talkpolitics | They Could Always Go Work in Factories

Teri Adams, Head of Independence Hall Tea Party and School Voucher Activist:

Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.

In other words, Adams would like education to be, along with medical care, available only to those who can pony up the cash for it.

The article I’ve linked to includes a few quotes from people speculating about what drives the American right’s hostility towards public education. The ban on teacher-led prayer is invoked, along with the mercenary desire to funnel the money now paid into public schools into private hands.

I suspect it’s much more simple than that. Without universal education, the far right wouldn’t have to contend with so many pesky arguments about the facts of history, math, science, etc.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I thought y'all believed there was no such thing as society?

An abstract entity, a collection of identifiable phenomena does exist, which can be identified as being part of the concept "society," but the belief that society is the plaything of "leaders" who can "socially engineer" it into shapes pleasing to everyone's sense of values, or even a lasting majority's "sense of values" is delusional. Society exists, but it is not one monolithic thing, like Hobbes's Leviathan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book)) Hobbes's Leviathan is an invented secular god, a bit of sociological idolatry grounded in collectivist fantasy. It is the kind of "entity" to which is alluded in all sorts of places, such as the lyrics of the song by Primitive Radio Gods: "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand":

We sit outside and argue all night long,
About a god we've never seen,
But never fails to side with me.

Everybody thinks they know exactly what "The Social Contract" means, and we attempt to enforce its terms upon each other based upon that hubris. It isn't true, except in very very limited and carefully delimited cases, that "our" will is "united" by "common purpose". We delude ourselves with the attempt to control the Social Sphere through collective violence in the Political Sphere. The attempt produces perverse, unintended consequences and empowers the unscrupulous. It shrinks the Social Sphere of cooperation and enlarges the Political Sphere of conflict. This is because power, unlike wealth and economic production, is a zero-sum game. For A to have more power, some other human being(s) must have less.
What is actually the case when we often speak of the Social Contract, is that even among those who believe in it religiously as a real explicit understanding, no two people can agree upon what that explicit understanding actually is, in its details, and a contract whose terms are such that no two parties can explicitly agree to them is no contract at all, whatever else we may say about or think of the feelings of mutual amity which bind groups of human beings together into cooperative efforts to divide labor and trade.

Edited 2011-07-23 14:44 (UTC)

They Could Always Go Work in Factories

Re: I see.

Re: I see.