carlsonjok
Posts: 3326
Joined: May 2006
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| Quote (philbert @ Mar. 10 2008,05:19) | | Carlson, you're again conflating the issues here. There's a world of difference between questions about the "quality" (vaguely defined, but yes, I know what you mean) of public versus private education (on averages, of course), and questions about the content, which is the actual issue here. |
You were the one that brought into the conversation the notion that private schools should be closed and the money used to support them should be plowed back into the public system in hopes to improve it. If you are backing off of that position now, fine. But, you become guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater if your main motivation is curriculum. If we take the statistics in Blipey's post as accurate, there are almost an identical number of students in secular private schools as there are in parochial schools. Further, many of those parochial schools (at a minimum, those run by a Catholic diocese) do not teach nonsense in place of science. That you are willing to close all such schools because some may be teaching nonsense is classic overreach: designing an entire system to solve a limited problem.
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What the hell would I be accomplishing by closing the public (I think you mean private - c) schools, but allowing parents to continue hiring private tutors (etc.)? Well, I'd be making sure that all children, regardless of who happened to be their parents, were exposed to a non-indoctrinating curriculum. |
Defined by whom? Some legion of bureaucrats designing a one size fits all curriculum for children they don't know? What this comes down to is you don't approve of what people maybe teaching their children and are looking for means to wrest that decision from them. My first goal in any political discussion is to figure out who's ox is being gored and who is doing the goring. After that, the analysis is trivial. There is a fine line between ensuring uniformity and inculcating conformity. I wouldn't trust anyone to tread that line for my (hypothetical) children and, I am willing to bet if dropped in rural Alabama, neither would you.
| Quote | | Quote (carlsonjok @ Mar. 09 2008,22:11) |
Individual freedom is at the core of the American character. It is at the heart of the reason we told George III to go fuck himself. We Americans prefer to make our own decisions regarding what is best for ourselves rather than deferring them to some faceless bureaucrat who is only intent on enforcing regression to the mean.
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What about the freedom of the children? What happened to that? Suddenly the content of their education is entirely the result of the lottery of which set of parents they were born to? How affirming of their future freedom is that, exactly? |
In aggregate, poverty and ignorance are intractable problems. At the individual level, they are not. Two of our own esteemed moderaters (Hi, Lou! Hey, Steve!) managed to rise above a fundamentalist educations and/or anti-intellectual upbringings. Others do, as well. Many don't, but still become upstanding, contributing members of society. And that is what it comes down to for me. Education is about developing the set of skills necessary to create productive members of society.
If parents want to teach their children that they didn't come from no munkeys, so what? So long as they don't force our children to learn that (corruption of public policy is an area I suspect we agree on), in the end it just doesn't matter. Science, and it's impact on society, has advanced, and will continue to advance, without universal acceptance of evolution. Society will continue to function, and thrive, regardless whether the electrican wiring my house, or the lawyer drafting my contracts, believes the world is 6000 years old or 4.6 billion. For the vast majority of us, evolution just doesn't intersect with our role in society and your desire to take control of a child's education away from the parents is just your own version of "won't somebody please think of the children."
I have heard fundamentalists described, with tongue firmly in cheek, as someone who is excessively worried that someone, somewhere might just be having fun. I can't help but see something similar here. You are so concerned that someone, somewhere may be teaching nonsense that you are willing to force everyone into the same mediocre system to keep that from happening. And extract the money from them to fund a miniscule improvement in that level of mediocrity. How many do you suppose you have to drag down for each you save? Is there a point where the mathematics no longer balances?
| Quote | | Make all the decisions you like about "what is best for [y]ourselves". Just don't pretend that your children are yourselves. They aren't your property. They're citizens, too. You shouldn't be free to subject them to "educational" curricula that conform to your religious beliefs - and they're too young to make rational decisions about their own, yet. |
What is bizarre is that you wish to substitute a scheme where children are the government's property and it is up to the government to decide what is best for them.
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It's natural to be curious about our world, but the scientific method is just one theory about how to best understand it. We live in a democracy, which means we should treat every theory equally. - Steven Colbert, I Am America (and So Can You!)
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