Public education is evil on these counts:

1. Education is a service. No one has a "right" to a "service," except for three specific services. These services all have to do with the management of physical force and the protection of such rights as a person does have. And they are:

Police

Military

Courts of law

Education is NOT one of them.

2. Government education becomes indoctrination. Any government is at moral hazard, and subject to a temptation to promote values--there's that word again--that the government knows is most condusive to its own power and its ability to do special favors for people.

You just deflated your own argument. If you read AR's statement carefully you will see the seeds of your own destruction. It is not in the best interest of a government such as we have now, riddled by progressive and socialistic interest groups, to teach students skills in critical thinking and initiative. Creating automatons who mindlessly follow whatever drivel the intellectual and media elites choose to spout is. While I was publicly educated, I was also taught, in those same environs, to think for myself and to take whatever consequences followed from whatever irrational behavior led me into.

LOL

Eh, they need me. lol

Best we erase these posts. :-)

Right now, the TTB is my big problem. EPA hasn't bothered me directly.

Always.

What would you like me to say? ;-)

I found it! It's in Rands The New Intellectual. "Guilt and fear are the disintegrators of a man's consciousness or of a society's culture. Today, America's culture is being splintered into disintegration by the three injunctions which permeate our intellectual atmosphere and which are typical of guilt: don't look--don't judge--don't be certain.
The psycho-epistemological meaning and implementation of these three are: don't integrate--don't evaluate--give up."

Yes that is one quote, but there's another one about not noticing, not judging and not asking or something like that. It might have been Leonard Peikoff's Ominous Parallels actually. I'll have to look for it.

Yes, I knew many whose total life was the internet.

You were dealing with a subclass of geek whose focus doesn't run to anything outside of a keyboard and a screen.

I shrugged in high school. It felt like prison to me. I did just enough to get out.... and I copied half of that.
Learning on my own has worked well for me.

Actually the quote is "Judge and be prepared to be judged." (pg 73 of 'Virtue')

dang, I am still trying to find the study. it's fairly recent too. all I know is, oooooo whoa whoa,
if my mom had been with me 1st -6, well, I wouldn't have gotten away with sliding. lol actually I really didn't. when I was in 4th grade, she'd give the 6th grade math papers to grade. I remember watching Hawaii 5-O while a whole stack of papers were on a TV tray in front of me. I graded them, watched whomever Dan-O booked, and cracked a new Conan Doyle on the couch next to me. no one sent me to high school to do anything, but I made all kinds of mischief with mercury in my mom's classroom. I'm still alive.

Too late. I will spend my remaining days railing against Emotionalism and for Reason.

Glad I could help.

Line from Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', or very similar.

try being a farmer or rancher

Not many...and the ones who know don't talk about it. That I've ever heard anyway. Actually the ones that know, I would imagine, usually home school. Heck, the teacher don't see it and they're teaching it. They spend a lot of time keeping the kids "in line" because, let's face it, it's a difficult task to teach 30 kids at once. AH!! which is why they have big classes!!!!!! Another puzzle piece just snapped into place. Kids need one on one to retain a sense of individualism..being part of a herded group kills it. And yes, j_lR, "family size" is exactly right.

Spot on LS. "a small group" like maybe family size? Following is the first sentence of Dewey;s Pedagogic Creed " I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. " I wonder how many parents know that they are sending their children into this claptrap?

You mean as a track worker fot Taggert? :-)

"The key to the study was constant contact with a primary parent in those years"
I seem to remember a book written by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan (not sure on spelling) in which he showed that children raised in a home by two parents for 18 years, got more education, made more money, formed stable relationships, and committed less crime.

Funny....I was teaching a group of kids today and had a thought... I could teach so much more efficiently if I could just do one on one instead managing a group of normally active kids. If you start with numbers, letters, reading books at very early ages then kinder thru 3 would be a breeze. Then my son asked me if I'm going to home school his son if we should get a jump on it and start when he's like 2 or 3. I said, "Wow..I was JUST thinking about that too." The whole "they need to interact with peers" stuff is hog wash. Having play time with a group of friends teaches them all the interaction skills they need and it's easier to address issues that might come up with a small group than a huge group. :)

Privatize everything. The tax problem is bigger than just schools. Why do people who didn't pay any taxes get a refund?

You're welcome