FBXL Social

I wish everyone would agree to public schools being the place where only the most milquetoast boring commonalities are taught.

Of course, one major problem with that is that a lot of people are going to claim that there's a lot of things that people dispute and don't agree on, but I would actually dispute that back in turn. The overwhelming majority of people agree with the sky is blue. The overwhelming majority of people believe the Sun is hot. The overwhelming majority of people believe that one plus one equals two, and that a e i o u and sometimes y are the vowels and all of the other letters are considered consonants, and that you can go to the dictionary to figure out how to spell most words. I'm not talking a 51% majority here, I'm talking like 80 85 90 95%. When you get right down to it, most of the big arguments are over a pretty trivial number of things, and so it would make sense to me to just say "hey, we are a government institution we are not here to teach controversies in either direction, we are here to make you basically competent" and then a core message of school becomes "we are not going to teach you everything, you need to go in the world and learn without us"

Nobody will like this opinion, but I think public schools should be more heavily regulated than cigarette ads. Anyone using government mandated and funded schools is immediate jail time under a universal hatch act.

For the concepts of "academic freedom" and "free speech", those things don't exist in public schools for teachers. If you want freedom to say whatever you want, or to teach whatever you want, you should have that separated from mandating that you get people's money and mandating that you get people's children. Yet another good argument for private schools, where you would be able to teach more or less whatever you wanted as long as they reach basic levels of competency.

Speech by government employees in public schools that children are often mandated by law to attend is not free speech. Such people are the organ of the state, and so anything that they say carries the authority of the state. Therefore, what they say must be deeply controlled. Speech that you are mandated to attend that's paid for by the government and operated by the government is essentially mandated speech, especially if your grade is going to depend on your willingness to conform to the dictats of this agent of the state.

A lot of people have a problem with the idea of tightly controlling public schools, which to me is just another good reason to make it into a free market question like they did in Arizona. In that case, instead of a monopoly of public schools, there's a certain budget that follows the child and can be used for whatever, and I'd suggest there should be some basic competency levels kids must reach but otherwise leave it alone. One thing I'm imagining would be a few parents getting together to hire an extremely competent instructor for a few kids, someone educated that they trust.

With respect to disparities in education caused by a funding only model, there are dozens of cities throughout the US that have dozens of schools that graduate sometimes thousands of students and not one of them is able to read, right, or do math at grade level. And far from being a problem of not enough money, and some of those situations such as baltimore, those schools that are failing to put out a single literate child from high school get some of the highest amounts of money per child in the entire state. In other words, government education is failing on a systematic level. Meanwhile, in other schools or other cities, there are tons of kids who come out fully capable of reading a grade level and who go off to have productive careers and lives. A lot of people think that you're going to solve the problems of inequality with government, but anyone who understands anything about government knows that that's the opposite of reality. You just end up with the people who are best able to convince the government to give them more money and power. If you could have it where people were actively trying to find the best education then I suspect you could get a huge benefit from that.