Joe Barta wrote:
Tim Daneliuk wrote:
Say a parent is conciously failing to educate a child and
Government has to remove them from that home.
If the government is out of the education business and the educational
standards business, then who is determining if the parent is failing
to educate the child and where are they getting their standards?
It's a fair question just like "What constitutes abuse?" (Corporal
punishment, not being able to stay up past 10pm, ...?). The most
likely answer would be the one we have today - the courts would
decide what constituted a reasonable level of education.
Further, the masses being as they are, using your method, I envision a
scenario where there are great gulfs between a relatively small number
of educated and large numbers of uneducated (a hundred fold what it is
now), and that the limited government interdiction you propose above
would be largely unable to control the deteriorating situation.
1) You underestimate "the masses" - they will do what is in their
own self-interest sooner or later. The only reason you (and I)
fear this scenario is that we've been so conditioned by the
academic Elites to believe they are the sole instrument of success.
Long before there was K-12, Undergrad, and Grad School, there
were trade schools that taught people useful skills (rather than, say,
degrees in Women's Studies). These would, no doubt, spring up again.
2) Big Eeeeeeeeeevill Corporations cannot afford an illiterate work
force. They need capable people to carry forth their Eeeeeeeeevil
agenda. No doubt, if there actually was a significant failure
of the private sector to educate most people, corporations would
start training them and treat it like a benefit of the job no
different than, say, healthcare.
3) You underestimate the power of markets. If there is a need,
someone pretty much always finds a way to fill it (at some price).
Say there was the "great gulf" in the educational marketplace.
Then some clever entreupeneur would find a way to bring education
to the (presumably) economic underclass - or at least enough of it
to make a dent in their needs. How do I know this? Because
this takes place daily in areas like lending, insurance, and so on.
There are companies that *specialize* in lending to high credit risk
customers, for example. This became necessary when all the social
do-gooders got laws passed that prevented redlining in poor neighborhoods.
So, the mainstream banks left, and the high-credit-risk lenders came
in. Credit is still available to these customers, but they have to
pay a higher interest rate in reflection of their higher risk
status.
4) But say you're right - that this idea leads to Haves and Have-Nots
of education. How is this worse than what we have today? If you
live in an affluent community, the schools are usually much better
than in the inner city. A good many inner city schools manage to
spend billions without ever educating almost any student because of
the "must serve all" environment that prevents them from kicking out
the obstacles to progress and the unions with their "No Teacher Left
Behind" plan. The issue before us is not one of Good or Bad but
Better or Worse. We have Worse now, I want Better.
Can you at least get behind the idea that some sort of public
involvement in education, despite all of its shortcomings, is the best
way possible to raise the education level of the masses, and that the
removal of public involvement would effectively "dumb us down"? That
No. US culture (and I suspect most Western democracies) are a lot
"dumber" already than you're acknowledging. Watch what passes for
"entertainment", "news", and "information" on TV - the single most
promiscuous vector of our culture. It's nauseating. For all the
billions poured into education, look at the rate of graduation of US
citizens from top-tier graduate programs. Listen to grammar, clarity,
and general execution of language you hear everywhere - at work, the
grocery store, at the pub. We've become a post-literate society, in part
thanks to the fine job government education has done.
I taught grad school briefly and had this reinforced over and over
again. My foreign students were not "smarter" they just worked *much*
harder than most of my US-born students. You know why? Because the US
students took it all for granted - getting an "education" was assumed
and it was assumed to be relatively pain free (boy did some of them
squeal when they ran into me
My foreign students knew better; they
knew education was a privilege earned. It is exactly this sense of
entitlement that gets built with government money and it is exactly that
sense of entitlement that corrupts the academic process
if we value the idea of and strength of a "middle class", your vision
(in it's most strict form) would erode that middle class and we would
gravitate more towards a small, affluent and educated elite and masses
of poor and uneducated?
First of all, the middle class is declining because it is moving *up*.
There are (inflation adjusted) more wealthy people per capita then ever.
Second of all, census by census, the per capita rate of poverty is
declining. Just one example. In the early 1960s, a staggering percentage
of Black Americans were considered impoverished. Today, a significant
majority (well over 50% IIRC) are middle class or better. The point is
that the vector here is North, not South *even in the face of crappy
schools*. If our dysfunctional education system (which
more-or-less-fails the impoverished anyway) still manages to make us a
successful culture, imagine what a *Better* (not perfect) system could
do.
As always, (All) Collectivism Kills, (Honest) Markets Bring Good Things.
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Tim Daneliuk
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