I swear these people get crazier and crazier. The ideas that the rightwing vomit out of their minds range from the ridiculous to the insane. This particular plan by Jonah Goldberg lies somewhere in the middle. Ending the public school system would be a terrible idea and set our country back over one hundred and fifty years since we started the system to educate the nation's children. Abolishing public schools is not surprisingly in line with neo-conservative thought though, that is to dismantle the government.
From The LA Times:
HERE'S A GOOD question for you: Why have public schools at all?
OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government's interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can't leave any child behind.
The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90% of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run 90% of the schools — particularly when it gets terrible results?
Why does the LA Times even publish this shit? I'm all for the free expression of ideas, but some should be left to the websites of fringe radicals. I will agree with Jonah on one point, that our schools are not performing as optimally as they could be. But that is because they are terribly underfunded. "Throwing the baby out with the bath water" seems to be the classic approach for people like Goldberg.
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