Tag Archives: Public Schools

News

Bad news for social conservatives in Sweden and Quebec

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First, in Sweden, the socialists want to ban homeschooling.

Excerpt:

The Swedish Association for Home Education (ROHUS) is asking for support from the international community to stop an attempt by the Swedish government to outlaw homeschooling. The new legislation argues that because a child’s education should be “comprehensive and objective” it must be “designed so that all pupils can participate, regardless of what religious or philosophical” views of parents or children.

When you give the government your money, you give up the right to choose. If you keep your money, you keep your right to choose. If you think that the government should take your money and then provide you with services like health care, education, welfare, therapy, etc., then you just gave up your right to choose. You gave up your liberty for security.

I think that Christians give their money away thinking that the government will act in their own best interests. That is, that a secular government will act in the interests of Christians. Maybe Christians think that their interests lie in “helping the poor”, and that a big government is needed to do that. But when government gets that money, they will use it in ways that cannot possible be as good as you would use it yourself.

Let me be clear. If you are a Christian, and you give money to government to take care of you, then you cannot complain with a secular government bans homeschooling or outlaws voucher programs. Obama isn’t going to take your money and defend homeschooling or create voucher programs. He was elected with the help of teacher unions, who are opposed to any education provider other than government-run schools.

The time to act in your own best (Christian) interests was when you still had the money in your hand. Don’t give your money to the government because they tell you some sob story about taxing the rich and helping the poor! What they really want to do is to take your money and pay off their political donors, like abortion providers, trial lawyers and unions. They cannot possible spend the money as well as you could have spent it yourself.

Christians need to be fiscal conservatives. They need to learn economics. They need to think with their heads when voting.

Quebec schools impose same-sex parenting curriculum

Same-sex marriage activists always ask the same question, “how does allowing me to marry hurt you?”. I don’t think they are interested in an answer, but here is one answer. When the government decides that marriage is what we call a bunch of people having sex and living together, then there is no reason to prefer traditional marriage in the schools. And the curriculum will be modified to reflect that.

And this is what is happening in Quebec.

Excerpt:

The Quebec Ministry of Education has funded the development and implementation of training for primary school teachers promoting inclusiveness for families with same-sex parents, and will be implementing it in Montreal and Quebec City, reports Le Journal de Quebec.

Estimated to have cost the province between $50,000 and $80,000, the training involves a three-hour session for teachers on location, with a kit of materials including videos, brochures, and activity books for students.  According to Manon Boivin of la Coalition des familles homoparentales (the ‘Coalition of Same-Sex Families’), who is training the teachers, “It’s almost a recipe book with all the ingredients to make of our schools schools that are inclusive and more open.”

Boivin, who herself has a 5-year-old daughter and raises her with her same-sex partner, commented: “Often, in the face of homophobic insults, teachers do not know what to say….We will make an offensive to inform the schools.”

This is similar to the first story. Well meaning Christians feel that poor people should not be excluded from health care or education. So they hand the government their own money and ask government to take over health care and education. It’s “compassion” for the poor. And then the government does take over these things – but in a secular way.

The government is not going to spend your money that you gave them on things that are in keeping with your religious values. They were elected by certain groups, and they must reward those groups. If you want the freedom to teach your children what you believe, don’t vote for bigger government and higher taxes. Don’t vote for things like single-payer health care and environmental regulations.

And stop hating wealthy people and big corporations! The government is much, much worse than either of those two – the wealthy people and big corporations can’t ban you from homeschooling your kids and they can’t forcibly indoctrinate your children in views you don’t hold. Only government can do that! Think! Don’t give them your money, don’t let them take care of you. Handle it yourself!

Commentary

How childhood experiences shape our view of economics

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Last time, we looked at how childhood experiences influence our views of religion. This time, I want to go over an article from the Cato Institute from the famous Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. This article will give you insights into why leftist academics are against capitalism, and what specifically causes them to have that belief.

Here’s a blurb about Nozick:

Robert Nozick is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia and other books. This article is excerpted from his essay “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” which originally appeared in The Future of Private Enterprise, ed. Craig Aronoff et al. (Georgia State University Business Press, 1986) and is reprinted in Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Nozick’s thesis is that the school environment encourages “wordsmith intellectuals” to be hostile to free market capitalism and prefer centralized systems.

First, let’s see what a wordsmith intellectual is:

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.

Nozick’s argument is that wordsmiths oppose capitalism because the free market doesn’t provide them with the rewards and adulation from authority figures that they received in their school years.

He writes:

Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher’s favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

But what happens when these pampered wordsmith intellectuals hit the job market?

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

So, what economic system do wordsmith intellectuals advocate for instead of capitalism?

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements.

Intellectuals can’t make money degreez in Marxist Studies, Peace Studies, or <Insert_Victim_Group_Here> Studies. And yet, they feel entitled because of their classroom experiences. So, the answer is to confiscate the wealth of the productive entrepreneurs and redistribute them to the intellectuals.

But there are further unrelated points I must add to this article.

What makes people less religious the more educated they become?

OK, if you watch the debate between Peter Atkins and Bill Craig, or Lewis Wolpert and Bill Craig, etc. then it’s pretty clear that these “intellectuals” have not rejected God for intellectual reasons. On the contrary, they rejected God based on the reasoning of a 12 year old and never bothered to look for answers since they were 12.

The real reason that more educated people reject God is due to pride. Specifically, they do not want to be identified as believing the same spiritual things as the masses. Their great education makes them feel pressure to please their colleagues by embracing views that are different from the benighted masses.

So, it comes down to peer-pressure. They simply don’t want to be different from their colleagues. They want to be able to look down at the benighted masses.

What makes researchers support socialist dogma and pseudoscience?

Researchers are funded by government grants. Grants proposals have to get the attention of government bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are always looking for a crisis that they can sell to the public in order to increase the size of government and regulate the free market.

Therefore, researchers tend to embrace whatever the latest Chicken Little crisis is, be it global cooling, global warming, or unsafe consumer products, etc. Grant proposals that open up opportunities for government to control the free market will get the most funding.

What makes government-run schools and media support socialism?

Again, government-run schools and media receive funds based on the size of government. NPR, PBS and the whole public school system can never be objective about anything. They must always side with government and against individual liberty. They also oppose competition from private alternatives like Fox News and vouchers.

News

How teacher’s unions make war on charter schools

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Story here in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T The Heritage Foundation and Independent Women’s Forum)

Let’s see what Jay P. Greene has to say about charter schools:

In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase thanks to local taxes and stimulus money that the charters lack. New York charters already receive less money per pupil than their district school counterparts; now they will receive even less.

When I was a young man, I dreamed of becoming a prosecuting attorney or English teacher. (Software engineering was my third choice). But the political activism of left-wing teacher unions, and their opposition to merit-pay, stopped me from becoming a teacher. I always think of unions as a form of adult day-care, insulated from real world competition and consumer needs.

Unions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. New York already has the “card check” unionization procedure for teachers that replaces secret ballots with public arm-twisting. And the teachers unions appear to have collected enough cards to unionize the teachers at two highly successful charter schools in New York City. If unions force charters to enter into collective bargaining, one can only imagine how those schools will be able to maintain the flexible work rules that allow them to succeed.

…Eva Moskowitz, former chair of the New York City Council education committee and now a charter school operator, has characterized this new push against charters as a “backlash” led by “a union-political-educational complex that is trying to halt progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children.”

…When charter schools unionize, they become identical to traditional public schools in performance. Unions may say they support charter schools, but they only support charters after they have stripped them of everything that makes charters different from district schools.

And why does school-choice matter?

In New York City, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found that students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and were forced to return to district schools.

Florida State economist Tim Sass and colleagues found that middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than their peers who returned to district high schools because charter high schools were not available.

The most telling study is by Harvard economist Tom Kane about charter schools in Boston. It found that students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit.

I highly recommend you read the whole article, as Greene is a respected authority on education policy. In case you missed my recent article on Obama’s cancelling of vouchers, check it out here.