'Socially minded liberal types'

A comedy video, in which liberal crusader Laura Flanders describes joining other "socially minded liberal types" to hear a speech left-wing education guru Jonathan Kozol, only to discover that only one person at her table had sent their child to government schools.

Radical egalitarians like Kozol (and Flanders) can't seem to accept that government fails at education for the same reason government fails at everything else. Once government usurps a social function previously provided privately by individuals, the entitlement mentality eventually sets in.

If it is the government's job to educate your child, and your child fails to become educated, then government is to blame for the failure -- not your child, and certainly not you. Government, by claiming a monopoly on education -- claiming that only a certified teacher in a certified school is capable of educating children -- thereby absolves parents and everyone outside the school system of responsibility for education.

Meanwhile, inside the school, the spirit of bureaucracy takes hold. The bureaucrats who run the government school are concerned only with meeting the minimal requirements to retain their jobs -- requirements so low that it is almost impossible to fire a government school teacher nowadays. The mission of the school is not to educate children, but to serve the employment interests of the bureaucrats, who organize into unions in order to defeat any effort by taxpayers to control the system.

Teachers unions dominate school-board elections, so that no board member can be elected without union approval. Thus, when it is time to negotiate contracts, the union is represented on both sides of the bargaining table. "Education" becomes a crooked racket, organized to benefit the lazy and dishonest, and any idealistic young person who might actually be interested in educating children eventually will flee such a system in horror.

This system cannot be reformed. The only viable option, for parents who wish their children to have a genuine education, is to escape the system. So while Flanders seems shocked -- shocked! -- that most of the "socially minded liberals" in Kozol's audience don't send their children to public schools, those parents have taken the first step toward real "reform" of American education, namely abandoning the existing system.

Parents who abandon the existing system should be praised, and those parents who have not yet abandoned the system should be encouraged to do so. Furthermore, once parents have abandoned the system, they should condemn the system. If a school is not good enough for my child, why is it good enough for your child? Get your kids out of those rotten government schools! As far as I'm concerned, parents who send their kids to government schools are guilty of child neglect.

The only way to reform this system is to destroy this system, and if you're not part of the solution -- if you don't get your kids out of the system and encourage other parents to do the same -- you're part of the problem.

UPDATE: In the comments field, Donald Douglas of Americaneocon says:

As a professor at a public college, I take exception with going that far.

Why? Your students at Long Beach City College enroll there voluntarily, choose their own classes and pay tuition -- three characteristics that distinguish college from government K-12 schools, which are compulsory and tuition-free.

In K-12 education, the child arrives at the school at 7:30 a.m. and is the responsibility of the school until 3:30 p.m. -- more like a babysitting service than a school -- whereas at college, the student is always responsible for his own education. The college student determines his own schedule and can leave at any time he wishes.

While I would not propose granting such autonomy to 7-year-olds, why does the government K-12 system not allow the child's parents any input in the location, schedule or content of their child's education?

Answer: Because parental input conflicts with the bureaucratic interests of the administration. The government-school bureaucrats control the system, and provide the type of education that suits their interests, rather than the interests of the child or the parent.

This is why government education must rely on compulsion to force parents to send their children to school, to ensure that the system is not required to be responsive to parental inputs. By placing the school bureaucrats into a position to command compliance from parents, government education diminishes parental authority. Therefore, the first lesson a child learns from the government school is: Your parents are helpless, untrustworthy idiots.