A summary of the debate here. Notice how insane this debate is. Here we have a state of 25 million people imposing an identical educational curriculum for everyone. Notice how no one ends up satisfied. Imagine your grocery store worked the same way. Everyone has an opinion about what deli meats and cheese should be standard fare. You form commissions to analyze the nutritional, social, educational, and health values of the foods – and then you vote on one meat and one cheese that will be served to everyone. You would consider that insane. But despite this being a reductio, it is not inconsistent with the way we organize public schools.
Free the schools from the public sector and parents and children will be free to craft curriculum that they support.
I would say that we should at least allow the local schools to determine their own curiculum, but I suspect that parents aren’t free to move their kids from their local school. I thought monopolies were supposed to be a bad thing? Strange how we fear big corporations for being monopolies, even when they are not, but so quickly work to give government monopolistic powers.
I have a friend who was a public-school manager (Superintendent) for many years, now retired. Twenty years ago and even now he goes ballistic whenever you suggest vourchers, and parents being in charge.
He jumps to home schooling, and how there are motorcycle bezerker gangs up in the hills, who want to drug their kids and take them all to their initiation rites where there is all kind of sex, cross burnings, and Charles Manson-like depravation. Who knows what these parents will do to their kids’ education? And how about the charter schools in Philadelphia (straw man) opening up a Night Club on the weekend? Unless you support every dime of your property taxes going to your local school district, you are a debaucherer and white slaver.
I will never change him, but I wish my parents had a few vouchers to pay for my private school, and I bet other parents today have the same wishes.
758454 661602We keep your page. Watch it offline again soon. Very interesting post. 690304