Topic: Education and Child Policy

Happy Birthday, Welfare Reform














Striking While the Irony Is Hot

The New Jersey Courier-Post has come out in favor of parental choice in education, and was criticized for doing so on its own op-ed page today. The critic, one John R. Flynn, argues that the Courier-Post failed to provide enough support for its position. Ironically, he provides no support for his own opposition to school choice. Naturally, I felt it my civic duty to point that out in a letter to the editor:

School Choice Critic Uninformed

In his August 21st commentary, John Flynn criticized the Courier-Post for providing, in his view, insufficient evidence for its support of school vouchers. How ironic.

Mr. Flynn voices “serious questions” about the feasibility of public and private school choice programs, but seems not to have seriously looked for the answers. He is apparently unaware that such programs are well established and successfully operating in a host of countries. The Netherlands has had school choice since 1917. Nearly three quarters of its students are now enrolled in private schools and the Dutch outperform American children in every subject at every grade. School choice programs also exist, in various forms, in Chile, Australia, Sweden, and Denmark, among other nations.

If critics spent less time wringing their hands and more time informing themselves about the international success of school choice, they would do a great service to American families.

Educational Toleration

NPR reports on a new Florida law that requires the teaching of American history in the schools and sets up some rules for how it should be taught. At the beginning of the report I was amused by the description of the impetus for the law:

Mike Fasano was a state Senator from New Port Richey, Florida, just north of Tampa. After visiting some schools he learned that students often didn’t know the name of their town’s mayor, the name of the state’s lieutenant governor, or even the difference between the Florida legislature and the U.S. Congress.

The name of the lieutenant governor? Let’s see … kids who can’t vote can’t name a public official who has no power. And that’s a problem? But OK, they should know the difference between the legislature and the Congress. And so:

To help remedy that, Fasano proposed a bill recently signed into law that requires Florida schools to teach the history of the United States from the period of discovery to the present. Nothing controversial about that. The clause that alarmed historians was the one that seemed to suggest that any discussions of controversial events that were open to different interpretations would be off-limits.

Indeed, the bill does say:


And that has stirred controversy. Teachers and educrats and a Washington lobbyist for historians (!) all complain that history is not just “facts,” that interpretation is essential for understanding what happened. And of course they’re right. The first problem is that millions of things happened every day in 400 years of American history (note that “400 years” assumes that American history began with the arrival of European settlers). You can’t tell kids every one of those things, so already you’re picking and choosing among facts, based on some theory or assumption about what’s important.

And then of course history is full of controversies: Did the British treat the colonists unfairly? Did the colonists treat the Indians unfairly? Were the costs of the American Revolution worth it? Were the Founders hypocrites to proclaim their devotion to liberty while holding slaves? And so on and so on, right up to the dropping of the atomic bomb, the debacle of Vietnam, and the contemporary questions of whether either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush was the worst president in American history.

But the mere listing of a few historical controversies illustrates the difficulty of deciding on a “right” answer. Whose interpretation should be taught to all students in government schools? Should we tell students that Jefferson was a hero or a hypocrite? That the 600,000 deaths in the Civil War were or were not worth it? That the bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime or a necessary measure to save even more lives? That FDR saved capitalism or transformed a federal republic into a centralized welfare state?

There are no right answers to these questions. (Well, there are, but apparently not everyone sees them.) So the teaching of history becomes a political struggle: Which faction will get to impose its view on millions of children?

The way to avoid political fights like these is to depoliticize them. Take away the power for anyone to impose his or her views on all the children. People used to expect the state to impose one religion on the whole society. When, nevertheless, people came to hold differing religious beliefs, Europe went through the Wars of Religion. And out of those conflicts came a new understanding: religious toleration and the separation of church and state. Let everyone worship as he chooses, and let no one impose religion on those with different beliefs.

The separation of school and state would accomplish the same thing in education: No more political fights over school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, gay teachers, evolution, dress codes, sex education, or historical interpretation. Let every family choose schools that reflect their own values or otherwise best meet their educational needs. And if we can’t achieve separation, we could at least adopt toleration: Let all parents send their children to schools they choose, without financial penalty.

Who Is Really “Obsessed” Here?

I just fired off this letter to the editors of the Houston Chronicle:

Who Is Really “Obsessed” Here?

In an August 16 editorial (“Voucher Obsession”), you claim as fact that “vouchers would only [help] a few students.” The Netherlands has had a nationwide public and private school choice program since 1917. About three quarters of Dutch students now attend private schools. Chile introduced school choice in the 1980s, and the majority of students in that country are now enrolled in private schools.

As school choice programs allow demand to rise, the supply of private schools rises to meet it. For you to be unaware of such an elementary fact about market-based education systems does a disservice to your readers. And it begs a serious question: if you know so little about school choice, why do you oppose it so obsessively?

“Abolish Religious Schools” — Guardian Columnist

In response to the latest Islamist terrorist plot, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee makes the following recommendation:

A new Commission on Integration and Cohesion, launching this month, will be worthless unless its first recommendation is to end religious and ethnic segregation in schools. That means no Church of England or Catholic schools, no Muslim or Jewish schools.

Ah yes, social cohesion through religious tyranny, a winning strategy down through the centuries. Nyet.

A nation that fought a number of civil wars over (among other things) the repression of religious freedom should have learned that compulsion in matters of faith does not breed social harmony. I would have thought Ms. Toynbee particularly well equipped to pass along that historical pearl, given that she is the descendant of not one but two well known British historians. Apparently the nut does sometimes fall far from the tree.

The Evolutionary War, Part Deux

In response to an earlier post, a reader e-mails with the following comment: “Intelligent Design is fundamentally a religious theory and thus cannot be taught in public schools according to the First Amendment.” 

Regrettably, it’s not that simple. For the first century of their existence, state schools engaged in official prayer and Bible reading in bald defiance of the First Amendment. That official religiosity was only discontinued after a 1963 Supreme Court ruling. There’s no reason it couldn’t come back. The sad truth is that our Constitution and Bill of Rights are regularly trampled over by legislators who find their content inconvenient (viz., the 10th Amendment). 

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that all courts, in perpetuity, will see Intelligent Design as a religious theory, as happened to be the case in last year’s Pennsylvania District Court verdict [.pdf]. 

Even at present, public schools in many parts of the country have watered down their coverage of the theory of evolution to avoid rousing the ire of adherents of ID or creationism. This is perhaps part of the reason that only 13 percent of Americans think humans evolved through entirely natural processes, while the rest think they were created in their present form (46%), or guided in their evolution (31%), by the god of their choice.

Natural human evolution has been public schools’ sole explanation for human origins for three generations, and that is the result. The official knowledge thing has thus already been tried, at length, and it has failed on its own terms.

Parental choice is a better approach. Those who want their children to receive a high-quality secular scientific education will be able to get it – which many cannot do in our current public schools. And those who want to pass along their religious beliefs about human origins to their children will be free to do so, without being forced to wheedle those beliefs into the official government schools for which they are compelled to pay. 

Most important of all, in a country founded on freedom of conscience and individual liberty, it is not the government’s proper role to indoctrinate children with the majority’s views (or, in this case, a tiny but influential minority’s views) – whether or not you or I happen to think those views are correct. 

Still more here.

Gimme That Old Time Sci-ence

Much of America’s soi-pensant intellectual left opposes school choice as a solution to the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution battle. They argue that some things, like science instruction, are too important to be left to the discretion of the drooling masses “unqualified” parents. The state must step in, they believe, to ensure that all children are taught the non-Gospel, God-not-fearing, scientific TRUTH.

A small problem with this “reasoning” is that it fails to consider the possibility that the state might not always be in possession of said TRUTH. Consider, for instance, the recent words of Arkansas’ Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Mike Beebe: “I believe in intelligent design and I don’t think intelligent design and evolution are mutually exclusive.” Beebe went on to tell reporters that intelligent design should be available to students alongside curriculum on evolution theory. The Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Jim Holt, “called evolution a ‘fraud theory’ and said that keeping intelligent design out of the classroom is censorship.”

Thanks to the federal government’s accelerating usurpation of control over the nation’s public schools, it is not difficult to imagine a day when such candidates hold federal office and can shape instruction in classrooms all across America.

How, exactly, would that protect the scientific truth so ostensibly dear to the anti-choice left?

This is why the latent totalitarianism of so many American intellectuals is remarkably short sighted. It might not always be a friendly face waiving from the back seat of the flag-adorned staff-car….

More here.