Part of the series: School is hell
Who owns the public schools?
“Without a real private competitive market for education in the United States, all that is available is what the central planners of state education choose to provide.”
— Richard M. Ebeling, President of The Future of Liberty Foundation
The so-called “public” school system does not belong to the public; It is owned and run by the government. Therefore, public schools serve the needs of the government, not the needs of the public. By contrast, private schools are owned and run (and paid directly for) by members of the public, and are accountable to their patrons.
We must not make the mistake of believing that “We the People” are our government. While politicians and other officials claim to represent us, they are an elite class who pay little attention to their constituents. Furthermore, the school system is a world of its own with virtually no responsibility to the public it purports to serve. Their superintendents actually work for the state education department. Their only connection to the town is that the local residents are forced to pay their salaries.
Furthermore, we should not expect public schools to offer a real education. They are intended to provide education only: basics of literacy and numeracy, with a superficial layer of other knowledge. Yet even those basic skills are severely neglected in today’s schools. They are displaced by political mandates, social engineering and other concerns. The result is a confused hodgepodge of opinions, attitudes, and values (often contrary to family and religious traditions) with no cohesion, no consistency, and no real goal other than to train docile group-thinkers who will be dependent on the government.
“Local control” of public education simply does not exist. Local school boards do not represent the people who elect them. In my state, CT, state law says, “School boards are not agents of their towns, but creatures of the state.” In other words, school boards are puppets of the state education bureaucracy, which also controls the state legislature on school issues. School board members are also members of political parties and respond to their pressures. They just pretend to control the schools when in reality they decide only trivial details. Increasingly, what we have is a national school system controlled from distant offices by unelected bureaucrats with unknown agendas. Even state control is giving way to virtual federal control, through laws as bad as No Child Left Behind and Goals 2000.
School wars continue because the system’s goals for children are virtually the opposite of the goals parents have for them. The government uses its schools to produce masses of obedient and controllable employees and soldiers; therefore, it offers an experience that conditions our children for low-level jobs and/or the military. That should explain why state schools offer a routine that tells kids, “Sit down, shut up, don’t ask questions, we’ll tell you what to think and what to do.” To parents he says, “We don’t care what you want.”
Meanwhile, parents are constantly disappointed by what public schools offer their children, but they can’t do anything to change it. School board meetings are charades organized by employees to prevent parental and public participation. The entire show is controlled by state and local administrators and employee unions to benefit themselves, not the public or the children.
Parents shouldn’t expect public schools to offer a real education, and yet many still do. The government school system has never intended to offer what most parents want. Public school is a program of coercion controlled by the unions paid for by the force of taxes. Employee qualifications are questionable, their “certifications” are bogus, “tenure” is a sham, and their union constantly seeks maximum pay for minimum work. It is designed to provide political and social indoctrination, with only a minimum of skills and knowledge, but no education. The result is mediocrity, secrecy and deceit without accountability to anyone. Fewer and fewer people believe that the government is an appropriate agency to provide “public education.”