2) Utter bilge. Your rants about politics are paranoid fantasies. The only politics I saw taught in grade, middle and high schools were pretty much the present Republican playbook: rabid anticommunism, racism and Fundamentalist Protestant prayers, in homeroom and civics class. As for your usual incoherent noises against unions, that’s just too bad. You don’t want ANY workers unionizing, but they all have the Right (as well as the necessity) to do so. Characterizing union activity as leftist politics is the oldest fascist lie in the book.

3) What free choice is denied? It has never been illegal to send your kids to private school. Not before and not now. Nothing is stopping you from paying a private firm or church for your own kid’s education. What you want is privatization, tax-subsidized private schools so you can starve public schools of public funds, ingratiate yourself with your knuckle-dragging, banjo-plucking, trailer trash allies so they can teach creationism and other right wing doctrine to their larvae at my expense.

I choose not to participate.

The education system needs a complete overhaul…

Kids are so much smarter than they were on one hand…and stupid as shit on the other.

Technology has bitten us in the ass.

I have no answers…but perhaps what this man has to offer is one. Hell put it into a five year probationary period. Allow a group of kids…ages ?-? for input.

I am of the opinion that this man did not wake up one day and *facepalm* with the epiphany that he wants the to stick it to all liberals on every front.

Maybe, just maybe, he isn’t as cynical and conspiracy oriented as the rest of us and he genuinely wants to help.

…He just happens to be Republican.

My original points still stand:

1) Our current public education system is not delivering anywhere near the results for the money that the system of my own childhood did.

2) In addition, the education bureaucracy is primarily focused on politics, not education. The teachers unions serve a single political party and ideology, with the NEA the number 4 political donor in the entire country. Diversity is important everywhere in education except in the field of ideas.

There is considerable evidence of cause and effect in these two things, but that’s another story.

3) The idea of free choice in education–competition or alternatives to the public school system–raises actual fury among liberals, even here.

There’s your “fear”–a political ideology that needs force to survive.

You really need to think before you write, and to read before you think. Shooting from the hip will only get you a hole in your boot.

Piano, softly, Tommy. Slowly, gently catchee monkee.

You’re a fanatic, and the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt. One day, that doubt, and that lack of moderation, will be your downfall.

I went over my comment several times, including the comparison of the considerably different and quite successful system both of us grew up under and the one we’re dealing with now.

I failed to find anything supporting abolishing public education altogether.

But then a straw man is a lot easier to deal with than I am, isn’t it?

No, Tom, the real reason you despise public education is its alarming tendency to produce graduates who refuse to accept your reactionary nonsense. And on top of that, you get to help pay for it. That must really steam the hell out of you.

It’s worth every penny. That’s why I have no objection to paying taxes for public education, even though I have no children of my own. I figure its my patriotic duty, what I owe my country for what its done for me. Like I said, the alternative, working for the TBs of this world, would have been intolerable.

So tell me, Tom. Can I start thinking of myself as a “minion” yet? Or am I still in the “useful idiot” category?

As far as Unions go, you live off of a Union wage, and benefits, that you don’t even work for, and until I see you forgo those I will regard you as a hypocrite beyond hypocritical.

In some areas, TB, you don’t have to be scratched very hard to see what you are, you trumpet it. In others, most others, you’re a pretty good guy.

Kinda scary, huh. Makes you wonder sometimes what we live around.

Public education has devolved to this point from a decentralized, non-unionized system run at local and state levels, a system that built the greatest technological civilization on the planet, put men on the Moon, and cost a third of what we’re paying now in constant dollars. If this were really about education, and not political power, we’d be doing things a lot differently.

Note that people who think it’s a crime to make someone show an ID to vote are all set to strip the citizenship from those who don’t like the idea of compulsory indoctrination by an education system controlled by a single political party. Think about that for a minute.

Democrats are only interested in “choice” if you choose what they want you to choose. I can think of many examples, and I’m sure you can, too. For an exercise, try to think of any “progressive” idea or policy that does not involve forced compulsion.

Progressivism is nothing without compulsion.

They do not have to be scratched very deep to reveal what they really are.