Inquiry Into Inquiry

Re: Diane Ravitch • Help the ACLU Sue the State of Nevada to Stop Vouchers

Vouchers are a tool for injecting a viral species of market dynamics — the dynamics of private individuals competing in a zero-sum game for individual commodities — into a sphere where those dynamics are out of place and where they are ultimately destructive.  That is the sphere of cooperative, public, social institutions that must rise above the myopia of short-term private interests if they are to sustain themselves over the long haul of history.

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Re: Diane Ravitch • Help the ACLU Sue the State of Nevada to Stop Vouchers

Until very recently, beginning with the perverse promotion of corporate curricula, state and federal governments have never had “the power to require children to receive a particular philosophy of education” (Craig Engelhardt).  Parents have always had the maximum freedom, within reason, to choose private institutions and alternate forms of education for their children.

What state and federal governments are required by their constitutions to do is to hold publicly funded institutions, organizations, and facilities of all kinds, along with private contractors receiving public funds, accountable to the people for the democratic principle of equal protection under the law.

And, yes, there is a particular philosophy pervading that provision of equal protection, but I don’t think it serves the purpose of the people to subvert it.

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Re: Diane Ravitch • Help the ACLU Sue the State of Nevada to Stop Vouchers

Religion is a private business.

If religious establishments wish to remain free of accountability to the government of the people as a whole — just for one example, under that extraordinarily strong definition of privacy that excuses them from property taxes — then they must not expect to take funds whose distribution demands a public accounting.

That wall of separation between church and state is a two-way wall, and people who value religious liberty and toleration should be wary, be very wary, of anyone punching holes in it.

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Re: Diane Ravitch • Why Douglas County, Colorado, Vouchers Were Ruled Unconstitutional

Freedom of religion depends on the separation of church and state.

That’s what they taught us back in the last millennium, even in Texas, maybe even especially in Texas, whose constitution as an independent republic they made us learn in school.

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Re: Michael Hays • How to Fix the College Debt Problem

Once we are clear about the principles that govern the role of education in a democratic society then we can begin to reason out optimal ways of providing for its realization.

Elementary and secondary education became compulsory when our society decided that they had become the minimal educational requirement of a competent citizen.  But there is a wide gap between minimal and optimal, and if the public recognizes a public interest in making something of some kind universally and freely available, then it is in the public’s interest to do so.  What exactly we make available can be diverse and is always subject to discussion, but I think it’s clear that something more for those who elect it would probably pay dividends to the public good.

We started down several such roads many, many years ago.  And then some forces pulled us back and down.  I think it’s long past time to question whether those forces are really acting in our best interest.

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Re: Michael Hays • How to Fix the College Debt Problem

The rationale for Universal Free Public Education is that a certain level of education is necessary for a person to function as a full-fledged citizen in a well-tempered and thriving democratic society, lacking which any form of democracy is bound to fail, just as many democratic experiments lacking U.F.P.E. have failed in the past.

That is the sense in which in which it makes sense to use the word “free” in this context.

In that sense the reason for U.F.P.E. is much the same reason for prohibiting poll taxes.  If being educated is part and parcel to being a citizen then there must be no obstruction to it.

U.F.P.E. becomes the right of each individual in a democratic society precisely because the society in question has come to see U.F.P.E. as necessary to its own survival and well-being.

The only question that remains has to do with the “certain level of education” that is needed for optimal functioning.

That level has shifted, mostly upward, through history.  In the late Sixties when I left home for college, there was a general recognition that the future of our nation would depend on upping the notch a bit.  California, being as forward thinking as they used to be back then, leapt ahead of the pack and inaugurated a First Year Free program for qualified high school graduates.  Well, stuff happens.  And Reagan happened.  And that was the end of that.  And the country has been going backward, education-wise, well, not so wise, ever since.

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What was it called? — spinthariscope? — it came from a science kit I got as a kid …

I might as well jump in medias res …

Re: Michael Hays • How to Fix the College Debt Problem

Better to join the First World, and make college free.

The larger problem is this —

Everyone knows that the health and smarts of any country rests on the health and smarts of its people, but there is in this country a small but powerful sector that prefers to benefit from the general health and smarts of the masses without actually paying to support it.  So they are relentless in pushing policies that socialize the costs and privatize the benefits to themselves.

It is time to put a stop to that …

While we still have the strength and wits left to do it …

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