Re: When even a Republican can see it....

In article <slrnf85t8q.lmr.randolph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Randolph Fritz <randolph@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2007-06-27, David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrnf85nfa.l0u.randolph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

....

But once you have a legal framework that makes home schooling or private
schooling easier, what people do within that framework isn't under the
control of the people who pushed to get it. That's one of the advantages
of decentralized systems. Private property in paper and presses makes
possible left wing publications as well as right wing ones.


But you still have to own a press. And that doesn't even count what
happens when the good citizens burn your printshop.

If things have swung that far towards a theocracy, the theocrats control
the public schools--it requires a lot less political power to make sure
that kids are taught what you want in the public school than to force
every home schooler and private school to teach what you want. The
public schools, after all, are already run by the government, and at
that point they control the government; it's supposed to decide what is
taught in them.

The only version of your argument that makes sense to me is one that
holds that the fundamentalists will do such a good job of educating
their kids in their views that those views will spread and become
dominant, so we need to keep the kids in the public schools in order to
make sure they are taught what you want them to learn rather than what
their parents want them to learn--rather like the old argument that we
need public schools in order to turn those benighted Catholic immigrants
into good Protestants. I doubt you would be willing to take that
position and I'm sure I wouldn't. It's a pretty extreme rejection of the
marketplace of ideas in favor of the imposition of a state selected
orthodoxy.

....

One big question with regard to vouchers is how much control the state
gets over the schools they are used at; some people oppose vouchers on
the theory that they will simply expand state power over private
schools. But on that issue I think I and the fundamentalists are on the
same side, because both of us are minorities, although I'm a smaller
minority than they are, and both of us want to minimize state control
over education. Despite the ambitions of the reconstructionists, I think
the core of the fundamentalist project is defensive--to keep their own
kids from being schooled in ways they disapprove of, not to force other
people's kids to be schooled in ways they approve of.


That isn't my sense of the fundamentalist homeschoolers, and it isn't
Joyce's experience here in Oregon: they are fine with state control,
as long as they control the state; to a large extent this movement
exists because they lost control of the curriculum in the public
schools.

Of course. My point is that they did lose control of the state, and
that's why they want private schools and home schooling. The important
thing is their kids; they would be happy to have other people's kids
taught their version of the truth too, but that's a lot less important.

....

Do you know of any example of a voucher bill that expanded control over
private schools in a way that fundamentalists would approve of?


That I don't, but the earlier California intiative would have been a
windfall for church schools; the provided funding was enough for
religious schools but not academically-oriented private schools. It
would help a poor family to send its children to religious schools, or
a middle-class family to send its children to academic private school,
but not a poor family to send its children to good private
schools--the two main financial beneficiaries, in other words, would
have been the churches and the wealthier members of the middle class.

And, as I keep pointing out from the other side, the reason for partial
vouchers isn't that anyone in the voucher movement prefers them--indeed,
even on your conspiratorial view they wouldn't, since the bigger the
voucher the more useful it is to fundamentalists and for profit schools.
The reason for partial vouchers is that the people on your side of the
argument are trying to block vouchers entirely, and a compromise is the
best we can hope to pass.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
.

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