I do agree the best chance to break the current American culture, is through education, but if you look at the studies, apart from the few exceptions, public education is a complete and utter failure to teach critical thinking and analysis. The Pavlovian style of instruction in our publically funded classrooms are, however, achieving exactly what the self perceived elites and political class want. Producing sheeple.
Go spend 6 hours a day for 12 years sitting in a classroom, listening to people attempt to teach to the lowest common denominator. Most of whom, have actually zero experience in the private world of work.
They’ve spent 16 to 20 years in a classroom listening to someone else tell them what and how to think, and in the later years of their education the instructors and professors have an even more slanted perspective they try to influence with.
I know many who have gotten into public education, and they are well intentioned people, but I have been told they are stuck in a system where they have little or no ability to teach anything other than what is in the syllabus, approved by the government. What are they going to do after spending all that time and money to get their degree? Quit and do something different? Probably not.
The basics of education are necessary and can be taught in half the time, I know because I’ve done it with my children, the social engineering is not. Once my kids turned 16, they started college. If public education was not fully funded by mandatory tax theft, and people were given a choice where they wanted to spend their education dollars, it would wither and die.
Why do you think educators are deathly afraid of charter schools or anything else that would introduce competition to their guarenteed paycheck and retirement. Doesn’t do much to develop incentive. It is similar to welfare. Why excell and take risks if I can follow a comfortable mold and go with the flow. In Washington State, the figure per child per year is $18,000. And what do people actually pay directly? Maybe $3500. For all of their kids.
That is my property tax burden to fund something I don’t agree with, but I have no choice, refuse to pay my tax, and eventually the government will own my property through interest and back taxes when I sell. If you want to trust the education of the most precious thing in life, your child, then pay the full price of admission, obviously you think it it is worth it.
Quit asking me to pay a part of it, I believe it is the greatest contributing factor that got us into this shit storm we’re in right now.
But in socialism, it is easier to have someone else pay for and take care of your child while you live for yourself. An underperforming, government monopoly, pinned up by an unaccountable bureaucracy of cacooned people. Textbook repeaters. If they read it from someone who read it from someone who read it from someone, then it must be true.