I imagine that you're sitting there licking your lips waiting to read, "HA HA! None for the poor! Mua ha, ha!" so that you can pounce, and pronounce "public education" an unmitigated blessing upon society and absolute necessity for human survival. The problem is that people look at education as if it were a 12-year (in the U.S.) package full of Expensive Components Unaffordable by the Average Family™, when that simply is not the case. To your question I would counter-offer, how do parents pay for "private food", how do parents pay for "private entertainment", "private clothing," etc.? The answer is that they buy them, they make them, they trade for them, etc. Education is not a single, monolithic, standardized thing; it is a life-long series of experiences, frequently encapsulated into tradeable packages of goods and services consumed by the individual. I utterly reject the idea that "education" is a single box of goods and services that can be rolled into a one-size-fits-all expensive "program" that "requires" government to not only pay for it, but to regulate and mandate it. If anything, the nineteenth and twentieth century "industrial social welfare" paradigm has blinded our entire society to a wealth of private, voluntary, cooperative and economic market, community, and philanthropic organization-based alternatives (http://montecristo.livejournal.com/63489.html) that would have evolved and will evolve in the absence of the system founded on the ridiculous idea that education is a weapon whereby The Better People "uplift" and control the Undermenchen. (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm) [The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, free book, online at the preceding link, in its entirety, if anyone really wants to read a cogent, well-researched examination of what has gone wrong in the politically warped evolution of modern education in the U.S.]
If the public education cartel were broken, and it is failing, as we speak, people would find that there were and are almost uncountably many alternatives to the 12-year sentence of hard (and inefficient) drill-and-kill classroom labor in rows of desks occupied by 20 to 50 other "students." The cartel has locked itself into a nineteenth century, early industrial revolution, third-wave, factory production paradigm which is ridiculously arcane and evolutionarily unsound. The thing is, at least in the U.S., the system is not working, has disserved the poor worst of all, is not adapting, and is inevitably heading for a well-deserved collapse, whether people choose to acknowledge that unpalatable political, economic, and sociological reality or not. On a broader scope, the K-12 paradigm itself is the prisoner of the 400 year old university paradigm, which is itself suffering from the same kinds of sclerotic inability to adapt, grow, or repair, and is crumbling.
Of course, this does not even begin to raise the objection that government and education must be separated, precisely for the same reason that government and church must be separated. Any government which presumes to indoctrinate the citizen is not "free" and run by the citizens.
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Re: Public education is political indoctrination paid for by theft
Date: 17/7/11 22:07 (UTC)If the public education cartel were broken, and it is failing, as we speak, people would find that there were and are almost uncountably many alternatives to the 12-year sentence of hard (and inefficient) drill-and-kill classroom labor in rows of desks occupied by 20 to 50 other "students." The cartel has locked itself into a nineteenth century, early industrial revolution, third-wave, factory production paradigm which is ridiculously arcane and evolutionarily unsound. The thing is, at least in the U.S., the system is not working, has disserved the poor worst of all, is not adapting, and is inevitably heading for a well-deserved collapse, whether people choose to acknowledge that unpalatable political, economic, and sociological reality or not. On a broader scope, the K-12 paradigm itself is the prisoner of the 400 year old university paradigm, which is itself suffering from the same kinds of sclerotic inability to adapt, grow, or repair, and is crumbling.
Of course, this does not even begin to raise the objection that government and education must be separated, precisely for the same reason that government and church must be separated. Any government which presumes to indoctrinate the citizen is not "free" and run by the citizens.