Separation of School and State

It is about time! I only wish I had thought of it first.

Jeff Jacoby, in his Boston Globe Op-Ed, A Call for Separation of School and State, pointed out a nearly perfect solution for those who are offended by what public schools are teaching their children. Get the government out of education!!

Presently, public school teacher unions try to force all students into a "one size fits all" K-12 curriculum, to curtail all home education, and to stop public monies from being distributed to legally organized charter and religious schools. Thus, parents and students are losing their battle to have their own religious/anti-religious, liberal/conservative, market economy/socialist etc. viewpoints either taught at the schools or protected from being trashed by school curricula.

Hooray! Talk about democratic choice and voting with one's feet. This is an idea whose time has arrived. I cannot imagine how the system would actually be dismantled, and, of course, there is the problem of unemployment for many ineffective school teachers and administrators. However, as a former public school teacher, I can attest that many teachers long for the freedom to properly teach their students and for the freedom to serve the students that they want to serve.

What? A Market for education? Some will say that is wrong - that society has a responsibility to take children from their parent's influence and to bring them up the way of righteousness (defined by the educational leaders). Oh, right, that is what the Boston religious leaders wanted, and why the first public schools were developed in Massachusetts - to save little kids from parents who refused to bring their kids to church services.

I remember my own mother, upon visiting the elementary school that I attended, being told by my principal, that she should leave my education up to the "professionals" - and that she had been wrong to teach me how to read before I started kindergarten. Mom was suitably outraged. Of course, a couple of years later, the school told my mom that they had done all they could for me, and that the family would have to find something else to occupy my intellectual curiosity. Imagine that!