May 30
We’ve decided to have government run the schools. The education of young people is intimately tied into the transmission of values. This leads us to a serious conflict with the way we have chosen to order our society.
Some people will say that the schools shouldn’t teach values; that should be left for parents. Unfortunately for that point of view, deciding not to teach values is itself a value choice. And people don’t usually hew to it; they want the school to teach their values, whatever those values are. State schools can teach the consensus values of their community without too much trouble - if there is a consensus set of values.
We have to recognize that people have a strong desire - and a right - to see their kids educated in the way they want them educated. Larry Liberal wants his son to learn about tolerance and diversity; Connie Conservative wants her daughters to learn morality and individualism. There’s not really a good compromise here; if their children go to the same school, someone (more likely everyone) is going to be unhappy.
We really only have two viable choices that I can see. One choice is to voluntarily self-segregate - so that liberals live in one town, conservatives in another. That mitigates the problem by making it easier for the schools to please the large majority of their constituents. Liberals, out of Kansas; will the last conservatives and libertarians leaving New York turn out the lights, please. Our family had a reasonably good experience in the public schools of a small mountain town in rural Colorado; there weren’t any liberals, atheists, or ACLUers around to complain that the kids celebrated Christmas and had Easter break.
The other choice is to completely convert to homeschooling and private schooling. The government can still have a role in setting voluntary standards, providing curricula, and giving subsidy payments to parents who fall below a certain socioeconomic point. Virtual academies - public curriculum and funding, but with parents teaching (and doing the values integration entirely independently) - are growing in popularity; that’s how we’re schooling our children. I see downsides to this; some people will make bad choices about their kids’ schooling, for example, which imposes costs on the rest of us downstream when their kids graduate from the DeVry Institute of Poetry Studies and can’t hold a job.
But I think it’s a lot better than the alternative, which is a continuing failure in our schools to reinforce the value choices of families.
May 22
The existing teaching industry is not effectively mediated by market forces. Guilds (in the forms of unions) and government (in the form of certification requirements) act as a barrier to entry, preventing genuine market competition from working its happy magic. Any additional allocation of resources to education simply flows to the rent-seekers who control access (in this case the teacher’s unions and their political causes) rather than to the end users. Thus the spiraling spending on education, with absolutely zero correlation to performance. Under the current regime, if you add more teachers, regardless of competence, the net amount of education will not increase. The rent-seekers have no motivation to provide good performance; good performance does not justify them in asking for more resources for their tiny empires.
This may be changing. The colleges of education have become so openly rotten that even legislatures can’t bear the stench. New teacher certification tests are getting acceptance - anyone with a degree can take the test and if they pass, be certified to teach.
This is totally healthy and will be a boon to schools. It’s a difficult slog for a smart person to sit through a graduate program in education - it’s pablum, and bogus pablum at that. If these tests catch on, we could be seeing a much higher caliber of person entering the world of public school teaching.
Jan 28
This is a great idea, and it’s interesting how strong the correlations are. It’s also interesting to note that Christian books have a wide span of associated intellectualism, with people listing “The Holy Bible” at one end and “Mere Christianity” at the other end - and just “The Bible” in the middle.
(H/T Marginal Revolution.)
Jan 22
Want to know if someone thinks that the state is here to serve the people, or the people here to serve the state? Ask them what should be done with exceptionally bright children in the schools. Via David Thompson:
If you regard children as the property of the state, existing to serve it, then it is explicable why the bright ones should be regarded as a scarce commodity, and rationed accordingly. The idea of allocating their “beneficial influence” equally through society follows from the same twisted logic. It is a pity that this is only applied to intelligence. Why should not the good-looking children be shared out equally, so their peer group has equal access to the pleasant sight of them? Perhaps the kind ones should be spread so that all may benefit equally from their sweet disposition?
