wrote in message
...
On May 16, 12:22 am, Hawke wrote:
Why isn't
there a voucher system so the people have a choice where they send their
kids to school?

No vouchers because we believe in small government. We already provide a
good public and non religious education for everybody. If that isn't
good enough for you then buy your kids your own religious education.
Can't afford it? Then be happy we have a free public education system.
You're lucky we still have it at all.


Sure we do. We're just not going to pay for it. People like me with no
kids already pay for yours. I'll be darned if I'm going to pay for your
private religious schools too. You ask for too much from the government.


Hawke

I pretty much agree with you on separating church and state. I
certainly do not want the government paying for anything religious.
But have a different slant on vouchers for schools. My thoughts are
that the government ought to encourage anything that creates a
educated citizen and also try to get the most education for the money
spent.

So if vouchers encourage people to take their children out of public
schools and thereby reduce the amount that the government has to spend
to educate children, then they are a good thing. So a voucher of say
1/3 to 2/3rds of the cost of public school would be a good thing. It
would reduce the cost of public education and presumably do as well or
better in educating the kids.

So that would agree with your small government ideas and would provide
some competition to the public school. Without competition the
public school will not try to be efficient.

Dan

*************

That's what I like the vouchers idea, it takes away the monopoly we now
have, public schools would have to be competitive. Competition makes things
better and benefits the consumer. I don't think Intel would make such great
processors if it wasn't trying to keep ahead of AMD, and likewise AMD is
trying to keep up with Intel and offering their processors at a competitive
price per performance. If it wasn't for competition we might be hoping to
upgrade to a newly released 386SX with 2 meg of ram and a 120meg hard drive
for $2000. My kid goes to school and comes home with 3 or 4 hours worth of
homework, I feel like we are home schooling him but send him to public
school to baby-sit during the day and send the materials home for us to
educate him.

I also agree that the government shouldn't pay for anything religious unless
it does some other good for the society and that's supposed to be the idea
behind the tax exempt status. I guess there is no way of knowing if it's
true but I have heard a preacher claim if we would have sent a few
missionaries to other countries we wouldn't have had to send so many
soldiers. That's why Thomas Jefferson gave government money to
missionaries, because they were doing a good work with the Indians.

RogerN