What's wrong with government schools

I'm catching on a little late to this discussion about Ray Moore's* initiative to encourage Christians to abandon the public schools. It might have been the words 'Kathleen Parker' in the title that caused me to overlook it. (Must give her great credit for this, though.)

Coincidentally, just last night Pundit and the kids and I were talking about what an America without public schools might look like. The fact that this idea is a bit mind-blowing tells you how brainwashed we are when it comes to this institution. The biggest difference would be the existence of school competition and variety. Try to imagine actual educational diversity.

Here's the chronology of the discussion:
Parker
McCain
Creative Minority Report (with RSM comment, which I've posted below)
McCain

Caveat: I've had some wonderful teachers. Instructing the ignorant is a spiritual act of mercy in my book and a noble endeavor. It's government schools that I take issue with.

As a Catholic home schooler I haven't paid much attention to what Dr. Dobson has been proposing. But had I known that he advocated sending our children to government schools in hopes of reforming them I would have laughed out loud. Sure, let's toss our kids in the sewer every day. We can hose them off when they come home and pray that they don't catch anything deadly.

When Pundit was trying to convince me that home schooling was the way to go, and I was still whining, "But how will I get the laundry done?" (by the way, it's still not done -- oh well), he made lots of excellent points. One of them was the school-prison analogy. In public schools, children are trained not to speak or get up from their desks without permission. This isn't a discipline that prepares them for the world of work; most businesses don't require their employees to ask permission when they need to use the bathroom. The structure that government school imposes on children resembles prison more than it does any workplace.

This is, in part, a function of economics: the ratio of one teacher to thirty students necessitates some serious crowd control. But there's a philosophical rationale, too, behind this drive to breed passivity in children. One of the original goals of government schools was to create a tractable workforce for industry.

Parents ought to take note of this: the style of teaching that goes on in public schools -- instructing children in herds, aiming at the middle, using one-size-fits-all curriculum -- was not adopted because it's the best way for children to learn. No one even pretends that that is the case.

The list of what's wrong with government schools is a long one, but it would include:

• a destructive influence on family relationships
• the weakening of the institution of the family itself
• the indoctrination of children with values and 'truths' that are antithetical to conservative and/or religious parents' beliefs
• the killing of initiative

In RS McCain's comment at CMR he explains his "philosophy of maximum feasible non-cooperation with the government school system":

Understand that I am myself a product of public schools (and a state university); a dear aunt of mine was a public school teacher; two of my best childhood friends are married to school teacher.

My philosophical opposition to public schools is not a personal criticism of any individual. But the problems of our public education system are not episodic, they are chronic. These problems are not isolated, they are pervasive and systemic.

The system is the problem. This is why every effort at "reform" only makes things worse, because none of these changes address the fundamental flaws of the system:

1. The consumer (i.e., the parent) has no choice.
2. The consumer views the product as "free."
3. The providers of the product (the teachers) are employed by the school, not the parent, whom public school teachers tend to view with profound contempt.
4. The teachers' contempt for the parent is necessarily conveyed to the student.
5. Ergo, the one lesson taught 180 days a year, every year that the child is in public school is, "Your parents are too stupid to teach you anything."

Add into this the fact that education majors have the lowest SATs, on average, among all college students, and you begin to have some insight into why the public school system is a moral hazard. The system, by its very nature, undermines parental authority, is unresponsive to the real needs of students, and is oriented toward replicating in children the conformist mentality of bureaucratic mediocrity that pervades the administration and faculty. [emphasis added]

Suppose that you are an exception to all this. What then? Your individual excellence is being exploited by the inferior drones in the system, who unfairly share credit for your hard work. A "good school" is good because of the overall quality of its administration, teachers and students. But usually there are a handful of really dedicated people who are shouldering the burden and who produce the excellence for which the school, in general, gains credit.

Therefore, nothing is more necessary to changing the system than this: The good teachers must leave the system, and the good parents must stop sending their children there. Maximum feasible non-cooperation -- and that includes never saying a good word about the public education system, as such.

Bravo. Take note, too, that some of those college students who go into teaching because it allows them to avoid math in college end up teaching math to our kids.

*This Ray Moore is not to be confused with home school advocate and author Raymond Moore who, with Dorothy Moore, wrote the classic Better Late than Early. This is one of the books that helped to 'radicalize' my views on education.

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