We can't reform "public" schools because they're not broken. They undermine politically weak parents today just as they did when they were founded on bad principles in the 1840s:
Compartmentalism, the notion that it's OK to dis-integrate academics and religion by keeping them in separate compartments called school, church, temple, and family.
Welfare, the notion that you're entitled to your neighbor's money for your children's education.
Socialism, the idea that government should own and administer the means of production (e.g., schooling).
Government schooling in America can't be fixed any more than government farms could be fixed in the Soviet Union.
I want the poor to go to better schools than today. Free market schooling can make this happen. It will deliver better education at less than half the cost of government schools.
The top two-thirds of the families will be able to afford tuitions after the $300-billion tax cut, but the poorest third will need financial help. We'll need to raise an additional $20-billion each year for groups like the Children's Scholarship Fund.
Americans now give $175-billion to charities each year. With the huge tax cut, we can prudently predict $20-billion in new scholarships. (For more information, please see Education: What About the Poor?.)
School Liberation is already happening. Of 53-million school children in America, parents have already liberated 6.5-million children for reasons of safety, academics, morals or religion. They have chosen private-schooling, religious-schooling, and home-schooling.
As the next wave of reforms fails and even more pull out, this number will grow to 8, 10, even 15-million outside the system. We'll reach a point where support for government schools will collapse just like support for Marxism collapsed in the East. It'll probably happen in a Big Whoosh, just like the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We can go in one of two directions: a) continue down the present road of bringing more and more families into dependency with such notions as school breakfast, school clinics, longer day, and longer year, or b) we can reverse the 160-year slide into parental dependency and move toward more family responsibility for education.
Today we harm children by weakening their parents with government programs that foster irresponsibility. We must end these programs and call upon parents to do their duty to their children. It's not utopia, but it's better than today — and doable.
