Public Education is a Terrible Idea!

The Horn said:

I'm not a Christian and have never believed what the Bible says about homosexuality . To me, the notion that God would send people to hell for being gay makes zero sense . And if it is true, God is monstrously evil , and I would never want to have anything to do with such an evil being or be in heaven, assuming it exists at all .
The Bible also calls eating pork and shellfish an abomination, as well as working on the Sabbath, wearing clothes with two or more different kinds of fabric, cutting your hear, having tattoos and so much more .
Teaching kids in SECULAR public schools ridiculous Christian
superstition is a blatant violation of their parents rights, and the kids too .
If hell existed , people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot,
Al Capone, the clergy responsible for the Spanish Inquisition,
Osama Bin Laden and other cruel ,evil people would belong there, not innocent gay people who had never harmed anyone, which is true of the vast majority of them .

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Greg Jennings said:

You're right. We need all public schools to teach the important values of Islam and each should have its own little mosque

:thumb:

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Angel4Truth said:

Better yet, why not allow vouchers for school choice? Separate the good from the bad real quick, it would.

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GuySmiley said:

Never! All good liberals know that nobody would freely choose government schools.

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The Horn said:

Kids who attend public schools aren't the "indoctrinated " ones. On the contrary , the REAL indoctrination is by many Christian home schooling parents who keep their children pitifully ignorant of science, REAL history , and brainwashed into believing the earth is 6,000 years old, created in one week by an old man in the sky with a white beard who made the imaginary garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, a talking snake , Noah and his imaginary ark and all that nonsense .
Genesis is an ancient allegory based on earlier Babylonian mythology .
Many of these home schooling Christians teach their children to believe that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans, and much more hooey . And that homosexuality is an "abomination " while also taking their children to eat at Red Lobster to eat the very shellfish called an "abomination by the Bible.
Let's face it - this is child abuse. Not physical , but mental .

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Clete said:

And you have the moral relativism taught in the public school system to thank for it, in large measure.

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gcthomas said:

You'd love to believe that as it makes you feel superior, but you don't have the evidence to support you. Believing things because it makes you feel better than others is poor logic.

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Traditio said:

This is basically correct. If there's no such thing as a common good, but only a private good, then the notion of public education is right out.



As a private individual, you have no right to tell me what to do, much less to coerce me into doing it. The very nature of law, however, is coercive. This is what distinguishes law from mere counsels. When I counsel you to do x, you can either do it or not. I have no power to make you do it. I can lead the horse to water, but I can't make him drink.

A law, however, is coercive. It says: "Do x or else." If there's no such thing as a common good, what gives anyone else the right to prescribe laws to me, much less to coerce me into following them?

Again, consider the Romans passage. The ruler does not wield the sword in vain. He is empowered to preserve order and punish evildoers. What gives him the right?

Again, in the Bible we are commanded to be obedient to the rulers. Conversely, to disobey the rulers is to offend God, at least in some small way. In the Scholastic formulation, what is it about the ruler which empowers them to bind me in conscience?

This is not, pay careful note, a modern question of the left. This is the question of St. Thomas Aquinas and of the Thomists and, I am sure, of other scholastics.

Again, I ask the question in a different way: what is it about the ruler which gives him authority over me such that he can command me to do x, forbid me to do y, permit me to do z, and punish me if I disobey?

The only way to explain this is as follows: as a private individual, I am part of a greater whole, i.e., of a political society. Just as I have my own good, so too, there is a good of the greater whole of which I am a part. Since my good is the good of a part, it is ordered to and subordinate to the good of the whole. He who has care over the whole has the authority to order the parts in relationship to the whole and to each other. This he does by means of law.

If there is no common good, and there is no whole which subsumes the parts, then the ruler has no authority, no entitlement to issue laws, and most certainly no right to punish people who disobey.



I vehemently disagree with this. If you start with a notion of rights in the modern sense, then you cannot derive thereby a notion of law. To the extent that the ruler says "Do what I say, or else," he violates my rights, if there are such rights in the modern sense (in fact, I deny that there are such rights; there are only commands, permissions and prohibitions of law). This is where the modern notion of a "social contract" just falls apart. If you loan me money and I refuse to pay up, you don't have the right to bust my kneecaps. If there is no common good, why should the ruler have the authority to imprison me, impose fines or otherwise punish me for the very same thing?

But I do agree with you in this sense. There are two and precisely two alternatives: common good or anarchy.

Either there is a common good, and so a greater whole to which we are subordinate, and the ruler is entitled to bind us to follow laws, or else, there is no such common good, no such greater good, and the ruler has no such entitlement, and nobody is bound to follow any human law.



No, it isn't. You can find it in Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc. The idea of a common good isn't new. It's a concept of ancient and medieval political thought.

It's precisely in modern thought (in, e.g., Hobbes and Locke) that we see the common good die, at least, as a political concept. Hobbes and Locke make the foundation of political society a kind of "social contract." At that point, society becomes a mere aggregate of individuals. It's less like a house (to which the wood and the bricks are naturally subordinated and ordered) and more like a mere heap of bricks and wood.

It's only in ancient and medieval thought, wherein we follow Aristotle in saying that man is a political animal and has a natural ordering to the political society, that we are entitled to say that there is a common good.

Of course, leftists will appeal to "the common good," but it takes on a completely different meaning for them. It becomes Rousseau's so called "will of the people," as though such a thing has ever existed or even could exist in this state of life.

Leftists may appeal to the common good, but they do so illegitimately. They are not entitled to do so by their own principles. Proof of this may be seen in the fact that leftists are overwhelmingly moral relativists. If there's no such thing as an objective good or evil, then there's no such thing as an objective common good, i.e., what is objectively good for a well-ordered political society.

You cannot, in one and the same breath, think that morality is relative, and yet hold that there is such a thing as a good of the whole political society, i.e., independently of your good and my good as private individuals.



It's conceived analogously. Just as there is a good for the virtuous person, so too there is a good for the virtuous society. It simply requires that society be conceived as a single thing, a single whole with a determinate nature. If it is such a thing, then there is a good proper to it.

It is for this reason that we are able to differentiate between good and bad societies.



If that's true, then one private individual has no right to have authority over and punish another private individual.

Furthermore, if that's true, then the notion of a national or state border is completely groundless. The State has no authority to keep tabs on who is coming into and out of the country, much less to keep people out.



I simply disagree with the bolded. I conceive of political society as an organic whole of which the individual members are subordinate parts. Evidence of this may be seen in the fact that a political society pre-exists and outlasts its members.



Since the argument either for or against this point presupposes the notion of a common good, we'll have to bracket this discussion.

I do wish to note, however, that if your point is correct, then every act of war becomes a horrible injustice. What gives soldier A the right to shoot and kill soldier B? What gives military pilot C the right to drop a bomb on a munitions factory full of workers?

If you agree with me and say that soldiers A and C are, in a very real sense, public authorities acting on behalf of the State and in the person of the whole political society, then there is no injustice. Why? Because the political society, conceived as a single organic whole, has an objective right of self-defense, and soldiers A and C are acting on her behalf. They are acting, not on their own behalf, but as agents of the State, who has care over the whole political society.

If you disagree with me, then you must assert that they are committing acts of murder, vandalism, etc.



Both. The Nazis were acting as agents of a disordered political society. This is why things like war, sanctions, etc. on Germany as a whole were justified. Nonetheless, this doesn't absolve individual Nazis of guilt. They had a Natural Law duty to disobey (Acts 5:29).



Incommensurate; incomparable: You can't weigh and measure my life against yours, my rights against yours.



The bolded precisely is the point at issue. If there is no such thing as a common good, and if political society is not a single organic whole, then there is no basis for human law.

At that point, it becomes a mere matter of individual private contracts and agreements, into compliance with which you have no right to coerce me.



It's the good of the whole political society conceived as a single organic whole.



According to analogy. As the good of a virtuous individual is to that individual, so too is the good of a virtuous society to that society.



You just as easily could ask me what is the good of an individual human being, especially if, as I say, he is conceived as somehow superior to and independent of the individual parts of his body.

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Clete said:

Many of the arguments concerning public education have to do with religious issues.

The following is the single best argument I have ever heard on the topic and it is offered by an atheist and it anything but religiously based.
I invite those of you who support the public education system, atheist or otherwise to respond to it.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

SHOULD EDUCATION BE COMPULSORY AND TAX-SUPPORTED, AS IT IS TODAY?
​

The answer to this question becomes evident if one makes the question more concrete and specific, as follows:
Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents' consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve? Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principle of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No.

There are no moral grounds whatever for the claim that education is the prerogative of the State—or for the claim that it is proper to expropriate the wealth of some men for the unearned benefit of others.

The doctrine that education should be controlled by the State is consistent with the Nazi or communist theory of government. It is not consistent with the American theory of government. The totalitarian implications of State education (preposterously described as "free education") have in part been obscured by the fact that in America, unlike Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, private schools
are legally tolerated. Such schools, however, exist not by right but only by permission.

Further, the facts remain that:
(a) most parents are effectively compelled to send their children to State schools, since they are taxed to support these schools and cannot afford to pay the additional fees required to send their children to private schools;
(b) the standards of education, controlling all schools,
are prescribed by the State;
(c) the growing trend in American education is for the government to exert wider and wider control over every aspect of education.

As an example of this last: when many parents, who objected to the pictographic method of teaching schoolchildren to read, undertook to teach their children at home by the phonetic method—a proposal was made legally to forbid parents to do so. What is the implication of this, if not that the child's mind belongs to the State?

When the State assumes financial control of education, it is logically appropriate that the State should progressively assume control of the content of education—since the State has the responsibility of judging whether or not its funds are being used "satisfactorily." But when a government enters the sphere of ideas, when it presumes to prescribe in issues concerning intellectual content, that is the death of a free society.

To quote Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine:
"Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language, and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, there will be a considerable variation in different schools; the parents must judge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum offered. Then each must strive for objective truth. . . . Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the "supremacy of the state" as a compulsory philosophy. But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the "will of the people" in "democracy." Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy."

The disgracefully low level of education in America today is the predictable result of a State-controlled school system. Schooling, to a marked extent, has become a status symbol and a ritual. More and more people are entering college— and fewer and fewer people are emerging properly educated. Our educational system is like a vast bureaucracy, a vast civil service, in which the trend is toward a policy of considering everything about a teacher's qualifications (such as the number of bis publications) except his teaching ability; and of considering everything about a student's qualifications (such as his "social adaptability") except his intellectual competence.
The solution is to bring the field of education into the marketplace.

There is an urgent economic need for education. When educational institutions have to compete with one another in the quality of the training they offer—when they have to compete for the value that will be attached to the diplomas they issue—educational standards will necessarily rise. When they have to compete for the services of the best teachers, the teachers who will attract the greatest number of students, then the caliber of teaching—and of teachers' salaries—will necessarily rise. (Today, the most talented teachers often abandon their profession and enter private industry, where they know their efforts will be better rewarded.) When the economic principles that have resulted in the superlative efficiency of American industry are permitted to operate in the field of education, the result will be a revolution, in the direction of unprecedented educational development and growth.

Education should be liberated from the control or intervention of government, and turned over to profit-making private enterprise, not because education is unimportant, but because education is so crucially important.

What must be challenged is the prevalent belief that education is some sort of "natural right"—in effect, a free gift of nature. There are no such free gifts. But it is in the interests of statism to foster this delusion—in order to throw a smokescreen over the issue of whose freedom must be sacrificed to pay for such "free gifts."

As a result of the fact that education has been tax-supported for such a long time, most people find it difficult to project an alternative. Yet there is nothing unique about education that distinguishes it from the many other human needs which are filled by private enterprise. If, for many years, the government had undertaken to provide all the citizens with shoes (on the grounds that shoes are an urgent necessity), and if someone were subsequently to propose that this field should be turned over to private enterprise, he would doubtless be told indignantly: "What! Do you want everyone except the rich to walk around barefoot?" But the shoe industry is doing its job with immeasurably greater competence than public education is
doing its job.

To quote Isabel Paterson once more:
"The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as "reactionary," at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?

Ayn Rand - JUNE 1963.​

Resting in Him,
Clete

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aikido7 said:

It’s TERRIBLE EDUCATION that is a “terrible idea.”

Public school should carry out its intention to teach us “how to learn” as we go onward through our life.

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Lexington'96 said:

Homeschooling can be really good with some families but often I think going to a school building is better. Private School is probably the best option for those who can afford it.

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Clete said:

Everyone could afford it if the government school wasn't there.

It not only takes money out of the pockets of people who could otherwise spend it on private education but its very existence stifles the creation of private schools aimed at the middle to lower economic classes because it is basically impossible to compete with free. What we are left with is the rich and privileged going to high end private schools and normal folks being stuck with government schools.

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Clete said:

It has proven incapable of doing so...

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aikido7 said:

I disagree. School is supposed to present us with an array of choices to study. And with the Internet, even kids as young as 5 or 6 are using computers to "jump start" their intellectual curiosity towards what they are interested in.

Youtube and other sites have plenty of video clips of young kids doing astounding things.

This is only the beginning.

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Clete said:

What we are left with is the rich and privileged going to high end private schools and normal folks being stuck with government schools.

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Nick M said:

Democrats and liberals hate poor people. It is obvious. All they do is hurt them. And they try to stop Wal-Mart which is the one store they can afford to shop at consistently and a place that will employ them.

Democrats and liberals do everything they can to hurt the poorest people.

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Clete said:

You argue against yourself, or else misunderstood my point.

Youtube and other things internet are not owned by the government. It is government schools that have proven incapable of teaching kids "how to learn" (i.e. "how to think") and have no incentive to fix the problem.

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Nick M said:

Democrats and liberals hate poor people. It is obvious. All they do is hurt them. And they try to stop Wal-Mart which is the one store they can afford to shop at consistently and a place that will employ them.

Democrats and liberals do everything they can to hurt the poorest people.

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