Sarah Hoyt nails this one:
However, tell me, not-so-gentle reader, what the heck business is this of the feds? Or even your very own state bureaucrats? I’m willing to concede it might — might, perhaps — be of interest to your city, local business associations or churches. In which case those entities are perfectly free to start schools to make sure future citizens or employees, or even believers, know how to use the oxford comma, tie their shoes, and speak in full, coherent sentences, or even solve quadratic equations, if that is what is required.
But why is it the province of the state?
Oh, I know what the excuse/reason was at the turn of the 20th century. Then as now, the US was trying to digest a massive bolo of immigrants who didn’t know how things were done here. And let’s be honest, teaching them to be “good Americans” was better than now, when we teach them to hate the country they just immigrated to.
On the other hand… On the other hand a lot of that “good Americans” thing taught them to be members of FDRs vision for the US. And…. And led to everything else that’s come along.
So why not remove all educational requirements, take the public schools and raze them, possibly salting the land afterwards, just so people get the point that no, this is not good and should not be done again.
Oh, you work and can’t be at home to look after the kids? Well, then. The money the government takes from your paycheck to pay for education should be refunded with all possible alacrity, and you can probably find someone to teach your kids what you want them to be taught, or just to let them free-range while you’re at work. Look, if you really insist, we can find you a multi-tattooed, pink-haired monstrosity to convince your kids that they’re really trans-dragons and you get the entire public school experience.
Indeed.
I’ve been saying since I started this blog 21 years ago, that the worst mistake we ever made as a country, a culture, a people, was to turn the education of our young over to the government.
My primary reasoning in that observation is that no reasonable person can expect a government-run taxpayer funded education system to teach the young minds full of mush the founders vision of limited government… Because that educational system the antithesis of limited government.
I suggest that the hippies, the counterculture, etc., of the 1960s college scene, are now educating our kids. To make matters worse they have the power of government backing them. With that government enforcement, parents have no choice but to submit their children to this systemic deconstruction of America. Increasingly we see the government telling us that our children no longer are our responsibility as regards education.
And yet, while Chinese kids are learning advanced calculus. In the here in America our kids are learning. ….what, precisely?
Well, in large part they can’t read their own diplomas that they were just handed, but on the bright side, they are fully versed in gender pronouns and how to think like a drag queen, how evil white people are, and that America alone is an illegitimate country. They are taught that they can’t make it by in life without handouts from the government.
That disparity is not going to end well.