> > I think public schools are a good thing, but that they should be funded privately.
> IF THEY ARE FUNDED PRIVATELY THEN THEY ARE NOT PUBLIC. BY DEFINITION.

What I meant by that is that they would not be payed for by the government.

> > In order to accomplish that, we would need to phase out the current system, of course. Children's not getting education is a tragedy, but the government's redistrubting income they way they are now is wrong and has not solved the problem.
> What? How on earth would we accomplish this? You present two mutually exclusive plans:
> 1) We should have public schools, and also private schools which the government should give money to parents for.
> 2) We should not pay for any of this.
> Actually, maybe they're not mutually exclusive. You don't want us to pay for them via taxes. Okay, present a way for the government to pay for education or vouchers or anything else without levying taxes. Bake sales?

Ideally, number 2. I don't think the government should be controlling or managing education at all. Since we are so dependent upon it now, it would be a long time before we could phase it out. My idea for how to improve the current system is to eliminate the government monopoly on education by having parents decide how their money is spent. It's a comprimise in my mind, but the best we can go with right now.

> > Well, that's my two cents. What do you bet no one's going to agree with me?
> >
> > Mark"The Radical!"N
>
> Perhaps, rather than branding yourself as the "cool outcast", you should wonder why even the most conservative people on this forum refuse to agree with you. You pretty much refuse to answer the argument as to why something like a national defense or police are a good use of tax money (despite the fact that you seem to be opposed to taxation regardless of its use) but education is not. You complicate the issue by going off on tangents about income taxes and how California wants to make home schools illegal.

I am not opposed to taxation altogether. I see the role of government as being to protect the innocent, punish the guilty, and enforce law. For those purposes, they have every right and responsbility to tax to ensure that the job gets done. I think that for the government to increase its role from protector to provider is unwise and unjust. They provide for us by taking away our freedom to provide for ourselves.

> If you were to even be coming from a standpoint like "We need to make public education better through vouchers," rather than "We need to abolish public education," you'd probably have a lot more people agreeing with you.

My long term goal would be that second one, but I don't think we can implement that any time soon. Too many people ARE opposed, and it would need to be phased out. I think that the first is a good step to take right now to improve things, whatever your philosophy is about whether the government should pay for public education.

>> Nope. I have seen that the public schools in >California are failing. My friends who are in >the public schools say that schools are >overfunded and the teachers are incompotent.

>What? The staunchness and extremity of your >arguments is due to your FRIENDS telling you >something that the average student has no clue >about anyway? Basing a blanket opinion about the >general relationship between government and >education on limited hearsay testimony by biased >and partially informed kids is not the best way >to formulate a political position.

As I said before, I've talked to public school teachers as well. I've seen how we compare nationally, how many students admit to cheating, how we keep spending more money but test scores and the like continue to drop.

>> As I have said before, I see the government as playing a limited role in our lives. I definitely don't think they should interfere with private education, and I think it's unjust for them to make the rest of us pay for public.

>Nobody is suggesting they should interfere with private education. It's not unjust to make a country pay for the education of its country's citizens.

I believe that it is. Look, we obviously disagree about the place of government, okay? I see it as being as limited as possible, and the rest of you prefer government to play a more active role. I don't see making an entire country pay for the education of some a legitimate thing for the government to do. The government's taking the responsibilities of a family for themselves.

>> If the parents make poor choices with their children's education, it is a shame. Nevertheless, I believe that parents have the final say in their children's lives, and that the government doesn't.

>Can parents KILL their children, too? How about bat them around once in a while? Like you, I am conservatively-minded -- parents should have FAR more say in their children's upbringing than they are currently given, and government and social workers should have FAR less. However, whether a child is educated AT ALL or not is NOT a right I believe parents should have. They SHOULD have the right to decide the MANNER of their education. That's a parents' prerogative, no question. But whether or not they're educated at all or not is a decision upon which many more people than just the parents and child rely upon. As I said, the success or failure of our nation depends upon education, and if you don't believe me, compare the relative qualities of education in successful nations vs. third world countries.
>So, getting back to the actual point, government-funded public schools are GOOD, because they allow EVERYONE to be educated. If parents want to pay for private schools, fine. If they want to homeschool, fine. The issue of whether public schools should exist or not has nothing to do with all these fringe issues and smokescreens about California considering a law against homeschooling. In fact, the justness of the government HAVING a role in education has nothing to do with California considering a law against homeschooling.

Parents do not have the right to physically abuse their children. The government has a responsibility there. But the government can't step in to prevent people from making bad choices. One of the reasons I bring up the homeschooling issue is because that's another conclusion of that kind of thinking. If the government has a responsibility to ensure that parents do not neglect their children by giving them no education, isn't giving them an inferior education a bad idea? I don't think that the government should decide whether or not a family is qualified to train their kids mentally, or to choose whether or not the parents are making the best decisions in their lives.

In America, the government is continuing to take more and more of our freedoms and rights away, in exchange for handling our responsibilites for us. I don't think it's a fair trade. We no longer save to retire, we give money to the government for them to save for us-at 2% interest. We no longer take responibility for educating, teaching, and training our children-we have the government do it for us.

>> For number 2, of course not. But parents still should have the right to do so. Children are the responsibility of their parents, and their parents should have the right to educate them as they wish. Privately, publically, or by themselves. Parents will not always make the best choice. But the government isn't any wiser. If parents want to homeschool their kids, and the government is convinced that their system of education is better, they still should not overule the authority of the parents.

>I'm with you on this one and always was. Homeschooling, as long as it is with a government approved curriculum (the standard of approval being "at least as thorough as the public school education curriculum). Why must the government approve the curriculum? Because otherwise "home schooling" could consist entirely of occasionally teaching one's children to count to one.

Nope. If we decide to have school officials decide what appropriate curriculum is, what do you think it will lead to? They kicked creationism out of the public schools, they'd like to call it unscientific and not fit to be taught everywhere else. The government should have NO control over private schools or homeschoolers. The curriculum shouldn't have be approved, and the parents should not have to certified as teachers by the government.

The homeschool group I work with does have requirements for graduation. We do keep high academic standards. And colleges look at the curriculum, grades, and SAT test scores. The government would like to control all education, "for our own good." I don't think they have the right, or the wisdom to make choices better than the parents.

>> For number 1... it does. And certainly, everyone SHOULD be educated. But for the government to forcibly redistribute income to make it happen is unjust.

>Nonsense. YOUR LIFE is positively impacted by people you don't even know getting an education. The survival of our country depends on it. Anything that depends on the survival of a country is, by definition, fair game for the government to get involved in.

We can survive without the government running our lives. As the government takes a larger and larger role in our lives, we become more dependent upon them. Parents need to start taking on the responsibilites of educating their children themselves, and seeing to it that they get the best schooling possible. The survival of our country depends upon millions of factors. It depends upon entreprenuership, but that doesn't mean the government should bail out businesses which fail to ensure that it can happen. The best way to ensure the survival of our country isn't to intrust the responsibilites we have to the government. It's to start managing them ourselves.

>> Children's not getting education is a tragedy, but the government's redistrubting income they way they are now is wrong and has not solved the problem.

>Uh. Yes it has. Maybe not perfectly, but a darn sight better than completely privatizing schools and making them optional would.

>And since you keep talking about "redistribution of wealth," can we talk about what that means? Where does it redistribute this wealth? The money goes to the public schools. Yeah? Are taxes that fund our national defense "redistribution of wealth"? Are taxes that fund museums and state parks "redistribution of wealth"? I suppose technicality it moves money from one place to another, but what I consider the intended use of that term are things like welfare. Maybe capital gains taxes and minimum wages, if you stretch the meaning a bit. Using the term inappropriately to apply it to all taxes everywhere is an unreasoned hot button type of logic that clouds the issue

As I've said before, the government has the right to "redistribute wealth" in order to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. I do consider taxes which go to causes other than these unjust. Since we obviously can't manage our own money, since the church, and charities seem not to be doing the job well enough, we have our rulers step into the picture to spend our money for us. And something is always lost in the shuffle. There are tens of thousands of buearucrats living off of the money we pay for education.

>> Because of what they have done in taxation, they have made it difficult for parents to afford private education and colleges, making for many, public schools the only choice.

>Public schools will ALWAYS be the only choice for the majority of the people that only have that as a choice now. All the more reason to make public schools better rather than do away with them.

The options wouldn't be so limited if people weren't already paying for an expensive education through taxes. And I think the way to improve the public schools is going to have to be through accountability, not more cash. There are two ways of resolving that-make them accountable by creating some other government agency to oversee them, or by having parents be able to send their children elsewhere if they are not satisfied.

>> Parental accountability. If a parent is not satisfied with the level of education his/her child is getting, have the government take the money it would be spending on the public school education, and give it to the parent to spend on a private school.

>There's a good way to get the government out of education.

As I've said before, I view this as a compromise, but better than the current system.

>Your ideas work great in a utopian world where parents always make the right decisions, or at least none of the rest of us are affected if they don't, in which school vouchers would actually PAY for a private school education (they don't and never will), and in which the government can be totally free from education and yet still be around to distribute vouchers. Furthermore you're trying to solve problems that aren't problems, and trying to expand our choices by taking the cheapest one away.

Parents don't always make the right decisions in education. Bureaucrats don't always make the right decisions in education. Who do you think I trust more? Who do you think has the right to decide what should be done with the children of the parents?

The school vouchers that are being proposed are not a perfect solution. I would prefer to see the amount the government spends per student given to the parent to spend on private education. But at least school vouchers would allow parents who prefer alternate styles of education to pursue those instead.

In response to your last comment, (although you probably won't read this) I could say the same. I think no conclusion about this issue can be reached because of our more fundemental disagreements about the role of government.

In 20 or so years, we may be able to see better what has worked and what hasn't. Until then, ta ta.

Oh yeah. And who said there were any good John Steinbeck novels?

Mark"The uncompassionate convervative"N