Can I ask you what the alternative is?
Those using our nation's socialized school system are horribly addicted to this entitlement. We will see the same in a few generations socialized medicine. Most of the population will be incapable of imagining life without it. They can't even imagine having private team sports or cheerleading for their teens. Even **conservatives** will defend socialized medicine in a generation or two and insist that it must be reformed.
So? What is the alternative. I suggest that we immediately make all government owned and run schools charters. We have a template for this: New Orleans. It can and does work. At the same time, I would fund all socialist schooling by way of tax credits. All citizens and businesses would have the freedom to choose a private scholarship fund of their choice that would issue private vouchers.
The next step would be to gradually reduce the taxes imposed on citizens for tax-funded schooling and increase the amount that parents would pay directly. Tax credit vouchers would be issued only to the poorest as is done with housing ( Section 8) and food stamps now. Eventually, all schooling for the poorest would be funded with charity. If Harvard can have an endowment of 35 BILLION and universities across this land with funds in the billions and multimillions, I believe that, as Americans, we do have the will and means to privately fund charity K-12 schooling for all those in need.
If our nation had never started socialized schooling it is possible that every child in this nation would now be receiving a tuition-free **private** education. (Please remember there is historical precedent for this.) Millions upon millions of Catholic children up until the late 1960s attended tuition-free schools staffed by dedicated volunteers. I attended tuition-free Catholic private schools, so did all of my maternal cousins and aunts and uncles, my mother, and all of my maternal grandparents. (**All** of my husband's family enjoyed tuition-free charity Catholic schooling. **ALL** of them!) By opening compulsory attendance, compulsory funded socialist schools government disrupted what would have been a natural progression of privately funded, tuition=free, ** private** schooling.
So far as I know, it’s public schools, private schools, or homeschooling. You obviously don’t like the former, and you want the other two for free! That’s classic liberal thinking for you. /p>
You are correct. Public funding of private education can make private education an arm of the government. It **is** a serious danger that must be avoided. This is why I strongly recommend that the movement toward gradual but ** complete** separation of school and state be made immediately upon changing to a charter and tax credit system of funding K-12 education.
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans support public schools as a necessity for education future generations.
First of all we must call government owned and run schools what they are: Socialist schools or socialized schooling. Mc Donald's is public. Anyone can buy stock. The service is open to all, at an amazing reasonable price, and with consistent quality. This is rarely the case with anything that is socialized. Government gatekeepers, who are always overpaid, guard access to the many socialized mazes.
As for the American sheeple who have been indoctrinated to expect and love their socialist school after attending them for 13 or more years ( and their socialized minor league sports teams), why are we surprised that they can not imagine a world without them? We will soon see the same with socialized medicine in a generation or two.
It is up to conservatives to teach others and to help them understand that a world without government owned and run socialized education is possible. Point out some of the successes. Show them the major cities in the U.S. with 20% or 30% or more of the students in privately owned charters and even more using vouchers or tax credits. Talk to them about charters. Show them the movie "Waiting for Superman".
At the same time, if you don’t like public schools, you have the freedom to educate your kids another way - at your own expense, of course. That is hardly ransom, my friend, since the private sector, not the government, collects.
It is ransom. It is jizya.
And.... it is an abomination that parents and children who can not home or privately school **are** under police threat to put their children in atheistic government schools. These children must think and reason godlessly just to cooperate in the classroom. It is an abomination that any citizen be under police threat to pay for it.
Perhaps you would agree that public schools need more local control - getting rid of the “socialist indoctrination” curriculum you mention.
Simply attending a socialist K-12 school is socialist indoctrination. Children who attend our nation's system of socialized schooling risk learning that the government gives them tuition-free schooling by taking money ( under police threat) to pay for it. Geeze! It only took one to three generations of this to get a Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hey! If government can use its police threat to give kids tuition-free schooling, why not use that police power to get **lots** of socialist goodies?
Our nation's system of socialized schooling is corrupt to the core because socialism is corrupt! All of it is a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination no matter who sits on the People's Correct-thinking Control Committees. ( oops! "school boards")
It's like trying to cure cancer without excising the cancer. It's like fighting a raging forest fire with a water pistol. It's like throwing a grape a Jupiter. It's like trying to "reform" a Nazi concentration camp by rotating the chairs in the concentration camp board room.
While basic education must be made available to all Americans, there has to be greater oversight from parents and the community, not the NEA.
You have the audacity to call **me** a liberal? Huh? Where did **you** latch on this Marxist idea that one neighbor **owes** another neighbor's child any schooling? ( Let alone $13,000/year for it?)
Why?
Completely illiterate and innumerate people graduate from high school all the time. Somehow they manage in life.
And.... I have personally witnesses nearly completely illiterate and innumerate high school graduates learn at the community college, (in **two** years,) everything they should have been taught in 13. These kids are the same kids,( who just 12 weeks earlier,) their government teachers insisted were not capable of being educated. They still have the same crummy families, full-time jobs, broken homes, ADD or ADHD, parents in prison, etc., yet 12 weeks after graduating from high school they suddenly can learn at the community college. Amazing isn't it?
Regarding the unavailability of private schools in your county, I would advise you to move - you are still free to do that. Freedom doesn’t mean getting stuff for free, it means you have the freedom to change your situation by your own means.
Cartel monopolies that price-fix a service at the price of "tuition-free" is CRIMINAL it isn't freedom. If a cartel of private CEOs did this they would be in prison in a blink of an eye. But...Down on the socialist Animal Farm government school price-fixing cartels sleep in the farmer's house. Price-fixing cartel CEOs get prison. OINK!
With this statement above, I would have sworn that you were a paid government school defender sent here to troll the Free Republic thread, however, your posting history doesn't suggest that. Therefore, I sincerely urge you to read up on conservative alternatives to forced-attendance, force-funded, socialist schooling. There is a way free from this quagmire.
Here she goes again. Beware.