[wintertime]

The solutions to the public school problems are both simple and inexpensive: Institute standards for both the teachers and the students, then stick to them.


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So..who gets nominated to the Soviet-style Neighborhood People's Re-education Camp Committee?

The solution is to begin the process of privatizing universal K-12 education. Parents, teachers, and principals in private settings are in the best position to formulate an educational plan for a child. Soviet-style People's Committees aren't.

[Sam Cree]

I did not, as I think your reply indicates, advocate any sort of central planning of curriculum on a national level. I also didn't even address whether or not it is appropriate for the states to operate public schools. What I did say was that schools must have standards. Seems clear enough that without them, education doesn't happen.

I don't disagree that having schools in the hands of government carries the danger that they will become servants to whatever distortion of our ideals, such as political correctness, may be adopted by the state. The PC and leftist distortion, though, has more been adopted by the educational establishment than the states, with the result that it's prevalent in private schools as well.

I believe some of our founding fathers, at least Jefferson and Adams, were great advocates of education, as they understood that the citizens needed to understand the ideals on which the nation was founded. Adams certainly thought the states should encourage it, though I couldn't say if he believed they should actually operate schools to which children were required to go.

One thing is for sure, the founding fathers certainly didn't anticipate that the school system would devote itself to destroying the ideals that they had fought for.