Parental Speech Rights -Reply

[Robert Hotz]

 My questions for Ed Darrell, and others, are as follows:

 1.  In what way do public schools benefit all of us that private or
 home schools do not?  (para 1)

 2.  In what way do private or home schools fail to follow the
 Jeffersonian duty to the republic principle?  (para 2)

 3.  In what way do private or home schools fail to produce a citizenry
 as public schools are purported to produce?  (para 3)

 4.  Isn't it conceivable that we could make (limited) public schools
 better while similtaneously allowing private and home schools to
 flourish?  (para 4)

 5.  How is it that by educating their children in choosing the mode of
 instruction private and home school parents are guilty of the
 "abandonment of the republican ideal that an educated populace is a
 bulwark against tyranny"?  Ed Darrell's assertion here seems to be
 particularly strong, while unsupported.  (para 5)

 6.  First, the government does not pay for education, taxpayers do,
regardless where they send their children for instruction.  Further, are you
not making the assumption that when the private and home school parents have
their children opt out of public school that the obvious result is that the
children that don't opt out will be harmed as a consequence?  Also, I know it
sounds trite, but isn't there a difference between public education and public
school?  (para 6)


7.  Everyone does have the right to get out.  But Ed's concern begs the
question.  We do not begin *in*.  In what way would the education system --
education, not school -- be impaired if everyone attended private or home
schools?  (para 7)

8.  If private and home school parents participated in the PTA and campus
improvement groups of their neighborhoods and communities, wouldn't public
school parents still be able to play with them?  (para 8)

Rob Hotz
Lincoln, Nebraska
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[1][My response is primarily polemic.  If I take the time in the midst of
boxing and packing to edit it down, I'd not get it out timely.]
I am awed at Bruce's and Maureen's resolve to educate their children at
non-public schools at an income about what my family's income is.  As a
matter of Constitutional rights, they are exercising theirs, and I commend
them.  As a matter of public policy, I wish they could find a way to dedicate
such devotion to public schools that benefit all of us.

[2]In any discussion about an individual's right or a family's right to
select education, it seems to me we tend to lose sight of the purposes of
education in America and the effect of education on our history.  I think it
is a post-Brown phenomenon that we see education as for the individual and a
right of the family, as opposed to a duty to the republic.  Jefferson was
more clear, I think, in laying out the curriculum he thought his schools for
Virginia would have had (please excuse -- my "Notes on the State of Virginia"
is boxed for a pending move.)  There are some things we need kids to know,
even when they disagree.  Indeed, there are many subjects citizens cannot
disagree with unless they know them.

[3]We don't educate kids so the kids will become all they can be.  We do it
to provide leaders to lead us and a citizenry that will continue to act as
the correcting mechanism to government.  We don't tax people in a quid pro
quo so that their kids may then get an education -- we tax them to provide
public schools to educate the great unwashed so that those who pay the taxes
may be more free from crime and reap the benefits of leadership provided by
the educated.  We don't insist parents send kids to school as a benefit to
those kids -- we insist on it as a prerequisite to their becoming lever
pullers or cogs in the machinery of our republic.  Bruce and Maureen reap
those benefits regardless where their kids go to school, or if they have no
children at all.

[4]Bruce and Maureen may have wholly innocent complaints against the public
schools -- I couldn't get Latin at my school for instance, we had only two
years of French, and calculus wasn't offered at all.  But in our neck of the
woods there are three big issues for avoiding the public schools:  History
classes don't claim that the U.S. is a Christian nation (one parent
complained to me that a teacher had the gall to say Ben Franklin wasn't a
Christian), biology is a required part of the science sequence (and Texas
standards require students be able to explain evolution theory even if they
don't believe it), or "the schools aren't safe, especially since there are so
many students from the 'apartments'" (the riff-raff issue).  With the
possible exception of the local Catholic diocese's schools, none of the many
parochial schools within a half-hour's drive of our city provide better
academics or a more safe environment, by any objective measure.  I do not
think interpretation of history or the riff-raff issue are valid bases upon
which to base a free exercise argument for avoiding the public schools (I'm
dubious on the biology argument, but that is a diversion to this argument).
 At what point do we say that the task is to make the public schools better,
rather than abandon them?

[5]If Bruce and Maureen get their $5000 per child from the local school
government, it makes their life easier to the extent that they can recapture
that money for their personal investment portfolios, or new shoes.  But it
comes at a cost to the rest of us who suffer by their abandonment of  the
republican ideal that an educated populace is a bulwark against tyranny.

[6]The assumption that there is a family right or an individual right to that
money the government pays for education is my real concern.  If we make that
assumption do we not abandon of the idea of public education?  De Toqueville
marveled at the ability of the average worker to read and discuss the day's
issues.  I get nervous with the idea that individual familes should have a
right to frustrate the community's better interests by choosing not to
participate in that system.  The issue is not really whether Bruce and
Maureen's kids get the education; the issue is whether all the other kids get
it.

[7]On the issue of school funding it seems to me we have seen the
conservatives follow the liberals over the brink, into an abyss of "too many"
competing rights.  The rights become increasingly important and increasingly
impossible to defend if no one has a responsibility, or if no one assumes the
responsibility, to make the education system do what it is supposed to do for
our communities and the nation.  When everyone has a right to get out, who can
assume the responsibility with any hope of making it work?

[8]Bruce and Maureen sound like a wonderful couple.  I'd love to have them
join me in the PTA and in the campus improvement groups.  I wish they
wouldn't choose not to play.

Ed Darrell
Duncanville, Texas