Open Left

The two authors that spoke best about education were

Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman (from whom I took my nom de plume).

Their thesis? School, whether public or private, sucks. Mass education, like holy war, is an oxymoron.

Most of what I learned was learned despite the best efforts of school to dumb me down, and I went to some of the better ones.

Education is the human animal's attempt to punch above it's weight class, to reach for something higher than Nature's passive endowment.

Thus education is a holy and sacred act; to think otherwise is to be anti-life. Yet I see so many kids thinking that mediocrity is OK, ignorance is OK, let's play sports, let's sit down in front of the X-Box 360, let's be promiscuous, let's rap and dance.

Fine.

But don't cry when the bills come due.

A socialist society cannot allow people that kind of liberty. Your life is not your own. You are a member of a community that relies on your good faith effort. If the left is to be libertarian and allow people to squander their formative years; it cannot long bail them out later with welfare and make-work jobs. The injustice done to those who do the right thing will give them just cause to uproot the system and put something more sensible in.

The modern predicament in a nutshell. And the answer to this predicament is a moral fervor, not more money.

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by: Paul Goodman @ Sun Jun 28, 2009 at 19:31:32 PM CDT