In response to Matt Rich's April 12 column, "Leave the home-schooler alone":
I have a couple of critiques about home-schooling. First, how can we measure the quality of education home-schooled children receive? If those children aren’t reading from state textbooks, being tested according to state curriculum and thinking state-approved thoughts, then how will they be prepared to live in America? Secondly, what if these students get an unfair advantage and have more caring parents? I’m glad home schooling worked out for Matt Rich, but this is not always the case.
In a recent filler for the MSNBC network, host Melissa Harris-Perry offers some insight. She asserts, “We have to break through our kind-of-private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.” Harris-Perry is absolutely right with her suggestion to sever the relationship between families and children. In place of loving and serving our parents or siblings, we should instead be loving and serving our government. Then we get better investments (and jobs). These ideas were not also advocated by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other totalitarians to control the future generations.
This is the sentiment that will make our society stronger! In the spirit of equality, it is best for everyone to be equally worse off. This is the best way for progress, for our American democracy to work. As the father of state education Horace Mann said, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” As we have seen through skyrocketing test scores and the outstanding condition of our inner-city public schools nationwide, the best operator of this social machinery is government. Let’s keep it that way.
David Ludwick
Undergraduate
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