I am always in support of less government - why in the world should a government be in control of the education of children? Society doesn't progress by circumscribing all of it's member entities, it progresses when those boundaries are pushed by people that do things different.
I was home schooled most of my life, and I'm self educated; school was a failure for me because there was too much "authority" instead of "discovery" while learning.
I am a parent; both of my kids are grown-up, and I have grandchildren.
I'm not keen on any kind of government interfering with school curricula. What is tsaught, and how it is taught, are matters that should be decided by professional educators. The job of a politician is primarily to influence the public's views, and they won't do the right thing if they get their hands on the levers controlling education.
Not personally a huge fan of the Public School system. Whether they are intentionally meant to turn students into sheep is one question I don't have the answer to, but I don't think that a centralized system can ever work to create an independent and informed citizenry.
Personally, I've always taken issue with the approach that the government should be directly responsible for the formation of its citizens rather than the reverse.
I don't know what you consider government, but the public schools I attended constantly told students that you had to go to college to be successful, no matter what degree you got.
School is NOT the only source of knowledge. Parents have the most important role in teaching values. The school has an important role in socialization. School teaches the children that they are part of society and that there is people out there that are different and that's a good thing.
It is as bad that children ONLY learn from their parents that children ONLY learn from the state. Both radical situations go against a complete and balanced education.
I'm against "the state should be the only educator", my mistake if I didn't expressed that correctly.
That's not exactly my position. I don't think authoritarian schools as we know them today should exist. I'd like to see lower cost, higher quality, and much more variety, innovation, and experimentation in education. Government involvement hinders all of those things.
It’s as if we made a mistake when we gave government control over education. It devolves into a lowest common denominator “one size fits all” approach that disadvantages heaps of people and prevents them from reaching their full potential
I think the universal availability of public schooling is, in general, a great good. But the idea of the government telling me that I can't home school my children makes my skin crawl. The US constitution correctly defines strictly limited roles for the government, and carves out huge spaces for individual liberty - liberty which is meaningless if I'm forced to allow the government to indoctrinate my children in ways that I may strongly disagree with.
Turn it around. Imagine that schools taught a sort of religious fundamentalism that you found abhorrent. Would you want the government to be able to force you to send your children there?
Making home schooling illegal turns the government into a master precisely when it should be a servant, and a jailer when it should be a helper.
It's common knowledge that the founders of the United States favored the separation of church and state because they didn't want government interfering with freedom of religion by telling people what to think.
At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches.
If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think?
We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice.
To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!"
-Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco
This is one of the reasons I can’t get fully behind public education because in a democracy, everything government operated must eventually revert to the mean. Excellence is not prized in government.
I'm not against public schooling in principle but its current form is baffling. We expect kids to spend 1/4 of their entire life in an authoritarian system where they have no autonomy and then we throw them to the wolves when they become adults.
Having schools conforming to educational standards may be important, but there is a difference between even a country-wide system that proposes (and tests, etc) educational standards, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, government's involvement in education. These two may be completely independent. Indeed, the former (standards) may exist without the latter (government-controlled education).
I see this talk as an argument against "traditional" schooling. The alternative to traditional schooling is anything not traditional. In the US, that would be homeschooling or private school like Montessori. The political takeaway is that government schooling (which necessarily places emphasis on uniformity and conformity) is harmful and that private alternatives should be encouraged.
The ultimate question is who is responsible for educating their children? Historically it's never been the state. Government run education went hand in hand with the industrial revolution-- it's designed to create a reliable (and pliable) workforce. By this point the public education complex is just one more oppressive power structure motivated primarily by self-preservation.
But school is about creating obedient subjects so that the government can maintain status quo. I don't see them promoting anything that is radically different which has the potential to undermine the thought processes that support out institutions.
I am from Brazil, and I don't intend to put my kids in school if I can (here it is illegal to homeschool, prison time for parents and all, I am hoping to get out of the country if the needed laws don't pass when I have kids).
And a good reason for it, is the amount of bullshit fed to me and my friends by the shovelfulls, when I was a teenager I believed all adults I knew except schoolteachers were evil, because they didn't like Mao, Stalin and Che Guevara, I was taught that Pol Pot was a hero, literally, only after I was out of the school system that I could finally learn what these people actaully did.
Then over the years I picked more and more on what sort of stuff school taught me wrong, there were a few things in harder sciences, but when it is social stuff, school was a disaster, lie after a lie, sadly some of theses lies remain pervasive in society (for example many people in my country believe the monarchy was pro-slavery, despite documents that exist that show that the monarchs themselves wanted slavery abolished, and that when they DID abolish slavery, the coup that ended monarchy was sponsored by the biggest former slaveowners).
I'm not sure mandatory indoctrination is a healthy sign for society. Study-at-home was rather strong in France historically, due to public schools being so reactionary and authoritarian (or on the other side of the political spectrum, due to teaching sexual education and evolution), and there was an entire public institution (CNED) dedicated to that.
However in the past decades, the government's attack on home schooling has coincided with the introduction of more and more nationalist/racist doctrine in public schools.
Don't get me wrong, i'm strongly in favor of public education, as long as it's in the interest of the children (for example Montessori methods) but public schools in much of the world are the exact opposite of that.
If you give parents absolute control over their kids on something as fundamental as education, the kids themselves live in a what you call a "totalitarian government". That is why the UN convention lists education as one of the basic rights for children.
I live in the US. And even though I don't agree with all the laws here, I respect them because that is what this society agreed too. Even though it makes this country, again according to your definition, a lot less free than Germany on plenty of issues. Except the right to homeschool.
Btw, I do prefer restrictions that are justified to protect myself and others. Like stop lights, or the right of way, or the fact that the people treating me at the hospital have to pass a medical exam to do that. By the law that is enforced by the government.
You can change that law in Germany if you want. You just have to convince enough people that your way is better. Good luck doing that. I won't support it, and I don't have to. That's the kind of freedom I like.
I was home schooled most of my life, and I'm self educated; school was a failure for me because there was too much "authority" instead of "discovery" while learning.
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