Reply #173: Hundreds of millions of students .... [View All]

[Trajan]

have been educated thanks to our current system of public education ...

Is it 'perfect' ? ... of course not.

But: is it a "losing system" ? .... hardly ...

Are you not throwing out the baby with the bath water ? ..

Are you NOT taking a few instances where some children don't appear to 'learn' in a public school environment, and implying that the WHOLE of the student body are not learning anything ?

It isnt fair to castigate the whole system because a percentage don't do as well as we would like ... no system is perfect ...

THIS much I know: prior to the introduction of public schooling, there was rampant ignorance amongst the masses ... We have NOT eradicated ignorance, but we have put a huge dent in it ...

Denigrating all of public schooling is a cheap thrill usually reserved for the UN bashers and religious right .. and it is fallaciously derived ...

What we need are BETTER public schools, with MORE money to purchase the resources they need ... the voucher system does EXACTLY the opposite by re-directing public schooling funds to private affairs, thereby starving the public sector by chipping away at it's support, making it even LESS effective as a tool against public ignorance ...

Vouchers are the WRONG approach, and fallacious smears against public schooling as a whole goes counter to what we believe as Democrats ....

Your line of argument is entirely consistent with the Libertarian view ....

Ehem ... Hello ? ...