To better promote and live out the principles of conservatism, conservatives should abandon the public schools and use private forms of education instead.
Over the past few decades I've looked on in wonder as my fellow conservatives wrangle with liberals over public schooling issues, from religion in the curriculum to sex ed to single-sex schools to early childhood programs and on and on. I keep thinking, Why use public schooling at all?
Public schooling is a statist institution. The government sets the guidelines and provides the funds. It decides which teachers are qualified and which are not. It sets hours and declares holidays. It accustoms Americans to top-down rule from their earliest years.
Private schooling, on the other hand, is created by private citizens and is run by them. They decide each school's purpose, its culture, its personnel, its student body composition, its structure, its curriculum, its instructional style, its hours, its location, and its graduation requirements. They decide what amount of funding it requires, and how that funding will be obtained. They decide how each school's performance will be assessed, and who will assess it. In so doing, they form strong bonds with each other, which can serve them as they jointly guide the children.
Bureaucratic impersonality is typical in the public school. It has hundreds and thousands of students that it treats in standardized fashion. The student, who is sensitive, or underprepared, or burdened with a troubled home life, is apt to become bored or discouraged.
Real community is possible in the private school. Each school has a character of its own and need not be all things to all students. Parents select a school for their child because they believe in that school and its suitability for that child. Thus, students, parents, and teachers share values and encounter each other in a setting small enough in scale for them to really get to know each other. Problems can be caught and addressed early, and customized remedies found.
Time matters. Public schools let out at two-thirty or three in the afternoon, leaving kids to try to fill their time some other way. They run five days a week and are obliged to be closed on federal and state holidays, and in the summer, except for remedial purposes. Private schools may run all day, into the evening, and all year, and on the weekends, too. They may declare holidays when, and if, they choose.
Structure is narrow in the public school. Lectures and lab sessions, in set chunks, with seven subjects studied concurrently, are the order of the day. In private schools, a variety of formats can be utilized, including distance learning and field study. Students may immerse themselves in a few subjects at a time, or take interdisciplinary courses such as Composition & Philosophy. Hands-on learning can be made more available. Peer tutoring and small-group learning are also possible.
Intellectual laxity in schooling is the fate of most public school students. Herded together en masse, they must move along at the rate of the average student. Their fragile "self-esteem" must not be threatened with too-great demands. But rigor is possible in the private school. The idea that education is a privilege, obtained at the price of hard and persistent work, can be restored.
Public schools pay lip service to addressing students' educational needs in all four areas-academic, civic, vocational, and personal. But the hours are too short and the needs too great. Students frequently graduate from high school without preparation for college, citizenship, work, independent living, or marriage. Private schools can be more thorough through longer hours and interdisciplinary approaches.
Sexual chaos reigns in the public school. Boy and girl teens are thrown together where they may dress as they wish, flirt and date as they wish, and steal away to vacant classrooms or vacant homes to have sex. School staff declare youths' "right" to be "sexually active," or just shrug and say it can't be helped. Sex ed revolves around whether the student is willing, feels "ready," and is equipped against pregnancy and disease. Students, increasingly, may bend gender in dress, prom date pairing, and even election as prom "king" and "queen."
Sexual order is possible in private schooling. Standards of dress and deportment can promote dignity and modesty. Restraint can be inculcated. Schools can reduce temptation and provide sex role modeling through single-sex structures. Full opportunity for achievement need not be taken to mean that masculinity in men and femininity in women should go by the board.
Political correctness advances apace in the public school. Grievance groups and their defenders call for social engineering to obtain false success for the historically "left behind." Standards are lowered and "multicultural" expectations fostered. Serious discuss of religion, except as a feature of "diversity," is shunned. The private school may set a common standard and push all students to meet it. Religion and morality may be treated as sources of universal and timeless truth. The role of values-and values biases-in academia, the professions, and the media may be explored.
Teacher preparation requirements for the public school emphasize long years of education courses and the willingness to endure bureaucratic employment. The private school need require only demonstrated knowledge, character, and teaching skill, however obtained.
When a public school system runs out of money, its administrators can prevail upon the government to give it more. Much of its budget goes to counselors, security guards, remedial courses, and other fallout of social dissolution. A private school either meets its budget or convinces its parents and donors of legitimate needs. Because it can concentrate on teaching, and pay teachers their market value instead of what the teachers' unions dictate, it can spend less.
When conservatives and liberals fight over the direction the public schools should go in, it's like two people fighting over the steering wheel in a moving car. Conservatives should get their own car and drive it where they want it to go. The forming of hearts and minds is the first business of conservatism. Public school is out, independent conservative learning is in.
Why we allow this charade of an education system to exist is beyond me. This could simply be improved by vouchers. If Americans can get mobilized vs obama’s health care plan (read disaster for most Americans) then this should be next on the agenda. It is the only way to break, yes break, the unions that are killing our education system. If we don’t take America back then who will?
“…it’s like two people fighting over the steering wheel in a moving car”
Good analogy, though more like a bus than a car.
There is only one problem I see to this. We may be past the point of no return where substantial numbers of us are even allowed out of the state schools. Private schools are regulated to provide ‘the same level of instruction’ that often goes beyond simple reading, writing and arithmetic are taught; to insisting the liberal agenda is also being taught. If private schools are not teaching the liberal agenda it can only be a) they are 100% private funded and not therefore subject to this dictum or b) mistakenly believe themselves un-subject to it and therefore in ‘non-compliance’ in whole or part with federal and/or state mandates. I am not at all sure the ’100% privately-funded’ criteria still applies, as liberals have been hard at work to close even that loophole.
hvance:
My wife and I put both our kids through 12 years of parochial school, and I was for vouchers at one time but soon realized that letting public riff-raff students into our private schools would convert them into the same mess afflicting public schools. And it would not make public schools better as advocates claim.
Sedonaman: I taught one year at a private school and we did not allow the riff-raff to set the agenda. It was a rules agenda and there were no exceptions, you either toed the line or you were out. With vouchers the riff-raff would either get in line or they would be headed for the exit. Discipline is what many of them lack and down deep crave. You can accomplish in a private school what you cannot even think of in a public school. I truly believe that this is the only answer for our education system. If we continue on the path that we are on then we are heading for oblivion as a country. If we graduate students who cannot read, write, and do simple math then remember, they are the future voters and they will be the ones that will vote to take your children’s money via the power of the federal government. It is happening today because we have allowed the inmates to take over the school system. To go even another step, I would not allow students to sue teachers but would allow teachers to sue parents. I an tired of these parents that think their kids can do no wrong or should never be disappointed. Education is a privilege, not to be taken lightly and valued by all. A high aspiration but one that should be our focus and not the current dumbing down of America.
hvance:
Your school was not accepting vouchers. As soon as private schools accept government vouchers, it won’t be long before the ACLU, et al, have them in court to convert them to de facto public schools. I offer a quote by Constitutional law professor Lino Graglia:
“The difficulty with our system of representative self-government, as they [cultural elitists] see it, is that everyone gets to vote, with the result that the views of the unenlightened masses are likely to prevail. The function of constitutional law, in the view of our cultural elite and as it has largely operated in recent decades, is to keep this from happening. The first and most important thing to understand about constitutional law is that it has very little to do with a Constitution. It has become essentially a device or ruse for policymaking by judges. Such policymaking is much preferred by our cultural elite to policymaking by the elected representatives of the people because judges, given a free hand in policymaking, can generally be relied on to serve as the mirror, mouthpiece, and enacting arm of liberal academia in general and liberal legal academia in particular.”
sedonaman: Good point. Perhaps we could put something in the bill that would keep the aclu at bay or better yet, a constitutional amendment. I know it’s fantasy land thinking but we need to do something. Thanks for the reply.
hvance:
If you ever figure out an answer, let me know.
I am mistrustful of Constitutional amendments other than as a brake on radicalism (i.e., referral to the states was chosen as our preferred method of amendment to a) include states in changes and b) discourage excessively frequent changes). They are too much an invitation to mischief.
Our experience of amendments is they only reach the critical mass needed to get one passed as a form of ‘mob expression’ (i.e., least-common-denominator politics) or as usurpation cleverly masked as a reform. With the exception of our Bill of Rights, amendments which have succeeded at ratification have a) concentrated greater power into the hands of government, b) served specious anti-libertarian social goals (e.g., prohibition) better address by laws, c) resolved purely procedural questions, or d) have been manipulated to serve statist objectives. Of the sixteen ratified and one un-ratified amendments since 1791, only the 13th, 15th and 19th have secured positive rights to a significant number of previously excluded individuals (the 26th merely accelerated the voter right of 18 yr-olds and the DC franchise is statistically insignificant to most outcomes). No amendment since the Bill of Rights has increased any rights or power of citizens or secured new ones; and 12 of the 17 have increased the reach of the central government at the expense of the states and citizens. At best, these amendments have been liberty neutral and, at worst, they backfire.
Invariably, Congress responds to our demands for Constitutional changes by crafting amendments more to its liking than ours. As Congress controls the amendment process, we have little recourse to their proposals than to acquiesce in or reject them. Usually, so much energy has been invested in the process by the time of ratification that nobody wants to be the lone spoiler; so, Congress almost always gets what it wants in the way of amendment. Given this track record, why would we suppose Congress, with its preference for power growing amendments would give us only what you suggest? Wouldn’t it be more likely they’d give us an amendment deviously shielding ACLU and the courts? Especially, as state power has been broken, thereby invalidating the original premise of a ‘state-centered’ amendment process, I would not go there.
The time to insist on amendment is as a last resort to rein in government doing as it pleases. The Constitution pertains only to government, how it is structured, and how much power we allow it to have. You recommended an amendment to the Constitution to curb the inappropriate activities of the ACLU, a non-government (i.e., private) organization. Such an amendment would be entirely inappropriate and insufferable. Any amendment capable of restraining ACLU must also touch every other private organization of the same type and/or general purpose as ACLU; and must necessarily increase the power of government to suppress. If not increase its power (reach), that is, if government already has sufficient power to accomplish this particular object, then what need of such an amendment and why increase its power. Assuming it has this much power already, it must be that it chooses not to suppress ACLU, and no amendment can be safely crafted that will force it to do so that does not also oblige it to suppress every other organization of the same or similar type and/or purpose (an unintended consequence). If the ACLU is abusing its rights and privileges, or abusing the rights of others, the proper way to address that behavior is through existing laws and their vigorous enforcement; even to making new laws if absolutely necessary; not yet another amendment.
Bob Stapler:
I’m sure you’ve heard the claim that the constitution gets amended all the time through the courts.
Yes, I have heard such a rumor.
Just goes to show how far we’ve sunk. Nonetheless, you can’t cure one evil with another.
Bob Stapler:
I think there is more truth to it than rumor; however, I agree that you can’t cure it the way hvance proposed.
If the amendment were worded to not only but halt the federal government’s meddling with the education system then it would be worthwhile. Problems with my solution are: the private schools would probably go overboard with their newly found power, it’s really ethereal thinking to think that you can legislate morality or common sense and the grass roots just aren’t there. Given all my misgivings with my solution I would still prefer vouchers as a way out of the debacle that we are currently experiencing. I typically go the simple way.
hvance:
Not to start a whole new argument, but the only thing you can legislate is morality:
The Reality About Legislating Morality
By Selwyn Duke
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/duke/040914
Selwyn,
Yes, you can legislate morality, but legislation does not change men’s character. This is the point of my statement. I understand that the legislation can make it more difficult for someone to commit an immoral act but like a bookie once told me, “You can making drinking, gambling and ____ing a hanging offense but people will still do it”. It is from this simple premiss that I say you can’t legislate morality. By the way, I too am not trying to argue but just having a little fun bouncing ideas around.