Curt Howland wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1Mumia W wrote:Yes, they are. I was educated in a public school.http://www.johntaylorgatto.com http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338 http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Apr-16-Sun-2006/opinion/6593902.html http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Apr-23-Sun-2006/opinion/6595142.html ==========Quote"Not only was private education in demand, but it was quite successful. Literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent between 1800 and 1840, the years prior to compulsory schooling and governmental provision and operation of education. In the South during the same time period, the rate grew among the white population from between 50 and 60 percent to 81 percent. (Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State, p. 38.) ..."This year, by comparison, a study by the American Institutes for Research found that more than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges in 2006 "lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks ... ." These are today's college kids, mind you -- supposedly the cream of the American crop, youths on whose schooling our unionized government propaganda camps have squandered more treasure per pupil than any other society in history.===========End Quote
Your quotes don't help your argument for two reasons. You're not comparing public to private, and the people making those statements don't begin to envision what society would be like without public schooling.
This is another part of the Right Wing mantra: "It doesn't outperform the private sector, so it should be scrapped."
Where both Social Security and public education are concerned, the purpose is *not* to outperform the private sector. If they tried to do that, the private companies would scream bloody murder.
The purpose of the public programs is to ensure that *something* is there for the middle class and poor. It doesn't have to be gold-plated.
The purpose of public education is to prevent the formation of a sharp, two-class system, where an elite class understands how the society is run, and everyone else knows so little that they have to accept the decisions of the elite.
When this happens, it is absolutely guaranteed that the elite will structure society so that they will forever be the elite, and no one else will ever be given the opportunity to understand how the society is run or why it's run the way it is.
It would be like Medieval times, where an Aristocracy ruled, and the peasants, by both education and law, had no choice but to accept their decisions. A system like this can last 500 or a thousand years.
The purpose of public education was to ensure that this could never happen again.
The purpose of public education in America, was to destroy the power of the old aristocracy of the South, and to fertilize the formation of a new white middle class that would never allow themselves to be dominated by an elite group of plantation owners ever again. (It worked).
The purpose of public education is not to compete directly against private education. It is to teach the masses how to see it when their rulers are about to give them the big shaft. It worked. In 2004, at least 55 million Americans saw the big shaft coming and tried to stop it.