I went to an excellent public school. I know I will probably get flamed for saying that, since many of you think that's an oxymoron, but it's true. There are good public schools.
Yes, there are some good public schools just as there are bad private schools. However, I would bet that the best public school education pales in comparison to the best private education.
I also attended an excellent public school. Today I work at an excellent public school in a rural community.
There are some fantastic teachers and there are some who should be fired immediately. Part of the problem is the union, I also think that school vouchers would help clear out the inept teachers. It would force schools to excel or be out of business.
Thats great. Which school was it, what state was it in and What year did you graduate? I too went to an excellent public school, Upper Darby, PA, in 1976.
It depends upon what your standards for "good" may be. I submit that, were you familiar with the standards of mid 19th Century education, you would consider the product of public schools to be apalling.
In our school, for example, the standards for a child of eighteen require completion of lower division college chemistry, physics, and biology with calculus as a prerequisite. They demand readings of Herodotus, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, Gibbon... all the way through Western Civ until the present day.
"Good" depends upon what you decide is good enough. Freedom allows individual parents to take different paths by which standards improve continuously.
Yes, I agree. My children go to a public school and I'm pleased with the education they're receiving. The teachers do tend to keep their political opinions to themselves, although occasionally, there is one that just can't help it.
I believe you and glad you spoke up. Just believe us too; they're are not all good.
Not going to flame you, but you have to remenber that we all make that judgement based on what level we have set the bar at as far as standards go. If it worked for you, and satisfies your level of standards, then, yes, it was a good public school for you.
This does not mean I think you have low standards or am trying to say my standards are better than yours. They're different. I would say, that I too, had a fairly good experience with the public school system (I only attended PS for high school), but that was over 20 years ago and in a very small, rural school district. We still invited local pastors to lead prayer at graduation ceremonies then. Times have changed.
To give an example, public school is sometimes justified as the best and possibly the only way to ensure civic peace in a religiously diverse country like the United States. This rationale works like a bait and switch, because school is an engine of civic disorder far worse than the alternative where people live and **learn** in plain old freedom and religion is allowed to be religion, the organic backdrop that shapes the way we see the world.
One of school's most important effects is to ensure that most people never develop a working vocabulary of morals, liberty, and knowledge, because school preempts all these things in it's day-to-day operations, and it has to conceal that fact from the vast majority of people so that it can survive as an institution.
School has this threefold effect because while purporting to be a sort of publicly-driven "knowledge engine" it actually pushes religious knowledge to the side; it inflicts a long-lasting regimen of drill and compulsion on everybody; and it tries to put knowledge in a box, treating it like a museum specimen that no longer lives or breathes but can be patronizingly "admired" and clinically dissected from a distance. These qualities of school cannot be changed, because that would be the death knell of schooling. So I ask, is there truly a crisis that threatens the civic peace, that makes it necessary to subject people to thirteen years of drill instruction in amoral, ignorant servility?
My school was good in 1963 as well, it is a mess today. When I was there they fired a known communist on the staff for bringing her views into the classroom. Today a teacher who brings his/her liberal views into the classroom receives commendations for social activity. Wear your pink ribbon, fly your rainbow flag, post a sign that homosexuals have a place of refuge in your room, you are mainstream. Complain about standard tests, mandatory flag salutes you are in. The only hope for kids in these schools is help from knowledgable parents at home.