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October 9, 2004

More Government School Issues

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

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Francis Porretto presents two interesting vignettes on government schooling. The first points to an article about Virginia schools teaching about Islam. While the article is a bit overwrought, it strikes me as interesting that any hint of Christianity or Judaism in the schools is utterly forbidden, while Islam is somehow a fit subject for study. Not very consistent that.

The second points out the motivations behind public schooling, and the obvious places it leads. Basically, given that schools and bureaucracies are both inherently authoritarian, schools tend to promote statism. Not a difficult leap, there, but it's probably true that not many people have thought about the connection.

I told Stephanie just last night that it seems to me that as we've increased schooling in this country, we've actually ended up decreasing education, with the peak probably having come some time between about 1910 and 1940. Since WWII in particular, the tendency of schools to engage in faddish behavior, combined with the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" that began in the 1960s, has led to a dramatic drop-off in academic standards and performance, combined (not coincidentally) with a rise in politicization of and activism in the classroom.

Yet more reasons why my children will never attend a public school.