Re: Reforming Education

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:43:49 -0700 (PDT)

>> What do you do in the case of parents who cannot afford to pay tuition?
>> Private charities? Scholarships? It would be a real shame to lose good
>> minds simply because their parents are not successful. This is one reason
>> we have mandatory schooling.

Very sloppy thinking. Subsidized education and mandatory education have nothing to do with each other. The first is an economic issue: should we use tax dollars to educate children? The latter is a human rights issue: should we enslave children to state-run indoctrination centers and jail parents who dissent? I have some sympathy for those who favor the former; it raises my libertarian hackles a bit and I think education can be more than adequately handled by private means, but it's arguable. But mandatory education should be morally repugnant to any civilized human. The fact that it is not is very distressing.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
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