Well, they lied to us, and we believed them. Shame on them, and shame on us.
I’ve got a lot to say, but I’ll forbear for now.
Personally, I’m going to keep fighting for parents’ choice in education, although I don’t really know in what capacity. I hope you’re as angry as I am so that you will too. As a whole, we didn’t fight hard enough; but next time we’ll know better. We owe it to our children not to give up.
I’ll leave you for now with a selection of quotes, mostly from Conner’s blog.
“…A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.”
– James R. Otteson, professor of philosophy. - The Independent Review, Spring 2000, “Freedom of Religion and Public Schooling”
“If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.”
– Milton Friedman - Economist. Awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.
“By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling … has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.”
– John Taylor Gatto, Source: Dumbing Us Down, p. 85
“In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge…In creating a monopoly of education, the government must answer to the hopes of the fathers of families who have thus been deprived of their liberty; and if these hopes are shattered whose fault is it? We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say we are opposed to any education.”
– Frederic Bastiat, The Law , 1850
“Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.
“This is the seductive lure of socialism.”
– Frederic Bastiat, Source: The Law, p. 25
“I am opposed to free education as much as I am opposed to taking property from one man and giving it to another who knows not how to take care of it… I do not believe in allowing my charities to go through the hands of robbers who pocket nine-tenths themselves and give one tenth to the poor… Would I encourage free schools by taxation? No!”
– Brigham Young, Source: Journal of Discourses Vol. 18, p. 357
“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
– Karl Marx - Father of Communism (1848)