While reading about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco, I also spotted this op-ed by Andrew Coulson, who made a very good point about public education in general.
But this is still a free country. Thanks to our (ostensibly racist) regard for individual liberty, Seattle Public Schools board members and officials are free to adopt whatever definitions of racism they choose. It is inherently divisive, however, for an official government school system to promote one ideology over another.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.
Whenever there is a single official school system for which everyone is compelled to pay, it results in endless battles over the content of that schooling. This pattern holds true across nations and across time. Think of our own recurrent battles over school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, the teaching of human origins, the selection and banning of textbooks and library books, dress codes, history standards, sex education, etc. Similar battles are fought over wearing Islamic headscarves in French public schools and over the National Curriculum in England.
There is an alternative: cultural détente through school choice.
Historically, societies have suffered far less conflict when families have been able to get the sort of education they deemed best for their own children without having to foist their preferences on their neighbors.
Some people fear that unfettered school choice would Balkanize our nation. Their concern is commendable but precisely backward. The chief source of education-related tensions is not diversity; it is compulsion. Why is there no cultural warfare over the diverse teachings of non-government schools? Because no one is forced to attend or pay for an independent school that violates their convictions.
Read the whole thing.
Reads like a breath of fresh air feels in a fetid room.
Hold on, while I am quite convinced that parental choice in the majority of cases is far better than state imposition, I am not sure whether the institution of the family is key to all choice when it comes to children. It used to be possible for families to elect to make their children engage in hard labour that was bad for their health? Shouldn’t the choices made by parents for their children be judged, to an extent, in terms of what the child would reasonably consent to if they were capable, and not simply allowed as if the parents have an absolute right of ownership over their own children.
I only bring this up because I want to avoid endorsing a system that would allow mini-collectives (families) to indocrinate vulnerable individuals with extreme ideologies that run counter to individual liberty.
“I only bring this up because I want to avoid endorsing a system that would allow mini-collectives (families) to indocrinate vulnerable individuals with extreme ideologies that run counter to individual liberty.”
Still much better to have families then the state. How many families actually do this? Precious few, I would say.
And how many state schools indoctrinate their pupils with extreme ideologies?
Pretty much every one of them.
Well, I dunno, since when has the family been given unbridled choice as to what their children should study? A minority of parents in the UK appear not to realise any value in education at all. Can they really be trusted to look after their child’s interests? What about the extremist minority within Muslim communities? Will you allow a Pakistani-style Madrassa to be set up in Britain if it is what the parents choose?
I have a great deal of sympathy with nic here. I can’t help but feel that the “troubles” of Northern Ireland were exacerbated by having seperate Protestant and Catholic schools. In a slightly more C21 context, do you really want every British kid born to illiterate backwoods Bangladeshis and Somalis sent to the nearest Madrassa and not experience anything of the wider culture? What do you think is the end result of that?
I believe in freedom of choice in education because it raises standards. I don’t believe in it as a way for parents to have their children indoctrinated with whatever ideology appeals to them. I think Not Dave is hopelessly optimistic on this.
Proper education should be totally non-partisan as far as ideology, specific moral codes and belief systems go. Teach ’em grammar, foreign languages, science & maths and let ’em make their own minds up on the “eternal verities”.
BTW Where is Samizdata’s own Eternal Verity?
As someone who believes in the amazing potential of the knowledge acquisition device, aka the average child ,what disturbs me most about public education ia how it manages through faddism and attempts to be social, political and cultural all at the same time to extinguish a love of learning in children.
My own anecdotal experience of school encounters of a frightening kind has led me to the conclusion that the wrong people make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons.
The schools are often a battlefield for score settling and keeping a love of learning alive in the children is rarely the primary focus of these warring factions.
I often had students in post secondary education who lamented the fact that they had been turned off rather than excited by their early education. What a pity and what a waste of so much human potential.
The bankrupcy of the current educational establishment is due, largely, to the fact that they have deliberately abandoned any coherent overall moral structure and philosophy.
The result is very much as you state you desire, Nick, an education composed of miscellaneous facts and opinions, unconnected by any context and indecypherable due to the lack of any moral structure upon which to rest judgements regarding the validity of one opinion or another.
The public educational system was, at one time, the Protestant caucasian school system. The Catholics, Jews, and Blacks had mostly seperate, and certainly not equal, schools. The problem was government control and compulsion to begin with, and was dealt with in the usual misguided fashion of inflicting more state intervention and taxation instead of less.
The result is the shambles we see all around us. The public school system is completely disconnected from the mission of providing a challenging and coherent education, having replaced that with a politically motivated mush of disconnected facts and unexplained phenomena.
Even worse, the tone set by the massive public educational system has inevitably seeped into the private systems, who must often use the texts, and thereby absorb some of the misconceptions, of the larger entity.
The result, as Millie Woods has described, is a boring endurance contest within which children learn to despise education and learning, are taught that everyone is a victim of someone else, that they are filled with unknown and non-preventable prejudices and -isms that pervert everything they think and feel, that there are no moral standards that can be held on to for stability and direction except that the ideas of European Christian culture are always suspect and probably wrong, and that success or failure in life is the result of either unfair advantage or luck, or the lack of same.
The results are “graduates” who think they know everything because they know so little, who cannot read or form basic concepts, who fall prey to an unending string of scams and fads masquerading as philosophies of life or scientific doctrines, who cannot defend the culture that has given them a standard of living and future potential unknown and undreamt of in all of human history, and who increasingly flee blindly into technological or other impersonal amusements and occupations because dealing with other flawed and incoherent people is so much more demanding than machines and video games.
Fortunately, there are always a small few who do not fall into this trap. For whatever reason, whether it is their parents’ influence (even though some may find it hard to believe parents could possibly be beneficial), the example of a particularly good teacher, author, or other figure of influence, or just an internal toughness and creative drive that cannot and will not be denied, they fall in love with the mind, with ideas, with the flow and seismic movement of human society as it works it’s way through all the endless problems of life, living, and reality.
And there, in the final analysis, is the failure of the “progressive”, or collectivist, attempt to rig the game. For, at bottom, the desire of the collectivist is to avoid reality, to deny its judgements, to put off its intrusion and verdict as to the validity of their premises, the workability of their ideas, the coherence, or lack thereof, when their assertions of what reality is come into contact with what reality really is.
The educational bias against failure is a central premise of the entire collectivist, multi-cultural, post-modernist mindset. They deny, they avoid, they evade, not because reality is unknowable, and the failure of some is unjust, every bit as the success of some is undeserved, but because all of these contentions collapse upon contact with reality, and a coherent examination of the result.
Just as the Chinese may spend decades remedying the damage done by the “Cultural Revolution”, and the Russians and their former vassals may have to spend decades correcting the damage done by their experiment with collectivist totalitarianism, so those of us in the West who were spared these horrors will still have a long and complex task ahead of us as we confront the erroneous theories, the disjointed philosophies, and the non-real premises upon which so much of what is taught and “known” are based.
An education without moral structure or philosophical coherence? That is what we have. It is the reinvention of an educational community which includes these vital elements which we must continuously strive for, and whose creation will be a gigantic step forward for the future success and survival of the culture known as “the West”.