Vouchers II

Failure to provide educational vouchers is a violation of the separation of Church and State principle. The State has a justified interest in the education of its citizens. But when it designs an educational system permeated with a narrowly defined ideology, constantly redirected by cultural fads, it becomes its own sort of religion. Educational agnosticism is functional atheism. A conversation that permits only materialistic thought drives the learning process. It has powerful influence on human perspective, both about society and the ideas that define what it means to be human. A human that is a byproduct of materialistic evolution is soulless and cannot be expected to give more than lip service to any sort of morality, public or private. A human who considers himself or herself created in the image of God has a profoundly different way of looking at everything. It is appearance vs. substance.

Vouchers can return the right and responsibility of education to parents, while removing that responsibility from the various vested interests and “experts” that currently run public schools. State monopolization of education is totalitarianism. Yes, the right to private education already exists, but only to the financial disadvantage of all who choose the option. For the most wealthy Americans the additional financial burden is a light one, but for the mass of middle-income Americans, private education is possible only at great sacrifice. For the mass of low-income Americans, i.e., those saddled with America’s worst public educational institutions, private education is not an option. 

It is clear, then, that today’s so-called public education discriminates against all who find it ideologically degenerate. It is also clear that it is a form of public oppression against those without financial means. Those with the least means are imprisoned in districts where schools are little more than warehouses. Progressives in America seem sensitive to the plight of far-away Palestinians warehoused in Gaza, but are strangely apathetic about the nearby educational warehouses of inner-city Americans. To be sure, the educational warehouses of America are the gateways to the prison-warehouses for those same young people as they become adults.

What is the national educational interest? Citizenship functionality: the abilities to read, write, perform basic math, live cooperatively, and function as law-abiding, community supportive citizens. Strangely, public schools hardly even attempt to teach civics, private finance, or respect for the law. But they do provide plenty of instruction about popular shifting morality; revisionist history; materialistic science; and humanistic philosophy, none of which contribute to strengthening a pluralistic society. 

It’s time for the people to be allowed to identify and choose genuine education for themselves. All of our children should be given the opportunity to develop into independent, capable adults.