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Public Education is Inherently Destructive

One of the big problems with the public school system is that the schools are not accountable to the parents. Parents have their children's best interest at heart; unfortunately public schools often do not.

Public education is inherently destructive. Public education involves forcing people, via taxation, to pay for public schools. This makes schools directly accountable to government bureaucracies, not to parents. Individual parents are thereby denied the right to choose which school will receive their education dollars, i.e., the right to reward schools for performance. If parents could pay schools directly, schools would have to earn those dollars by satisfying individual parents. And since parents are primarily concerned with the interests of their children, schools would have to deliver real value to children, which would require focusing on the child's educational needs.

Then of course there are the teachers who see their classrooms as an arena to brainwash their students.

Unfortunately, there is much confusion about both free speech and academic freedom. At too many schools and colleges across the country, teachers feel free to use a captive audience to vent their politics when they are supposed to be teaching geography or math or other subjects.

For example The Jay Bennish 'Diatribe as Geography'

This kind of indoctrination is by no means restricted to Overland High School. School teachers, at all grades, often use their classroom for environmental, anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-parent propaganda. Some get their students to write letters to political figures condemning public policy the teacher doesn't like. Dr. Thomas Sowell's "Inside American Education" documents numerous ways teachers attack parental authority. Teachers have asked third-graders, "How many of you ever wanted to beat up your parents?" In a high school health class, students were asked, "How many of you hate your parents?"

If you happen to have an exceptionally smart child the public schools are no place for them.

Unfortunately, the idea of treating the brighter or more serious students as a problem to be dealt with by keeping them busy is not uncommon, and is absolutely pervasive in the public schools. One fashionable solution for such "problem" students is to assign them to help the less able or less conscientious students who are having trouble keeping up. In other words, make them unpaid teacher's aides! But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators -- and some are absolutely hostile to the idea. It violates their notions of equality or "social justice" and it threatens the "self-esteem" of other students. As a result, too often a student with the potential to become a future scientist, inventor, or a discoverer of a cure for cancer will instead have his time tied up doing busy work for the teacher.

Cheri Pierson Yecke decries these social experiments with out children.

Heterogeneous grouping is a staple of cooperative learning -- one of the many educational fads that have seeped into middle-school education over the past 50 years. Cheri Pierson Yecke, former secretary of education in Virginia and commissioner of education in Minnesota, describes this movement to make all middle-school students equally mediocre in her book, “The War Against Excellence.” She decries the effort to “promote social egalitarianism by coercing students who are gifted/high ability to be like everybody else” as well as the way educators tend to use middle schools as laboratories in which to conduct their perverse social experiments.

Unfortunately bright students are often resented not only by their peers, but by their teachers too.

In regular public school classrooms, these gifted students have been too often resented by their classmates and their teachers alike. Some teachers have seemed glad to be able to catch them in occasional mistakes. Given the low academic records of most public school teachers, it is hard to imagine their being enthusiastic about kids so obviously brighter than they were -- and often brighter than they are. No small part of the gross neglect of gifted students in our public schools is the old story of the dog in the manger.

Thanks to these articles in Capitalism Magazine parents are at least aware of the pitfalls of a public education.

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