[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.

[wintertime]

The fact that frontier communities organized their own schools is the reason there was not universal illiteracy.
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These were essentially voluntary parent run co-ops, with volunteer support from friends and neighbors. Together they built a small school and hired a teacher.

I would like to see a return to this system.

Conservatives should organize education scholarship foundations. The foundations could hire conservative teachers who would open tuition-free one room schools, mini-schools, homeschool co-ops, or tutoring centers. The conservative foundations would certify the teacher, approve the curriculum, and test the students.

The conservative foundations could also break up the government monopoly on team sports by organizing sporting leagues.

Is this possible? Yes, it is! If Harvard can have an endowment of 35 BILLION dollars and universities across the nation have similar endowments in the billions, surely conservatives could fund private, tution-free, K-12 schooling for all the children in the nation. The brick and mortar, Prussian-model, prison-like school should be abandoned. Brick and mortar schools are expensive. Also,...It is unnatural and unhealthy to teach children to behave like prisoners, as is done in our modern government K-12 schools.

Simultaneously, the conservative education foundations should organize the parents politically to shut down every government K-12 school in the nation.

I believe that parents are generally desperate to escape the government schools. We only need to see the pitiful faces of the parents whose children do not win the lotteries for vouchers, charters, or magnet schools. The parents of those languishing on theses long waiting lists would welcome and opportunity for a tuition-free, private, conservative education for their children.