Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Killing Public Education

 Here's an article about the assault on public education -- which isn't really education anymore, just training.  And when you make "schools" a stultifying, often hazardous location with most of the same features as prisons, then the "compulsory" part of universal childhood education becomes a great deal more odious.  It puts children into a miserable place by force and then punishes them when they object.  That's a lousy way to make good citizens, but highly effective for making human livestock.
Tags: education, news
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  • 5 comments
cat_sanctuary

cat_sanctuary

December 30 2014, 23:17:31 UTC 6 years ago

But privatization, a.k.a. school choice, is what *protects* children from being punished for objecting to being miserable. I was *there*. I remember it well. When the local public school had a monopoly, I got hit for sitting up straight the way adults were always telling me to when a PMS'ing teacher screamed "Straighten up."
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

December 30 2014, 23:20:20 UTC 6 years ago

Having private schools means that rich kids have other options if the public schools suck and the private ones are better. But private schools also lack some protections that public schools have -- for instance, they can be religious schools bent on indoctrination rather than education. Or corporate ones. Destroying the secular, free, public schools is a problem for everyone.
cat_sanctuary

Re: Well...

cat_sanctuary

December 30 2014, 23:57:54 UTC 6 years ago

I'd agree that *destroying* the public schools would create a problem. I would not agree that school choice benefits only "the rich." We weren't rich; it was hard enough to scrape up the $500 for the HSI curriculum that my natural sister had to work with Paul Lindstrom's cheaper and very inferior homeschooling curriculum for a year or two. At least one of the two families that fought the original battle for school choice in Virginia, in 1980-82, was on food stamps at the time. (And both families were homeschooling--using Lindstrom's curriculum, yet!--because at that time "private school" was deliberately misread as code for "racially segregated school.")
cat_sanctuary

Re: Well...

cat_sanctuary

December 31 2014, 00:00:53 UTC 6 years ago

I think the public schools improved massively after teachers, principals, and school boards recognized that school choice was here to stay. For one thing, teachers who vented their feelings by hitting students were automatically retired...which had been David Peters' original goal. (David Peters was the accidental martyr for school choice in Virginia--he died, around the time of his thirteenth birthday, in an accident during the litigation process.)
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Well...

ysabetwordsmith

December 31 2014, 00:03:47 UTC 6 years ago

Studies show that, statistically speaking, private schools benefit children in proportion to the parents' wealth. It is also true, under the current system, that the most accurate predictor of children's future success has nothing to do with their own actions, but is again their parents' wealth. This bothers me a lot.