schools is simply child abuse.

Parents in Tulsa, according to James Wilson, your duty is clear: take your children out of the public schools and educate them in the security of your own home.

Sincerely yours,

ROBERT W. WATSON