QUOTE(It's the blimp, Frank @ Mon 14th March 2011, 8:48pm)
QUOTE
Northern states first experimented with public “district schools,†which were run by the local government and either charged tuition or relied on property taxes. The United States was slow to follow the European model. For the most part, government resisted the temptation to run schools even as it generously supported them financially at the request of its citizens. Throughout the colonial period, all schools, secular or religious, were considered “public†schools because they served the public good. Despite early attempts at a national education system by notable proponents like Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, local communities jealously guarded their schools and their prerogative to found them, recalling the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1820s that Americans had a talent for local and voluntary initiative.
http://www.frinstitute.org/allschools1.htmlYes, yes, so? Many founding fathers tried to get publically-FUNDED education, but that doesn't mean they succeeded, or that they had experienced it themselves in their own youth. Generally, neither happened. The "common" schools did charge tuition, and the idea of common schools run on property taxes (our present model) doesn't date from the revolutionary period, but from a generation or two later, at least. So if the founding fathers are going to revolve in their graves, they'd have had to do even more revolving while they were alive (revolution indeed). But I think a fair number of founding fathers, considering the way they fought Hamilton's federalism, would REALLY be revolving today at the idea of the national federal government involved in setting standards for, and paying for, community "common-school" education for kids. Perhaps not the states, but certainly the feds.
I'll bet Jefferson's skull would explode. He was the founder of the University of Virginia (one of the three accomplishments on his gravestone; his presidency is not), but that was a mixed-funded STATE and private secular university, and it should be remembered that it charged tuition, gave LOANS to the poor, and that the whole thing kicked off nearly 50 years after the revolution, just about the time of Jefferson's death. So in very many ways, it's nothing like the feds messing in K-12, ala W. Bush. (Had Jefferson been alive when The Army of Virginia went off to war with the feds in 1860, I think Jefferson would have cheered them on. He was a revolutionary and hater of central authority all his life, and didn't particularly approve of the federal Constitution, either).
Ben Franklin would have approved of state taxpayer funded common schooling. But I think even Franklin would have balked at the federal government becoming involved in something so "close to home" as K-12. Universities and colleges have always been something different, precisely because their studients are adults (for all intents and purposes, especially by colonial standards).
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I should make my own position clear at this point. I too am the product of public school education (not in the English, but the American sense of that word). My K-12 was paid for by the state (real estate taxes and the like), and it was a great one. I had an educational experience so idyllic that if you made it into a TV show it would resemble The Andy Griffith Show, and the school part of it would bore today's audiences right out of their skulls because it was almost pure learning with almost no drama. I then went to a private university on scholarship (which supported by private donations, BTW), which was also aided by the fact that I got a 50% tuition break since my father taught there. Lucky me. So again, nirvana. I then borrowed money at low-low federally-subsidized student loan rates for graduate training at a state university, which was itself partly partly subsidized by state money. Again, nirvana. I worked a little as a wage slave in college, but nowhere near enough to support myself fully. If I'd had to do that, I could not have maintained the scholarship.
I wouldn't change a bit of how I got educated. I'm sorry that everybody doesn't have the same system I had, with the state funding things at the beginning, and the feds assisting in the post grad part. Tax FUNDING of education is a fine idea, but public RUNNING of the educational system only works if the institutions themselves are watched over by at least jaundiced conservatives, who are there to keep them from being controlled by radicals who want to teach Communism instead of chemistry. I'm all for secular education at the college level and above, so long as we count Marxism as yet one more religion, and guard against it being taught pervasively as a correct idea alongside (say) Catholicism. I'm not sure I'm ready to see the K-12 system give vouchers to religious primary and secondary schools, unless they promise not to teach religion there (or perhaps give the students a limited hour a day of it, by choice, a separate building as actually some schools in my own state did, as a compromise-- they called it "release time").
When I was growing up, K-12 kids didn't need vouchers, because there weren't any public K-12 schools that needed to hire guards, or have metal detectors because students had weapons and sold drugs. My conservative western state would not have permitted it. Today, things have gone partly to hell; and one of the problems is that the teachers unions didn't do their job, and at the federal level, the liberals managed to insert more and more leftist values, which (strangely) are generally values that make endless excuses for poor personal performance and criminal activity. Parents need a way to escape that, if their kids are not learning, or live in fear. Vouchers are obvious ways to let this happen.
I wouldn't even object to voucher-mediated needs-based taxpayer support for higher education, aka the G.I. Bill for everybody. If we could get the federal government to stop paying for madness like the Iraq war, we might even have enough money to do it. But people would rather have their war, and so long as that's true, I would rather have them spend their money for war and go without other necessities, than borrow money against their grandkids' future. Unfortunely, that's not happening either. So, I'm angry. Neither of the two major political parties in 2000 offered a way for the feds to get out of my K-12 schools, and neither one supported vouchers. In 2003, neither party stood against the Iraq war. That left voters like me with no viable alternative. The country as a whole was hell-bent on stupidity, and mostly it has gotten what it has richly deserved.
And yes, I voted for Obama in 2008. With the idea that anything (ANYTHING) has to be better than Dubya Bush.