[wintertime]

If you are suggesting that it would have been better had universal education been provided only to and limited Roman Catholics, La Lydia
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I can not defend a strawman argument created by you. Given that you taught on the university level I would expect that you would know this. I trust that, (since you are a professional), you would **never** use this manipulative debating technique with your scholastically immature students, and would confine this strategy to message boards only.

Are you too young to remember that at one time Catholic schools throughout much of the Northeast United States were tuition-free? My husband and I attended tuition-free Catholic schools. In Wichita, Kansas, they are **still** tuition-free ! ( Do a Google on “tuition-free, Catholic schools, Wichita, Kansas). I know from the examples of my great grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles,..etc. that, thanks to the efforts of the Catholic school “universal illiteracy” ( as you state) did not exist and would not have existed.

Also...You point out that communities organized one room school houses. I expect that they were essentially parent-run co-ops. Parents, relatives, and friends voluntarily joined toghether, built a modest school, and jointly hired a teacher who supported values being taught in the home. You point out that these schools existed, so how could this have resulted in “universal illiteracy”? This is hardly the burdensome, compulsory, government monolith that we have today.

I also invite you to visit Hagley Mills in Wilmington Delaware. From the very beginning of the DuPont industries ( shortly after the Revolutionary War) the children of the workers were taught to read and do basic arithmetic in Sunday schools. We **know** that there wasn't “universal illiteracy” on the grounds of the DuPont mills and among the children of the workers of competing industries.

Finally... I attended a graduate school with a student body that was nearly universally Jewish. I testify that my classmates **deeply** resented the Christian worldview that was forced upon them in the government schools. Even if compulsory government K-12 schooling functioned reasonably well until the 60s those who were cheerleaders for the Christian dominant government K-12 system forgot one thing:

Any government powerful enough to force my worldview on other people's children is powerful enough to force an atheistic Marxist dominated worldview on my kids.

There is a solution: Begin the process of privatizing universal K-12 education. Shut down the socialist government K-12 system.

One more thing:

If we get government run health care, in one or two generations people will say, “We can't possibly have private health care. Look! In the beginning of the 21st century people were dying in the streets.”

[La Lydia]

I attended parochial schools K-12 in California. I assure you they were not tuition-free at the time I was in school, as my parents will attest, they were very good schools, and they were a luxury. Perhaps I am too young to remember anything else. But I am also familiar with the free schools provided by the Church in the northeast. I think you missed my point. The fact that frontier communities organized their own schools is the reason there was not universal illiteracy. Had those communities not done what they did, illiteracy would have been widespread, particularly in the West.

I do not think it will take a couple of generations of government health care for people to say we can't have private health care. I think it will be almost immediate. The Canadian government began its government health care program exactly the way Congress is intending to begin it here, incrementally. Within a few short years, the government had gobbled it all up, and they are stuck with the third-rate, patient-sacrificing system they have now. My greatest concern is, where are WE going to go once the government takes over health care here? The Brits and the Canadians can travel here to get the care they need, but our institutions will have been destroyed. We will have to go Brazil or India or Mexico.