Chris
True, but it would uniformly be better than what we have.
Susan
> An educational system made up of private schools would
> educate anyone who had the money to send their children to school.
Chris
Yes, but would it educate their *children*? :-)
A free society non-government educational system would educate virtually
everyone who wanted education, either for themselves or for their children.
Susan
> It would
> also mean that in some areas there would be no nearby school that didn't
> include religion as part of the curriculum and if you didn't belong to
that
> religion you would still have to send your children there (if you could
> afford it).
Chris
Susan offers no reason to believe this. I guess I'll have to take it on
faith. *Liberal* faith, of course. :-)
Possibly, she's right. But, that's true anyway, *because* of "public"
schooling. Many public schools do not teach religion overtly, but, as Kansas
shows, it can be included, or at least favored, by exclusion of any views
that might conflict with the local religions (e.g., right-wing
fundamentalism).
A free society would allow for more variation on both sides of the "norm"
(i.e., the (nearly) lowest common denominator). Public schooling is almost
inherently mediocre, plus, to sustain itself, it must actually *prevent*
education in the later years, or people will start questioning why there is
a state-education when there is no state religion, and they will start
suggesting that state and schooling should be separate for *exactly* the
same reasons as state and church. Public schooling has its own "religion" to
maintain: The doctrine of government control of our lives and especially our
minds. Because of this, much of the school curricula is aimed at bolstering
this view and at preventing the development of the skills and the learning
of the facts that would enable the students to "rock the boat" of the
unquestioned faith in government.
Susan is an atheist, but she has her own religion. It's a largely political
religion, in which God is replaced by government, and tithing by taxes. But
the underlying premise and many of the results are the same. Reason is
rejected in favor of faith, persuasion in favor of force, knowledge in favor
of belief.
Susan
> In other words, it would be a mess.
Yes, in a way, Susan is right, here. It would be chaotic, especially at
first, as people went scrambling over each other to prove that *their* form
of private schooling was better or cheaper than that of the next school's,
as they each sought to persuade parents that *their* curriculum was the
best, or that their methods were the best, or that their school produced the
most "well-rounded" graduates, etc. It would be *way* too much like the
publishing industry, in which people are allowed to publish books on all
manner of topics. Susan sees it as a *disadvantage* that some children might
be taught religion openly in their schools. I see the premise that would
make that possible as an *advantage*, because it would mean that *other*
schools would *also* be free, free to provide children with an education
*far* beyond the level possible in a uniformitarian public school system.
True, not everyone would get an education. But, that's true *now*, and
largely *because* of public schooling. In fact, it's worse than merely true
that *some* children don't get an education; nearly *all* children don't get
an education at present. The few who do are either in special private
schools, or are given much assistance by parents or others, etc. Public
schooling is not about education unless education is the production of
barely literate, definitely philosophically ignorant, and either docile or
ineffectively rebellious. If that's what education is, then public schooling
is educational. If education is about teaching children to think
intelligently and rationally, to understand the world, and to enjoy
*deepening* their knowledge and ability to satisfy their economic and
psychological needs, then public schooling is not educational.
Susan
> There's a reason the
> government school system evolved as it did.
Chris
Yes, but it wasn't because government schooling would be more educational
and more generally available than various forms of private education.
Further, government schooling did not evolve, any more than Prohibition did.
Officials decided that private schooling was becoming *way* too effective,
and simply took it over by force, as government is won't to do.
Government schooling is one of the main reasons why so many of the people on
this list do not understand evolution. Evolution must be short shrifted
(and, if you've ever had your shorts shrifted, you know just how painful
that can be! :-) ), because it is too powerful an idea to allow very many
people to understand it. Even Susan, one of the smartest and sweetest
damsels on this list, does not understand it, really, because, if she did,
she'd see why generalized government schooling is a bad idea, why it leads
not to *more* education, but *less*, why it *favors* the anti-evolutionist
views in the long run, why it thwarts education, why it is, even for what
good it provides in the lower grades, *vastly* more expensive than it needs
to be, and so on. Because she does not deeply understand evolution, she
*can't* fully understand economics, politics, history, and so on. Thus,
despite her basic rationality, she herself holds many beliefs that
implicitly contradict evolutionary theory in favor of very conventionalistic
moral and political theories.
Of course, evolution in our society goes on, even if government tries to
stop it (as it does, because government finds real change that it can't
control and predict to be disturbing), but it goes on much more slowly than
it otherwise would, and at hugely greater cost to our lives.
Eventually, the quaint but very destructive idea that government can educate
well will be dumped by human society, but, in the mean time, we all must
pay, directly and indirectly, for this stifling of the human spirit.
The lame editorial that Susan so skewers so well in the same post in which
she made the remarks above shows what happens in a society in which
education is left mostly to the government. It is written by an uneducated
person and directed at an uneducated audience, an audience that was produced
largely by the government schools. In a free society, there would be very
little audience for such drivel; in ours, it's large enough to enable it to
get published by Universal Press Syndicate.