[Jos] Obviously (again) I'm not saying children should decide what schools they go to, just elucidating the dangers of "parental free choice". What are your views on faith schools specifically? I think there is a danger that integration and co-operation are not favoured by monoculture environments. If in the educational market place there are schools that for instance teach literal biblical interpretations instead of science, should this even be an option for parents to "choose". Or conversely it might be considered wrong to choose on behalf of a child to exclude them from religious education.
Society has a role to play, in limiting the choices that are available and our "moral revolution" requires that intellectual development be favoured by those limits. [Case] I support parental choice and local control of schools. As I understand it school systems are controlled locally and at least where I live parent have a variety of option available to them. One option that is still restricted in large measure is which particular public schools can be selected and I would like that opened up. When my children were younger, their education was of primary importance to my wife and I. We bent rules to keep them in the schools we wanted them in, even when that included a 45 min drive in the morning and evening. When the rules could not longer be bent we use a Catholic school for a year then moved to a better school catchment area. I do not think the government should support private schools in any way nor encourage home schooling but I don't think they should discourage them either. I do not believe ideologically driven private schools provide a good education and generally do "indoctrinate" students in the worse way but I do support parental rights to make what I consider to be a bad decision. Among the biggest problems of the public schools is the requirement that they serve all comers and that they be held accountable for their standards of financial and educational practices. If you remove these barriers of public accountability it is cheaper to run a school. You can higher under qualified teachers and pay them less. You have less bookkeeping and lower safety standards. In order to maintain the standards required of the public schools a private school has to charge too much to attract any but the wealthy. My children were educated extraordinarily well in the public system because education was regarded as important in our home. Blaming poor school performance on some failure of public policy does not make sense to me. If the schools in your (this is a general not a specific "you") area are substandard why aren't you are the school board meetings raising hell? Why aren't you at your child's school volunteering, helping in the classroom, selling baked goods and washing cars to fund field trips? Why aren't you campaigning for tax increases to improve the quality of education? I have not paid close attention to this thread so if this is all irrelevant... Never mind :-) moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
