When A Homeschooler Runs the State Board of Education
Things get interesting:
Primary education in this country is an utter disgrace. That is the price of folly when Americans spend generations feeding a bloated, unionized educational aristocracy and refuses to hold this idiot leviathan accountable. Parents today have two choices: homeschool their kids or find a way to pay for private education of them. The third choice---no choice at all---is let the kids grow up to be morons.
If the government actually did the right thing for once and allowed private-schooling and home-schooling parents to put their education-oriented taxes toward the education of their own children, we would have a world class educational system overnight. Moreover, we'd put the idiocracy out of business and force the harmful useless to find other jobs, most likely other government jobs as they're simply not skilled enough for the private sector in any capacity.
The argument went: If parents want private schools, they should have to pay for them after taxes. And of course everyone should have to pay for public schools, even if they find what's being taught in said schools to be distasteful or offensive.
Precisely because they force everyone to pay for public schools, opponents of school choice ensure that they'll have to keep fighting to maintain the status quo. As Maguire's election shows, they could very well lose out to people who, if they were allowed to keep their money and make their own educational choices, would just as soon leave everyone else alone.
Homeschoolers, private-school parents, citizens without school-aged children -- all are taxpayers, and therefore all have the motivation and right to determine what happens in the public schools. You pay, you get a say. The same applies to believers in intelligent design, abstinence-only sex education, multiculturalism, gay rights, and all of the other hot button issues that cause constant turmoil in school systems all over the country.
Primary education in this country is an utter disgrace. That is the price of folly when Americans spend generations feeding a bloated, unionized educational aristocracy and refuses to hold this idiot leviathan accountable. Parents today have two choices: homeschool their kids or find a way to pay for private education of them. The third choice---no choice at all---is let the kids grow up to be morons.
If the government actually did the right thing for once and allowed private-schooling and home-schooling parents to put their education-oriented taxes toward the education of their own children, we would have a world class educational system overnight. Moreover, we'd put the idiocracy out of business and force the harmful useless to find other jobs, most likely other government jobs as they're simply not skilled enough for the private sector in any capacity.
Labels: Education
posted by Teflon at 6:13 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
We homeschool, but there is a third option -- supplement their public education. Which I guess is just a melding of public and home schooling, but it's what we did before we decided to just pull them out entirely.
You know, I fell into an education degree kind of by accident, but I did learn a thing or two about the system (imagine that). While I am in 100 percent agreement that the system is broken, I'm not convinced that it's because of the unionized system or the department of education. I say that because there are so many countries out there with strong, government-controlled systems of education and their primary ed rocks. I'm thinking specifically of German and Japan.
Our main problem, I think, is that we keep lowering our standards to incorporate the lowest common denominator, which is the quickest kind of entropy. There's got to be a national standard. But I'm all for spreading the wealth when it comes to tax monies.
Then, of course, there's the case in Germany where the state is seizing kids from homes where the families homeschool--all because they fear the kids are getting a subversive education? I don't get it, but then again, I keep thinking there's no way the U.S. government is trying to supplant the family, either.
Cullen, your response demonstrates the difference between the private and public sector.
When speaking of clear nonperformance in education, the private sector says, "Wrong leaders, wrong teachers---fix this."
The public sector says, "Well, you can't expect us to educate THESE kids." That's the crux of the "lowest common denominator" you reference, and is typical of the public sector in every denominator save the military.
We spend too much money on education to let teachers and administrators make excuses, or to let the teacher's union obstruct reform.
We are a nation of morons. Anyone can test this assertion for themselves simply by looking at their own parents' and grandparents' report cards. My father, who barely finished high school, had a better education in many ways than I did getting a B.S. from a service academy (and make no bones about the fact that a service academy undergraduate degree is the very best offered in the States). I was likewise educated in the public school system for my primary education.
I don't think the rise of teacher's unions had nothing to do with the degradation of American primary education. Unions exist to jack up wages and prevent accountability for union members. That is precisely what teacher's unions have done, and do.
True education reform is impossible as long as teacher's unions exist.
Given the sorry state of our public schools, Americans who care about the quality of their kids' education will continue to avoid them by any means necessary, including private and homeschooling. The cost of having your child be an uneducated fool is simply too high to do otherwise.
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