Reply #67: I've gotta say I'm shocked

[iverglas]

The idea of abandoning the public schools ... I dunno.

There are so many reasons not to.

For one thing, if the alternative is "home-schooling": who does the home-schooling? Women. Overwhelmingly. Women who are then not in the labour force, not out there in the public agora, not economically independent, not visible in the workplace and all the other loci of public activity. In the home ... right where the right wing and the fundies want them. Why is this return to the past considered to be a good thing?

And who are the public schools being abandoned to? The right wing and the fundies. So what about all the kids whose families can't afford to have a stay-at-home-mawm, or whose parents aren't qualified to teach or capable of teaching them, or whose mothers simply want to live adult lives in the adult economic world? What about children with special educational needs their parents can't meet? Aren't they entitled to a respectful, sound education?

What happens when large numbers of relatively well-off members of a society withdraw from its public institutions and programs? Well, often, they don't want to keep paying for the services they aren't using. They want "vouchers" to take their money elsewhere (and those who don't need the service at all, taxpayers without school-aged children, just don't want to pay in). A shrinking funding base reduces the public schools' ability to provide any services beyond the basics. And then the public schools aren't just staying the same, they're being degraded.

How does withdrawing from the public schools help your society?

To my mind, it simply exacerbates a host of problems.

I just don't understand why so many people in the US seem to be so unwilling to stand up and demand what they are entitled to. Parents are simply entitled not to have their children indoctrinated with religion by the public schools -- members of the society/taxpayers are entitled not to have any children indoctrinated with religion by the public schools. Children in the public schools are entitled not to be made to feel different or diminished because they are not in the favoured religious (or any other) group.

I really, honestly just don't get it. Where would your society be today if Brown hadn't sued the Board of Education and just home-schooled instead?

http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html

(c) Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

"ON EQUAL TERMS." It can't be said much more simply than that.