The first person to leave a comment at the Great Auk is another great blogger: Crispus.
Here an example of what s/he writes:
Yesterday religious and city leaders rallied on the steps of City Hall in support of school vouchers, saying it's the best option for their kids' future. The Black Ministers' Council of New Jersey head calls public schools a "fraud." The head of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders calls school choice a "moral issue" where blacks and Hispnics must unite.School choice advocates say tax dollars should follow a child to the schools of their choice, not the school itself. They say school choice would drive reform in public education through competition. The Black Ministers' Council says what stands in their way are the Democrats, who have strong ties to teachers' unions. Advocates are right on all three counts.
In my opinion compulsory education without school choice is a form of slavery. We force children to go to a particular building at a particular time, and sit and listen to a particular person telling them what to do. The only way to get out of bondage is to buy your freedom, if you can afford it. It is immoral, and should be illegal.
Of course, like many immoral activities, it has serious negative consequences from a practical point of view too. For example, you cannot have a state education monopoly and still have separation of church and state. The national education system has created a state religion, one which advocates a broad religious agenda. What am I talking about, I hear you say. Let me ask you this: If the schools aren’t teaching religion, why is it that so many religious people are against it?
UPDATE: Just in case I didn’t make myself clear: Something that contradicts a religious principle must also be a religious principle, at least according to the religion in question. For example, you can’t teach sex-education without conveying some kind of moral attitude toward it. What kind of moral attitude do you teach? That’s a religious question. Of course, schools try to avoid the issue by trying not to teach morals at all, just teaching “the facts”. That raises a couple of questions: First, do you really want your children not to be taught morals? Most parents, given the choice, would choose to teach their kids some kind of moral system, but of course they have no choice. Second, by avoiding teaching morals, you in effect teach children to have no morals – the message they get is that morals are optional, and that they can choose to do without. After all, the school apparently does without.
UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that the same case can be made for regarding compulsory education as slavery even with school choice. I suppose that’s true, however, the justification for compulsory education is that it is in the best interests of the child. Children are not free; they are wards of their parents or guardians, and to lesser extent wards of the state. I agree that in extreme cases the state should be able to intervene for the good of the child – but such cases should be as extreme as possible. Telling the parent that the child has to go to some school, that the parent can choose, is less extreme than telling the parent that the child has to go to a particular school, and therefore is without question more correct. (It remains a question whether parents should be told at all – I think they should be.)
Posted by David Boxenhorn at June 30, 2004 11:47 AM