Thought For the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Comment to see.
I know conservatives want to take back the public schools, but maybe they should take back their children. I can’t help but think our current system is simply 1) a means for The State to get and keep power and/or 2) a long term experiment/educational fad that ultimately harms the family by taking over a major part of its raison d’etre–the upbringing/education of its offspring.
School Reactions to Teacher {Principal hits back; Teacher told to stay home}:
https://nypost.com/2021/04/15/grace-church-high-school-principal-hits-back-at-whistleblowing-teacher/
https://nypost.com/2021/04/16/nyc-private-school-tells-whistleblowing-teacher-to-stay-home/
I can’t help but think our current system is simply 1) a means fo
Schooling is a fee-for-service activity which appears on the open market. It’s not what economists call a ‘public good’. The utility of public schooling in the first instance is as a conduit to providing some baseline of educational services to all the members of a given community. We’re not as we speak a predominantly rural country where wide swaths of the public live in zones where local demand can support just one (monopoly) school. The technology we’re employing is appropriate for Indian reservations and remote areas like Eastern Oregon. We can assure a baseline of service provision through voucher distribution in a regulated market, and provide quality control through state regents examinations.
Provision by public agencies or corporations could then be limited to (1) military families, via the civilian agencies attached to the armed services, (2) distance learning and multi-node learning provided by the federal welfare apparat to the children of people in itinerant occupations, (3) schooling at Indian reservations provided by federal agencies, (4) schooling on remote islands provided by territorial governments, (5) schooling in remote areas provided by state governments, (6) niche-client boarding schools run by state governments (covering students in English immersion programs and students with profound deficits), (7) niche-client day schools run by county governments or multi-county authorities, (8) inmates of the juvenile prison system, (9) schools run by local sheriff’s departments for jail inmates and for incorrigibles private schools refuse to take.
We do that, the public sector wouldn’t be responsible for schooling more than 15% of the population between the ages of 5 and 18, if that. The rest could be handled by (1) voucher-funded private schools, (2) tuition funded private schools, (3) homeschooling, and (4) homeschool co-operatives.
Over the weekend there was a mass shooting in Kenosha. You would think that with the current focus on mass shootings and the fact that Kenosha is well known from the Jacob Blake incident that this would be a top story. But it is barely mentioned by the major news organizations.
If you look at the sheriff’s media release it’s not hard to guess why:
https://www.kenoshacounty.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=2056
The suspect is black, and unlike the Austin case this can’t be spun into a “he’s still bad because he was a cop” narrative. Some people will object that the Kenosha story has not been totally buried in that big outlets have mentioned it in a story or two, but such stories do not appear on the front page of any major outlet and are generally short compared to stories on similar shootings. (And I will note that CNN somehow manages to avoid mentioning the race of the suspect.) The identities, and therefore races, of the victims have not been released yet, but judging from the area it happened at and the bar in particular most of them were very probably white.
If you are white and you are killed by a black person, you don’t matter at all to the powers that be. I would really rather not make it about race, but they already have so that’s the world we have to deal with.