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Sunday, November 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The difference between 'socialism,' 'sharing'

A government schoolteacher showed up at a talk I gave to an adult education class last month at the UNLV. By the time she raised her hand, she had a list. Her objections were so predictable I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a prepared script.

"When you say the government schools, do you mean the free public schools?" she asked.

I asked if the teacher worked for free. She did not. Nor do the school's librarians, administrators, bus drivers, or the carpenters and roofers who built the place. A county school system that now costs $3.3 billion per year (they always try to bury the $800 million annual interest on the construction bonds) is hardly "free."

"It's free for the children who go there," the teacher insisted.

Can anything mandatory really be called "free"? Were the prospective inmates of Sobibor glad to learn there'd be no admission charge? But even in the purely financial meaning, the parents of these children actually pay an amount in school taxes approximately equal to what they'd spend on private schooling or group home-schooling, were we to lose the mandatory government youth propaganda camps and revert to a free market in education. Total costs of any previously socialized endeavor tends to drop to about one-third when you get government out of the loop.

"I'd like to know what the difference is between what you call `socialism' and `sharing,' " the increasingly upset teacher snapped, her voice straining with emotion.

When a teacher gathers up all the children's privately purchased school supplies, pools them and announces they are now available for communal use -- as parents tell me is now routine -- coercion is in play. That teacher may not literally hold a gun to any individual child's head, but you can bet any child who "respectfully declined to participate" in this "sharing" would be disciplined, ridiculed or "written up" for failure to cooperate, follow instructions and play well with others. From day one, here we see the reproductive organ of the redistributionist state, opening like a poisoned flower to spread its heady pollen.

A person who cannot discern voluntary "sharing" and something redistributed by force or the threat of coercion -- including the taxes collected to pay her own government salary -- has no ethical compass. Such a person is at best astonishingly ignorant and unperceptive. She should not be allowed anywhere near impressionable children.

John Taylor Gatto, the 1991 New York City and State Teacher of the Year, deals with these euphemistic uses of the words "free" and "public" on pages 84-95 of his fine little 2001 book of essays, "A Different Kind of Teacher" (Berkeley Hills Books):

"It isn't hard to see that an institution designed to control people might well find it useful to advertise that its motives are public in the popular sense, and its own people over time might even come to believe that," Gatto writes.

A "public" school might be expected to reflect popular consensus in its curriculum, Gatto points out. Yet today's educrats have made a science of constantly re-naming what they do in a language of edu-babble so uninterpretable that parents now write me, asking what on earth it means when their 10-year-old gets graded not on spelling and arithmetic, but on 18 "Performance Expectancies" including "Theme Patterns in Science-Archeoastronomy," "Universal Concept-Patterns," "Theme Patterns in Nature," "Naturalistic Multiple Intelligence" and "Theme Patterns in Mathematics -- Fibonacci numbers and Mayan numbers."

(On top of that, one Las Vegas parent writes that his kid's teacher added a hand-written note that, "Abby continues to grow affectively." He commented, "Well, she can be a bit moody. But I think the word is `effectively.' Let's teach English before we spend too much time on Fibonacci numbers.")

Back at UNLV, our government-school teacher asked, "What would happen to all those children who'd be thrown out on the streets if you went to your competitive exams to get into high school, or if you closed the public schools?" Her voice rose in what sounded like a mixture of derision and panic. "Poor families wouldn't be able to afford any education at all! You can't just let children wander the streets ... unless you want them to break into your house and steal your stuff."

Ah, so it's not so much an educational as a custodial enterprise we're funding, is that it? Things gradually grow more clear. But note this palpable horror at allowing children to simply move about in adult society, observing and learning from their parents and their neighbors -- the way it was in the times that gave us Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, all the great inventors and military leaders and literary lights and captains of industry of the 19th century.

Of course, more moms were at home then -- they didn't have to go to work to help dad pay all these new school taxes.

Next time: They'll break into your house and steal your stuff.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."

I was talking with a new P.S. teacher last night. Kid grew up next door . . .

She remarked on the lack of structure in her work--that is, she was assigned to teach a class called Computer Journalism--given a classroom full of computers and youth, and essentially was told to figure out what "computer journalism" might be. She made no representation that she knew Jack about journalism.

No matter how well she creates that course, of course, if one of her pupils moves somewhere else and is enrolled in "computer journalism" there, they would find that the course was quite different--and even the similarities would be taught in a different sequence so that some things would be skipped and others would be duplicated. Your tax dollars at work.

But of course the basic problem is to sell the course to the pupils and the parents thereof.

I suggested that "computer journalism" might very well be web logging. Web publishing is IMHO "the press" grown up--since it very economically places my thoughts and yours, as we care to publish them, in the public domain. We can't all be Jayson Blair and get paid to write fiction for the NYT, but we can all try to make cogent arguments in favor of our own opinions and post them.