There can come a point in a journey when a path becomes so tangled in thorns and thistles, so overgrown with weeds, that there is no clear way ahead. When you reach that point, it’s time to turn around.

Government schools were the creation of late 19th century “reformers” acting from the premise that everything works better if it’s centrally organized and planned. Some other creations arising from this premise include the Federal Reserve (which has evaporated 99% of the US dollar’s value since it took over), the Department of Agriculture (famous for paying farmers not to farm and the wholesale slaughter of livestock that was buried to keep it off the market) and the Food and Drug Administration (whose onerous, time-consuming testing requirements are said to have killed many multiples of the number of people the agency was supposed to save.)

Nothing much needed reforming in education; literacy was in the 90 percentile range, but that didn’t stop nascent bureaucrats from building careers for themselves on the foundation of their dubious premise.

Well, it’s gone from bad to worse ever since. How bad will it have to get before people will admit that the trip back to where they took the wrong turn will be easier than continuing to hack through the endless underbrush on this path to nowhere?