Constant Conservative

To paraphrase some popular country lyrics from a few years ago “I was homeschooled when homeschool wasn’t cool.” I don’t know if that is the only reason I am keenly interested in education, but I believe that it contributes. While we are on the topic of education, Stacy McCain’s broadside may provide context for further discussion:

Let’s begin this discourse by clarifying our terms: They are government schools, not “public schools.” They belong to the government, not to you, the citizen — a fact you’ll quickly discover if, as a parent, you ever disagree with a school administrator.

For at least three decades, conservatives have wasted their time and energy pursuing the idiotic rallying cry, “Let’s take back our public schools!” They aren’t your schools, folks. They belong to the government, which is to say that the child-penitentiaries known as “public schools” are operated by bureaucrats for bureaucrats.

Hmm. Well, that should go down pretty easy. Let’s move on, shall we?

To admit that your local school system is a wasteful mess run by mediocre minds producing mediocre results would be to admit that you have been bamboozled by the bureaucrats. And publicly derogating the quality of your local schools might hurt property values. When a man is paying the mortgage on a $300,000 home, he has a direct financial incentive to proclaim that the local schools are the finest in all recorded human history, unequalled by anything this side of Athens in the 4th century B.C.

Furthermore, the system cleverly creates incentives for parents to believe that their child is receiving an extraordinary quality of education. Parents compete to get their children included in “gifted” classes, a designation presumed to pre-qualify the child to take “honors” and “advanced placement” classes in high school, so as to qualify them for attendance at an elite university.

I’m certain that people are not nearly so self-serving as to wish to protect their interests and their sanity in this manner. Let’s see what the author did about his own children:

One afternoon, when our daughter was in the second semester of second grade, car-pool duty obligated me to pick up Kennedy and two of our friends’ kids after school. We were riding home and, on a whim, I asked, “Kennedy, what is eight plus seven?”

It took her about four seconds to answer, “15.” Correct, but why did it take so long? Because she hadn’t been drilled.

“7+8 = 15″ is a fact, one which every child in the second semester of second grade ought to have long ago committed firmly to memory, and those four seconds it took for Kennedy to answer that question were the four seconds during which it was decided that she would no longer attend that school. Why were we paying them tuition, if they couldn’t teach a simple fact to a kid as smart as ours?

Now, some might well argue that learning addition by rote is not the only way to do it. They would be right. But the bigger issue here is that the teachers were not teaching what the parent believed to be important.

Parents have responsibility in educating their children. The state does not. The state has said time and again that it has an interest in educating the children (because they have to fit into society, be productive adults, etc) but the bottom line is that the state only has an interest in what it can control–and it would like to control the children. Why? Well, I’d say that you should ask Mao or Stalin, but they have both passed beyond the pale. Of course, they both left some history behind.