In a recent article, Allison Benedikt makes her case that, as the title says, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” (Slate, August 29). She clarifies: “Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.”
The proper course of action, she argues, is to take one for the team. “… [I]t seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”
Besides, she says, even if your local public school is pretty crappy, your kids probably won’t suffer too badly. After all, if you’re the kind of parent who’s selective and involved enough to send your kid to a private school in the first place, you’re probably providing the kind of support system your kid needs to do OK despite going to a crappy school.
Benedikt brings in her own bad self to clinch the deal. She went to a mediocre school, never learned a lot of that fancy college-prep stuff, and consequently didn’t learn much in college, either. But still, she turned out “perfectly fine.” And even if she never read Walt Whitman in high school, she got the benefit of socializing with all sorts of kids — e.g., “getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park.”
Here’s the thing: The very fact Benedikt could write something so utterly devoid of critical thought is proof that she did not turn out “perfectly fine.” If she takes such a conventional, uncritical view of the functional role of social institutions, then she’s exactly the kind of product the schools are designed to churn out. If “one of our nation’s most essential institutions” means “essential for the interests of the people running the nation,” she’s exactly right.
The public schools are, as they were originally set up to be in the 19th century, human resource processing factories. Their purpose is to supply the state with compliant subjects and employers with compliant workers. The ideal products are functionaries smart enough to perform their assigned tasks, but not smart enough to critically analyze the system or their roles in it.
The purpose of modern public education is fundamentally evil: To inculcate a view of a society organized around giant corporations, centralized government agencies and other authoritarian hierarchies as natural and inevitable — “just the way things are” — and an acceptance of one’s own role in that society as a reflection of merit.
Think I’m exaggerating? The first statewide public school systems were organized in New England around the time textile mills needed people conditioned to line up on command, eat or urinate at the sound of a bell, and cheerfully comply with orders from someone behind a desk. Take a look at the public educationist literature from the turn of the 20th century, quoted at great length in the work of critics like John Taylor Gatto and Joel Spring, on the purpose of the system. The public educationist literature of that period is explicit on the role of the schools in shaping a human product perfectly socialized to be satisfied with its role as cog in a machine managed by other people.
And those kids from the trailer park she talks about being socialized with? The system is set up to process kids like that (in the terminology of Huxley’s Brave New World) into obedient Gammas, managed by uncritical, cheerleading Betas like her.
What’s more, the idea that everyone should voluntarily herd themselves into the same crappy authoritarian institution, so that all will have some incentive to make that institution somewhat better, is utterly perverse. The beauty of networked communications technology and the free replication of digital information is that it’s no longer necessary to get everybody on the same page, and coordinate their efforts through some common institution, in order for anyone to do anything. The public schools are built on a mass-production industrial model of moving humans to a central location to be processed with a limited, uniform menu of information. But a near-infinite amount of education can now be moved around instantly at almost zero cost.
It’s like saying “if everybody gave up the Internet and forced themselves to rely on CBS, NBC and ABC News, they’d work harder to see the Fairness Doctrine enforced.” If we all just force ourselves to rely on an archaic industrial-age dinosaur and it’s one-size-fits-all product, we’ll have an incentive to make sure the homogenized product isn’t too crappy.
If we were just means to the end of the public schools’ flourishing, it would be a good argument. But we’re not.
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Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, How to (Inadvertently) Argue Against the Public Education System, Before It’s News, 08/30/13
I'd see it as a halfway decent argument if they simply touted public schools as a lesser evil than private schools, which in my opinion they are. Sure, the purpose for which public schools were created was turning people into compliant wage slaves, but the purpose for which elite private schools were created was creating a gated community within the juvenile cohort, which I think is at least as toxic. The purpose for which parochial private schools were created may originally (in the case of Catholic schools in Protestantonormative America) have been to create a safe space for religious minorities, but today it clearly has more to do with isolating children from the marketplace of ideas.
Part of what you're up against is tribalism. You need to keep reminding people (even people like me sometimes) that being against the public schools doesn't imply being for the school "choice" agenda, or being against unions, etc. Americans in particular are in the habit of assuming that political sides always come in pairs.
My recent post foobarianism
Abolish the public schools. Sell the buildings to the highest bidders and give the taxpayers a refund.
Then, if Prussian style day-prisons are desired, the people who desire them can pay for them.
BTW, n8chz, those "elite private schools" were created by the very people who created the public schools. They were created for their OWN children, in order to educate them to be leaders, while the great masses were tax and coerced into turning the rest of the population into what you call "wage slaves".
There is a "class" problem in America, but it's not between those who try to educate their own children well and those who just shove them off into full time daycare. The class is those with political power, and those without.
"BTW, n8chz, those 'elite private schools' were created by the very people who created the public schools. They were created for their OWN children, in order to educate them to be leaders, while the great masses were tax and coerced into turning the rest of the population into what you call 'wage slaves'."
You nail it hard & true, Bob. Schools, public or private, are evil. "Elite private" schools (even though not funded by taxpayer still but profiting from state-imposed monopolies & subsidies) indoctrinate rich kids into stupid, psychopathic bosses (as Kevin has argued elsewhere that bosses become stupid by listening mostly to each other rather than to their employees whom bosses cannot trust because employees never want to work hard for exploitative bosses), while public schools churn out obedient wage slaves by kidnapping poor children.
Also, private schools' can charge monopolistically high tuitions thanks to "intellectual property" laws which prohibit the free distribution of knowledge & weed out competitors, forcing folks eager to learn to accept monopoly prices from a few state-sanctioned distributors.
I actually agree with all of Bob_Robertson's comment, maybe minus the scare quotes. I would also make a subtle change in the last sentence to read
"those to whom political power answers and those who answer to political power"
I prefer the term "ruling class" over the term "political class" (which, not surprisingly, is an emphasis meme in neoliberal statements) because I see the political class as more of a middleman, doing the dirty work of the de-facto ruling class (whose advantages derive almost entirely from wealth). Replacing the state security apparatus with a private security apparatus would be an example of de jure change, not de facto change.
My recent post Idealist supraanarchism
It's come to my attention that the cited article is actually written by someone with a track record of writing satire, so the piece in question may not be entirely serious.
Then maybe she fails pretty hard according to the Poe's Law.
Let's analyse the central claim though. She says that public schools will get better if you send your kid to them, because you're the sort of person who gets involved in your child's education. Therefore you will get involved and improve the school. But why would we expect that to happen? The fact that those actually PAID to improve the school* didn't says something. It says that there are people who gain from the system that fails to improve the school. Why would you expect that those people, who are clearly able to get their way now, would be stymied by a few "involved" parents? Surely all they would have to do is increase their neglect, making more work for the parents. By shifting more and more work onto the parents they both make it harder to correct the problems and less attractive to be an involved parent in the first place. Parents would have to do enormous amounts of work to improve the school, with no guarantee of success. Every problem they solve would be against entrenched, informed, full-time employed opposition. That opposition would get part of the credit when things did improve, if ever, making them even more powerful.
If they wanted to do enormous amounts of work to improve their child's education, why not just home-school? By doing so and simultainously pointing out the flaws in the current system they expose it to criticism, which her approach doesn't do. In fact it makes criticism irrelevant since no matter how bad the system is perceived, she and others like her still use it, making improving it unnecessary.
* Well they're not really paid to do that, they're paid to make sure their masters aren't blamed when it doesn't improve.
It may well be a parody, satirical piece – but the argument is regularly used here in the UK in earnest seriousness.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/09/…
If you ever fancy a good horror show, I highly recommend Fiona Millar's education column in the Guardian. I recall a TV piece in 2004 by her that explicitly advocated banning private schools entirely for this very reason. She is not exactly an isolated crank either, she is the wife of Alistair Campbell (close friend and very senior political advisor to Tony Blair) and they almost succeeded in imposing taxes upon independent schools during the years of Blair government.
The taxation of private schools, is a goal she persists in promoting as a means to increase the costs of private education beyond the means of middle-class parents >> http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/may/10/…
She is quite explicit about it – "Forget parent choice… beware the market" http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/feb/09/…
I don't have time to go into what they tried to do to home-schooling via Badman, but thank goodness they were ultimately unsuccessful.