OK, so I know I'm not supposed to read the fucking article. But for some reason I clicked. I don't know why, I just clicked, and I read it, and I'm sorry. I understand now. I understand why we must never, ever rtfa. Because it's just mindbogglingly retarded.
Seriously, though, did anyone else read that? I'm trying, I'm really trying to just type a well-reasoned response based on logic and rationality. But there's a big part of me that just wants to grab this blithering moron by the shoulders, shake her very hard, and scream loudly in her face.
OK, to briefly summarize her position, basically she says that anyone who cares enough about their own progeny to send them to private schools is a bad person because by doing so they deprive everyone else's children of what is apparently their fair share of the love and support these bad people shower upon their own kids, and are therefore impeding the development of her utopian vision of the public education system of the far future. To make up for their misdeeds, these bad people should immediately enroll their children in whatever public school exists in their area, where the children will receive a significantly worse education for generations to come (I shit you the fuck not, she actually says it's a good thing for current private schoolers to be given a shit education for generations to come, says the kid's grandchildren should expect a poor education, but it's all for the children of the distant future, which is a new tact: fuck the children, it's for the children). Her, ahem, logic for all this is that by shaming parents (she's explicit on that, she doesn't want to ban private schooling, we need a "morality adjustment" to make people look down on it) into dumping their kids into substandard schools, it will force parents to work to make public schools "better" (a term she doesn't qualify, but based on the overall piece one can assume better means everyone learns what she thinks is right. God help us all...).
Now, I don't think she could summarize her own point that articulately, because, as she mentions with an air of pride, she is poorly educated and doesn't read, and she clearly has no talent as a writer. But that is what she says. There's a lot of attempts on her part to show solidarity with people who are in genuinely horrific schools (the kind where you can fucking die) by pointing out her own hardships (apparently there was no soccer team).
OK, so as to a solid refutation, lets start with the core concept. She assumes that full participation, every parent sending their kid to the local pub school regardless of how shitty, and participating in booster clubs and bake sales and pta meetings, will, over what she estimates to be at least four or five generations, result in some miraculous, perfect public school systems for everyone. There are lots of stupid ideas here, so let's look at a few. First, whose idea of perfect? Has our dear author not noticed that the education of children is a somewhat contentious issue? That not everybody wants their children to be imbued with the same worldview as their neighbor's kids (like, for example, the notion that once upon a time there were people who sent their kids to private schools, and they were Bad People, or don't want their kids taking civics classes that teach them that everything is as it should be and America perfected government in 1776 and never looked back, or want a decent selection of language classes, or who care more about how effectively teachers use the technology at their disposal instead of just how much tech is at their disposal, or any of a million other conflicting one-or-the-other issues)? How does our dear author plan to resolve this contentious issue? If there are an endless array of opinions as to what and how to teach, how will the system eventually evolve into the perfect system that pleases everyone? Well, it won't and can't, but that's not an issue, because our dear author only wants it to teach how and what she and her chosen authority figures say it should. See, everyone who wants to teach children anything else in any other way is a Bad Person, so we must simply shame them until they repent and accept the One Truth (and probably send social services for their kids, although there I'm just extrapolating our dear author's probable view). So from the outset, this arguement is fucking stupid because it relies on pursuing the "ideal" of having everyone in the country agree on every aspect of how to educate their own fucking children. Good luck with that.
Then there's the actual entrenched institutions. School boards do not give a shit about parents. They fucking tag and track kids like cattle without even sending home a note, continue policies despite all protest, they do not care. And crappy teachers? What, just replace them? You ever tried to get a terrible teacher fired? Hell, you ever tried to get any union employee fired, much less a union member in a government job? Unless a teacher does something psychotic like rape a student in class, they NEVER get fired (and even then they could get off the hook if they said it was a "security search" or some shit).
Then there's jist the incredibly fucked up notion that people should intentionally sabatoge their own children's future by putting them in substandard shitholes not even for the nebulous benefit of the (other) children, but for the benefits to be reaped by unspecified chipdren at some unspecified time in the distant future, such benefits never to come to pass anyway, as precviously discussed. And... You know what, fuck it, I tried. The woman who wrote this claptrap is a fucking braindead, sanctimonious, condescending, borderline illiterate piece of shit sycophant who should be tossed into a raging inferno sufficient to destroy her genetic code lest someone ever get the idea to use it for anything.
Private schools offer huge advantages over public. They're not based on political bias, they're based on customer satisfaction and delivering on the promise of a quality education. Competition means different options in teaching philosophy and methodology, cirriculum choice, schedule options, etc. Instead of arguing endlessly about the "correct" way "we" should educated "our" children (I didn't fuck your wife, they're not my kids), the actual parents can make the decision. Basically, public schools are a politically motivated one-size-fits-none shitholes which occassionally teach by accident (and are the ultimate in statist propaganda, given the aforementioned political bias).
Private schools can suck, too, but if they do, you[ve got real options, and so do the other parents. You can move your kids to any other school you choose. If enough customers are unimpressed, the private school either improves or fails, so the incentive to improve is much stronger. Public schools can perform terribly year after year and keep getting funded, because I don't have the option to not pay taxes going to the school (at least without the armed thugs of the state coming for me). And since everyone already pays for pub schools via taxes, fewer can afford private schools, which reduces income for the private schools, some go under, some raise tuition, or scale back operations to stay afloat until they can reach an equilibrium, but not before private education has become much less accessible than it could be.
In closing, fuck you Allison. Eat a dick.
