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here is some real garbage sent out in a mass e-mail
A recent e-mail debate that I had with an Arizona State University education professor reveals the fallacious thinking about the public good that permeates colleges of education and flows, through the graduates of the schools, to innocent k-12 students, like sewage flowing unfiltered into a pristine river.
It is collectivist, communitarian and vacuous thinking. Rarely balanced with individualistic thinking and reasoned debates, it explains why the vast majority of Americans engage in group-think about the public good and public education, never questioning the one-sided view that they were taught in government schools by government teachers, and not knowing the sordid history of the public education movement in the United States.
The debate was triggered when I received a bulletin from the ASU College of Education about homeschoolers who, in the view of the college, were taking public money for their own good. The bulletin claimed that homeschoolers were enrolling their kids in on-line charter schools, which are a bugaboo of the education establishment.
Charter schools are a bugaboo because the control freaks in the establishment do not like anything that they cannot control. Homeschooling is an even greater bugaboo, because the establishment has even less control over homeschoolers.
I responded that the homeschoolers were not taking public money. They were simply receiving a government service, an on-line charter school, in return for a fraction of the $190,000 in public school taxes that the average Arizona household contributes to public education over the lifetimes of the heads of the households. It is their money, not the state's money.
Of course, the collectivist view is the opposite. It sees one's money as property of the state to be allocated as the state sees fit. Thus, if the state takes your money for some purported "common good," you are being selfish and going against the common good if you ask for some of it back to be used as you see fit for your family's common good.
I anticipated that the professor would respond to my e-mail with collectivist thinking about the common good. After years of debating members of the public education establishment and many public school parents, including so-called conservative Republicans, about the danger of government schools having a monopoly on k-12 classroom thought and the need for competition, I have learned that they will turn to the public good argument as a last resort.
The professor did not disappoint me.
He smugly responded that although his three kids have graduated from public school, he was quite happy to continue paying public school taxes for the common good.
He had walked into my intellectual trap. Unknowingly, he had admitted that he had contributed a net zero to the public good. In his case, the cost of the combined 36 years of public education that his three children received exceeds the public school taxes that he will pay over his lifetime to public education. In other words, he received more "public good" than he will give to the public good. He isn't the good citizen that he smugly thinks he is.
I, on the other hand, will contribute a net $190,000 to the public good, because my child attends Catholic school. Yet when I have suggested that out of fairness I should get a little of my money back in the form of a tax credit for the 12 years that my son attends private school, the public education establishment and public school parents have called me selfish. Who is really being selfish?
The fact is, there is little if any public good in the professor and the majority of Americans getting public money for the education of their children. They can afford to pay for the education of their children out of their own pockets and would not leave their children uneducated if government schools did not exist. After all, most parents provide food, shelter, clothing, medicine and transportation to their children without the state's help. It is nonsense to believe that they would provide those things and not provide an education.
On a personal note, my uneducated grandfather immigrated to this country and first worked as a coal miner. Because taxes were about a third of today's confiscatory level, he could afford on his meager income to give his three children a combined 36 years of Catholic education. Certainly, a college professor could have afforded to educate his three children without taking public money. And certainly, the physician who lives two doors away from me does not need my family to subsidize the public education of his three children, who ride around in a new Cadillac Escalade while my son rides around in a 13-year-old minivan. In a real sense, we are subsidizing the doctor's Escalade.
A case can be made that it is a public good to subsidize the education of the relatively small percentage of citizens who cannot afford to educate their children. But that is not the case that is made by members of the public education establishment and most public school parents. They make the case that it is a public good for rich and poor alike to receive a "free" public education. But illogically, they do not say that it would be a public good for rich and poor alike to receive government food, shelter and clothing.
The source of such fallacious thinking is colleges of education. Until that source is plugged, the thinking will continue to flow through teachers to the general public, and the nation will continue becoming more socialistic and less free. ________
Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com
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