The Liberal View of Education
Tuesday 21 February 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized
Good liberals should be sure to send their children to public school in order to get a crappy education, even if a private or home school education would be a better option for their children, because poor people, fairness and stuff. She also maintains, despite the evidence showing that, in virtually every academic metric, both home schooled and privately schooled children are better educated than their publicly educated brethren, that “government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children” (read: the only institution willing to indoctrinate our children in the wonders of government and compliance with government authority). Slate:
Nor can we allow homeschoolers to believe their choice impacts only their own offspring. Although the national school-reform debate is fixated on standardized testing and “teacher quality”—indeed, the uptick in secular homeschooling may be, in part, a backlash against this narrow education agenda—a growing body of research suggests “peer effects” have a large impact on student achievement. Low-income kids earn higher test scores when they attend school alongside middle-class kids, while the test scores of privileged children are impervious to the influence of less-privileged peers. So when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.
Of course, no one wants to sacrifice his own child’s education in order to better serve someone else’s kid. But here’s the great thing about attending racially and socioeconomically integrated schools: It helps children become better grown-ups.
Unfortunately, this is the progressive dream. The author notes that publicly educated privileged children don’t suffer when exposed to those who are less privileged, yet fails to mention that they would have an opportunity excel at a higher level were they to be home schooled. She isn’t worried about the artificial ceiling of public education keeping some kids from meeting their educational potential, but with purposefully holding those children back in order to (maybe, perhaps, have the chance to create an opportunity to) facilitate a slightly better education for those who are less privileged. She wants parents to ignore what is in the best interest of their children, and choose what might help someone else instead. She purposefully wants progressives to bring the entire system down to meet the abilities of those less privileged rather than allowing some individual students to excel at very high levels. She doesn’t care about education, but about “fairness,” a fact exposed by conveniently forgetting to mention the many negative aspects of of public education.1 She’d rather see an entire society of mediocre educated children than one with some who excel well beyond what public education is capable and willing to provide because it would be unfair to lesser privileged children. Thankfully this is not the vision of all liberals, though that this view of what education should be, a race to the bottom, exists in America at all is lamentable.
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1. I agree with almost every point of Couture’s point of view, though it seems doubtful that she would acknowledge that even if it were the progressives of the 60s which created the modern homeschool movement, it is because of progressives and other liberals in government that we have the punitive public education system we have. One that is compulsory, with no choice whatsoever (especially for poor people), and teaches their students that compliance to authority is the way to success. Teachers unions and the liberal politicians they buy have created this system of compliance as education, and created the necessity to get out via home schooling.
2012-02-21 » madlibertarianguy