Few conservatives ( God-believing, agnostic, or atheist) are against compulsory education.
Conservatives generally believe that all parents and all private schools should be held to the same standards as the government. If government allows illiterates and innumerates to receive high school diplomas then **that** should be the **same** standard for everyone! If government promotes a big, hairy, illiterate and innumerate 14 year old to the 9th grade, then parents and private schools should be allowed to do the same.
I personally argue against government schools, and police compelled attendance at them, because government schools are utterly incompatible with the First Amendment, free practice of religion, and government establishment of religion, as well as free speech, free assembly and free press.
Conservatives pay for food stamps. If you want to make an argument against public schools or against compulsory education, go ahead, but the fact that religious people have to pay for them doesn't carry much weight.
How nice of you to bring up the topic of food stamps. All education in the U.S. should follow the food stamp model.
Food stamps are redeemed in private grocery stores. The middle and upper classes **PAY** for their own children's food. **Everyone* (poor and wealthy alike) use private grocery stores.
We should adopt the same model for education. Middle and upper class parents should **pay** for their own child's education in a private school, and we should have tax credits for those willing to support the education of the poor who would also attend a **private** school.
Everybody pays taxes for something they don't like.
There is no provision whatsoever in our Federal Constitution for education. These matters should be returned to the states.
Our federal Constitution has, and likely every state have, First Amendment protections. Police threat compulsion to attend a government school and the very existence of government schools are utterly incompatible with First Amendment Rights.
Please remember that no school is religiously neutral.
Government schools are not religiously neutral and **must** establish and champion the religious worldview of some citizens and destroy the religious worldview of others. The government also totally crushes all the other provisions of the First Amendment for those children who are under police threat to attend them.
People who don't read pay for libraries. People who don't drive pay for roads. Liberals pay for the war.
Roads and libraries do not use police threat to imprison citizens ( who have committed no crime) in government buildings 6 to 7 hours a day and bus them around in big yellow buses that look like prison work gang buses. Roads and libraries do not **order** people to shut up, forbid them to publish, order children to assemble with people of the government's choosing, forbid religious expression, and pour a government religion into the minds of captive children. Government schools do all of the above.
Roads and libraries do not threaten parents and children with armed police, court, and foster care action if they are not patronized. Government schools do.
By the way, our government has provisions for people to lobby against libraries, roads, against **government schools** and for privatization of universal K-12 education.! Conservatives are doing that. We will prevail.
Liberals pay for the war.
The liberal/Marxists didn't complain about Clinton's wars. ( Or bombing of aspirin factories.)
Anyway...Our federal Constitution specifically outlines the procedures for war. The liberal/Marxists are completely free to lobby for an Amendment to the Constitution. The Constitution has specific provisions for this.
I've read the arguments on both sides of that, and I don't think that model would work for education. The assumption is that some system of private schools would spring up to serve those who could only pay the minimum. But with compulsory education plus a food stamp model, I'm convinced we'd have a system with some lousy private schools (probably lousier and more costly than the public school system we now have) offering education at the minimum price to those who couldn't afford anything else, and private schools like the ones we have now but whose prices would rise by an amount about equal to the vouchers or tax credits. You don't have to mandate that people eat--people will work to be able to afford food anyway, and food stamps can operate as a supplement. But that's not necessarily true of education. If you have compulsory education, then you have to force some schools to admit the people who can only afford (or will only pay) the minimum that the government supplies or reimburses. And those schools would be subject to the same restrictions on religious content as the public schools are, and we're back to square one.
Please remember that no school is religiously neutral.
Well, you know I disagree with you there, despite your claims that it's self-evident. I think I'll go back to my original plan of just not engaging you on these issues. I will keep reading to see if you ever answer my questions, though.