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Your kids go to private or public schools?

No, I moved from Florida to a suburb of Pittsburgh known for its schools. We weren't able to sell our house in Florida so we ended up renting for seven years right on the edge of the playground of the elementary school. I gave up golf and other silly things so my kids had the best chance possible.

American public schools were barely functional in the 1950s when I was in them. They were originally set up on the Prussian model to produce factory workers in an age when factory work appeared to be the basic calling of 60 - 80% of our population and the basic idea was to get kids used to the idea of being herded around like sheep and dealing with meaningless (to most of them) subject matter, and if a handful of them could be taught just enough material to function at a level two or three cuts above factory work in the process so much the better, but that was all of it.

Normal in may parts of America over the last few decades has been seeing public schools spending 7K - 12K/kid/year while doing little more than teaching the kids to loot and pillage while Christian schools next door in buildings abandoned by the public system do a perfectly good job educating the kids on a third of that and in the occasional odd case like the Fairfax or Montgomery county schools in the D.C. area which are still halfway functional, you have to ask at what cost? If they're really doing no more than spending twice or three times what a private actor would spend doing the same job, then half to two thirds of that money ought to be being saved for kids' college educations.

You have experts like John Gatto basically claiming that many if not most kids would be better off being raised by chimpanzees in the jungle like Tarzan than attending public schools and, near as I can tell, any useful purpose the things ever served is water gone over the dam long since. We'd be better off without them.

That would, of course, amongst other things, end the debate about evolution or religion in schools since parents would simply choose schools for their own kids. The present debate assumes a quasi-socialist world as an axiom.