Posted on 06/23/2010 6:27:30 AM PDT by shortstop
I heard a guy on the radio yesterday say that public education should be abolished.
What a freak.
In the oneupsmanship of marketing to the conservative audience, some people get a little nuts. Not having a true sense of what people feel lacking an accurate internal compass they reach for ever more outlandish positions.
That doesnt serve truth, it exploits and embarrasses it.
So heres the truth.
No, conservatives dont want to abolish public education. We want to improve it and make it more accountable to local taxpayers, parents and values.
We conservatives are overwhelmingly the product of public education. We mostly had great experiences, we remember our teachers fondly and we love the schools from which we graduated.
We conservatives are overwhelmingly parents of children in public schools. Yes, we watch carefully what our children learn, and we push back against political correctness, improper morals or any sort of indoctrination. But we are in the PTA and the sports boosters and on the school boards. We are room mothers and field-trip chaperones, and by and large we are grateful for the education our children receive.
And a fair number of us are teachers.
Are there problems with public schools?
Absolutely.
From too much federal influence to the union domination of the teaching profession, there are things in schools which give conservatives pause. We read through the textbooks with a watchful eye and we worry about the politics and examples of some teachers.
And, yes, we conservatives have an agenda for public education. We want to hobble if not kill the federal Department of Education. We want to weaken the power of state and national teachers unions. We want local school boards to be empowered and we want American schools to be what they were created to be locally controlled and reflective of community values and priorities.
But we dont want to get rid of public schools.
And though the private-school and home-school movements are appealing to many conservatives, and those are wonderful options parents can exercise in a free society, the overwhelming majority of conservatives choose to send their children to public schools.
Why?
Because they trust them. Because they see the strengths of the system and feel capable of compensating for the weaknesses.
They do that by being parents.
Conservatives believe that they are their childrens first and most important teachers. Values, patriotism, world view, those are taught and reinforced in the home. Even if a course, teacher or textbook stray and preach the gospel of liberalism, good parents over the dinner table can set children right.
Good parents can also make their presence known at the school and challenge things which are contrary to the American spirit and values. Teachers and principals have phones at the school, and will meet with you if you ask them to.
But more often than not, conservatives find in public-school teachers and administrators not adversaries, but regular, hard-working people who look at the world the same way they do. I have had children in public schools for 20 years. I expect to have children in public schools for at least another 15 years. I have seen good and bad teachers and administrators, but the percentages have been about 70-30. Seventy percent good and 30 percent bad.
For every three teachers who preach liberal crud in the classroom, there have been seven who have been patriotic, positive people.
I can live with those percentages.
And my children have flourished under them.
Of my four children who have thus far gone through school, theyve all turned out to be conservatives maybe even very conservative. So if public education is brainwashing American kids with liberalism, its not doing a very good job of it.
Not when parents and churches and social institutions are doing their duty.
Public education isnt perfect, but then nothing is. Yes, the forces of liberalism in our society continually try to tighten their grip on our taxpayer-supported schools. But thats not a one-way tug of war. Our culture, our values, our constitutional heritage are exerting influence, too thanks in large part to the efforts of good, conservative parents and citizens.
We do need to focus conservative attention on public schools, to continue and enhance the process of oversight and improvement. But saying outlandish things like calling for the abolition of public education doesnt help that cause.
It only makes us look stupid.
Exactly. If he'd like to listen to the speaker he mentioned and address the person's points, that would be respectable ... but it's easier just to dismiss it, in spite of the very substantial numbers of conservatives who agree.
I guess the author thinks I’m stupid. I would like to see the current public school system demolished. They are little more than publicly financed indoctrination centers. Our children are basically held prisoner there for hours per day while union member teachers try to break down the values good parents try to instill in their children. The system needs to be demolished, the unions broken and the textbooks burned. After that we can talk about rebuilding the system in a healthy way.
What has gone wrong is that public education is no longer reflecting the wishes, morals and needs of the public. It started to go wrong when various "elites" decided they knew more about the real world than the rest of us - politicians, social activists, political theorists, even teachers. Teachers have a valuable input on educational theory - HOW to teach, but they should have no more input than the rest of us on WHAT to teach.
Why? Why should we not be against government-run education? (I'm dismissing your "are not" contention, because "we," most posters on this thread, are demonstrating that we ARE.)
Assertion is not argument. Do you have an argument to make? Mr. Lonsberry didn't seem to have one, other than, "It's not always as bad as it could be."
But better than having the State write one.
Well-put and for my wife and I that was the clincher: she could work and we could put our kids in school/day care, but the cost would basically eat everything she could earn. Why not eliminate the middle-types, cut the cash flow and improve the result? She home-schooled and our kids all entered college at least three years early.
And it didn’t take all that much ‘courage’, even though we did this in the SF Bay Area, which, you would think, might be one of the worst places to attempt it. Sure, we were broke all the time, but we weren’t insane, so that’s big enough plus for us.
Federal control of the schools is unconstitutional. Local control with parents on the boards deciding curricula is what needs to happen. Anything else is unacceptable.
That said, the curricula HAS been perverted by the Progressives, ever since the 1930’s and the progressive, Dewey. Dr. Seuss was mocking the dumbing down of the curriculum when he wrote Cat in the Hat== when government intentionally said that children should have a limited number of words in their readers. I think it was only 65.
Just compare the McGuffey Readers with the Go Spot Go books. McGuffey readers had been so successfully used prior to the books which limited the vocabulary to one and two syllable words. It is a crime when any smart parent knows that the rich language a baby is exposed to makes that baby more intelligent than if only exposed to simple vocabulary.
The brain is a marvelous organ and can accommodate massive amounts of information, especially at young age. One on one is the most efficient transfer of knowledge and it is best done by a loving adult.
Why do you think “preschools” are promoted? Look up the history of orphanages...daycares...and then the renaming to “preschool” to make it more palatable to a mother. No one used to send children away from loving family to learn???? They thought it evil to take children away from the safe homelife and put him with strangers to care for....orphanages were thought of as evil and daycares also until government reprogrammed adults into believing that children learn more when they are away from adults who will model adult behavior.....they should learn the behavior of other two year olds....that’s great, isn’t it?
Learn what???? How to be anti social by learning to hit, cuss, bite. I suppose teachers in preschool have the time to meet all the emotional needs of all the kids at once....what a joke.
Does anyone really think strangers are better teachers than a loving parent when the ratio of one on one is proven so superior than “group” learning.
(I am not advocating kids never playing with other children. Ideally is would be neighborhood children and children of all ages).
Children used to not go to “schools” until 7, which was pretty much when their worldview was formed and when reasoning begins so they wouldn’t be easily reprogrammed. Of course, progressive Dewey said that you had to get the children when their minds were more plastic...so they could mold them to be
“better” citizens....this is when all the social science was put into the schools instead of the 3 R’s which were so successful for our country.
This new worldview inserted subtly into the curricula promotes Marxism, atheism, moral relativism and mocks religion and moral absolutes.
The public schools use humiliation to make kids conform to these ideals. Boys are much more prone to fail in this Prussian system of education.....Very easy to see why we have mass conformity and little deviation from the “proper” way to think. All little obama voters....mmm mmmm good.
Added bonus - if you cut your income, you don’t feed the beast as much either.
A good conservative should be in favor of abolishing government RUN education, not government FUNDED education.
As a hard right winger, I have no problem with the idea that my tax money goes to support the education of children of parents with considerably less money. The children can’t help their parents’ straightened economic circumstances. It helps them and me if they become educated and productive members of society. So, yes, I’ll vote to give them my tax money.
BUT: There is no reason whatsoever to conclude that Government Run education works. Give every kid a voucher, and let schools be free market suppliers of better and better education for the dollars we ship in Susie’s backpack.
That is one of the best things I have read “by example”. I have had my children come to me and show they can do things that I know I never sat down and taught. My 12 year old likes to read to her brothers every night. My 7 year old pretty much taught himself how to read.
Yep, we factored that in, too.
I think that's acceptable for those who want that, and want to pay for it themselves. I don't think I should have to pay to educate other people's children, and I don't expect them to pay for mine.
I also don't want other parents deciding our curriculum - they have different values, different priorities, and different children with different interests.
That depends on what your odds of being a good teacher are, and if you can afford the time to be a teacher as well as holding down a full time job. Then how qualified are you to teach the full range of subjects? If you can do all of that, are you wise enough to expose your children to ideas that you do not yourself hold?
The public system needs to be undercut via freedom of school choice policies. While many public schools are of decent quality, I’d say that the intensified focus on high stakes testing, zero tolerance, etc. has made public schools places where kids simply learn to obey. I’m a former public school teacher myself, but today I advise talented young people to avoid public school teaching careers. If you love teaching, look to the private, religious, or cyber sectors.
I agree with you. I was using the number in the article rather than arguing that minor premise as well as the major one.
Look at the statistics for Christian kids, the percentage that leave the church after school for public, even religious private schools, versus homeschooling. It's ridiculous, it's like over 70% odds versus 10% on homeschooling.
Most homeschool families sacrifice to have one parent not be employed outside the home full time. Right now I don't work (though I am trying to grab a contract I can do from home) because my one year old needs me more than anyone else does.
Qualified to teach the whole range of subjects? If you aren't actively brain damaged you can teach elementary school. By the time your kid is done there, you'll have the know-how to acquire resources, learn things yourself, or contract the work out. My mother, with no more than a high school education to her name, has educated kids to become software engineers, Ph.Ds in history, video journalists, electrical/computer engineers, and my two youngest brothers aren't in college yet. Oh and two of those are in the military as well.
If you can do all of that, are you wise enough to expose your children to ideas that you do not yourself hold?
Load of old tosh. Yeah, kids will be exposed to those ideas - like the Holocaust, I don't agree with that but they'll learn about it, just in a "this was wrong and here's why" sense not a "well let's see, maybe Hitler had a point" sense. Same with all controversial topics. It's entirely possible to learn the arguments for all sides of a topic without wishy-washy "from this point of view maybe they were right" or "who are we to judge" nonsense.
But to recap, I think what Mr Lonsberry is asserting, which I agree with, is that there is a difference between government-organised education, and government-run education. And I think there is a fair amount of support on this thread for that theory.
It's far more efficient to centralise the learning process, especially for the more technical subjects. And professional teachers are (or should be) better than amateurs. The problem comes when the government mandates WHAT should be learned, and/or when educators have any kind of agenda other than excellence in learning, and/or when teachers put their efforts into looking after their own interests rather than those of their students. All three are now widely prevalent, but that doesnt invalidate the principle of public education. It just illustrates that the principle is being abused.
Good for you (and your mom).
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