The Case Against Modern Schooling

how long does it take to grow up? —not as long as you think

Dear Friends,

I’ve been working on a consumption tax plan/model. I have several chapters close to completion, but every time I think I’m ready to start releasing them, I find myself having to answer a more fundamental question first.

Today’s “more fundamental question” was, how much schooling did the Signers of our Declaration get? We’ll get to the answer here shortly. But first . . .

As everyone knows, schools take up most of our taxes. And most of those taxes come from property tax, which, as you know, destroys home ownership, because every year you’re cutting government a fat check so you can continue to live in your home, whether it’s paid for or not. The effect is that you never own your home, or land. You rent it from government.

A Little History from AI

By the 1960s, Nebraskans were furious about high property taxes. In November 1966, Nebraska voters passed a constitutional amendment that abolished the statewide property tax entirely.

To replace the lost state revenue and fund state aid to schools, the Legislature passed the Nebraska Revenue Act of 1967, introducing the state income tax and sales tax. The deal was supposed to split the burden across a “three-legged stool”:

1. Sales tax (taxing consumption)

2. Income tax (taxing productivity)

3. Local property tax (strictly for local entities like school districts and county boards)

The Unintended Result

Instead of balancing the burden, local spending—particularly for public K–12 school districts, which account for roughly 60% of all property tax bills in Nebraska—grew faster than state aid could keep up [allegedly—you don’t often know what the state is doing with your money, nor your local political subdivisions, for that matter]. Because political subdivisions (counties, cities, community colleges, and school boards) retained the power to levy local property taxes, the property tax quickly grew back into the dominant tax burden in the state.

The core tension remains unchanged: as long as local governments can place a lien on real property for unpaid assessments (failure to pay your property tax bill), the title to land remains conditional on an annual payment to government bodies—which is precisely why alternatives like broad-based consumption taxes continue to gain traction among property rights advocates.

So who do our schools really serve and how many years did our brilliant Founding Fathers spend in school?

Here is your answer:

The Case Against Modern Schooling: What the Founders Teach Us About Human Potential

If you told Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin that the average American teenager in the 21st century would spend nearly two decades sitting behind a desk before being considered “ready” to enter society, they would likely view it not as progress, but as a tragic waste of human capacity.

The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence built a republic, mastered classical philosophy, established international trade networks, and altered the course of human history. Yet across the entire group, the average signer spent only seven to eight years in a classroom, completing their formal schooling by age 18. Benjamin Franklin had just two years of formal school. Thomas Jefferson completed his college degree in two years at age 19.

Their lives expose the single greatest lie of the modern educational apparatus: that time spent sitting in a classroom equals competence achieved.

1. The Factory Model vs. Human Mastery

The modern school system operates on a rigid, industrial factory model. Students are grouped strictly by birth year, marched through a mandated 13-year K–12 pipeline, and then pressured into another 4 to 8 years of higher education. Progress is measured by “seat-time”—how many hours a student remains sedentary in a room—rather than demonstrated mastery.

The Founders’ era understood what cognitive science still confirms today: learning happens best through active engagement and real-world application. In the 18th century, once a young person mastered core literacy and mathematics, they didn’t sit in a classroom for another decade to be bored by busywork. They entered the world. They read law under a mentor, apprenticed in a trade, ran farms, or managed shipping merchant offices. They were treated as capable adults during their peak developmental years, not as perpetual children.

2. High Cost, Zero Efficiency, and Chronic Boredom

Today, we spend tens of thousands of dollars per student annually in public education (according to AI the Total Annual K–12 amount in Nebraska is approximately $5.66 billion annually - $17,200 per student) while higher education saddles an entire generation with crippling debt. What are we buying with those trillions of dollars?

• Delayed Adulthood: We have artificially extended adolescence into a person’s mid-twenties, holding back energetic, capable young people from building real wealth, families, and independence.

• Mass Engagement Failure: By forcing every student through the exact same slow-paced, standardized curriculum regardless of their individual speed or interest, we inevitably produce disengagement, boredom, and anxiety.

• Administrative Bloat: School districts and universities have ballooned into massive bureaucratic structures where an ever-growing percentage of funding goes toward administration and system maintenance rather than actual learning.

3. Who Is the System Built For?

If a model costs an exorbitant amount of money, takes twice as long as necessary, bores the participants, and yields declining functional literacy, you have to ask a fundamental question: Whose interests are being served?

The modern educational system is no longer designed primarily for the learner. It has evolved into a self-preserving institution. It exists to maintain union contracts, justify administrative budgets, provide institutional custodial care, and preserve a multi-billion-dollar credentialing cartel. It values compliance over curiosity, and time-in-chair over real-world capability.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the American Model of Education

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence stand as historical proof that human beings do not need 16 to 20 years of standardized classroom confinement to do extraordinary things. They needed core foundational tools, access to books, real-world responsibility, and the freedom to advance as fast as their drive would carry them.

If we want to fix education, we don’t need more funding for administrative bloat, nor do we need longer school days. We need to dismantle the credentialing monopoly, abandon forced seat-time in favor of true competency, restore hands-on apprenticeships, and return education to what it was always meant to be: a launching pad for early independence, not an endless holding pen.

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We the People can change all of this, and more. With a Ballot Initiative.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness requires that we really own what we own (i.e., no annual property tax/rent payment), that we control the purse, that we control the growth of government, and only pay tax on what we choose to buy (necessities like food exempt . . . more on that in a later chapter.) A home is not a luxury.

Everyone knows that government wages have grown beyond the private sector. Wages, benefits, pensions, down time . . . all exceed the private sector. That’s why so many want a government job.

It’s time for the gravy train to end and We the People to take control.

God bless,

More to come,

Robert J Borer

P.S. I was one of seven children. My parents had nothing. I started working in grade school. Shoveling snow. Doing yard and garden work. Delivering newspapers.

We are not doing our kids any favors by sending them to “school.” We raised six kids. Homeschooled them all through at least 8th grade. Several through high school. The two who went to high school for four years graduated with 4.5 gpas. One that choose to continue educating himself at home through high school graduated from UNL with a 3.9 gpa in Electrical Engineering. The subject of his first formal class was Calc 2. He aced it. One of the biggest engineering firms in the world wanted to hire him, but upper management wasn’t ready. His intern boss said he could do more in three weeks with a computer than the previous guy could do in three months.

Read/watch anything by John Taylor Gatto. He was NYC and NYS Teacher of the Year in consecutive years in the early 90s. He said our schools were ruining our kids back then. Our schools are much worse now. That’s very obvious to anyone with half a brain.

Our schools are exactly what Rockefeller and company wanted: factory and food line workers.