Education: September 2003 Archives

Opinion Journal is on a roll today; Pete du Pont, former governor of Delaware, as a great piece about the voucher system being proposed for Washington DC.

Lenin once said that he would rather have everyone in Russia die of hunger than allow free trade in grain. ...

Allowing parents to choose the school that is best for their children is a sensible and compassionate idea for educating Americans just as grain markets would have been for feeding Russians. It took decades for the Soviets to recognize that collectivized farming was a terrible idea; maybe this week the Senate will realize that collectivized education is just as bad.

Ah Lenin, that moderate communist.

A post by the self-proclaimed King of Fools titled "Caucasian Club" reminds me of my own frolic into racism when I was in high school. I went to a 90% black high school that had clubs for every race under the sun, except white people.

The "Young Black Scholars" club was one of the largest. So I went to our vice principal and told him that I wanted to start a "Young White Scholars" club, and that I wanted him to sponsor it (he was white also). He was almost apoplectic at the prospect. Although he found the idea amusing, he wouldn't sponsor it or allow it; among the reasons he gave: he was afraid we'd get beaten up or harrassed. I pointed out that his fears were fundamentally racist (didn't he think black students could tolerate a white club?), but to no avail.

Ultimately, a friend and I founded the "Junior Entrepreneur Club of America" instead. We were the only two members, and our only activity was to sell Domino's pizza by-the-slice during lunch. We made about $200 per day in profit (for 45 minutes of work) for about two weeks, and then the school shut us down because the cafeteria complained that we were hurting their sales, and they didn't want to compete with us.

Those two anecdotes (along with my post on secular humanism in schools) might help explain why I think the public school system is a miserable failure -- it's awash with racism, socialism, and ignorance.

In a comment to my "Proselytization and Free Speech 2", Les says:

I'd be very interested in hearing more about what Secular Humanist viewpoints you feel the public school systems are promoting. While I largely don't have a problem with Secular Humanism myself, I do agree that schools should try to concentrate more on facts and knowledge than the promotion of specific belief systems.

I think that secular humanism has become the de facto theology of public education. There may be an organized effort to bring this about by leftist intellectuals (not that they're secretive about it), but I doubt most teachers even realize it, care, or think about it. I'll present a simple example, that I think will illustrate my point.

In 3rd grade, my class was forced to sing "Greatest Love of All" at a school show. Some lyrics:

I believe that children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be

Everybody's searching for a hero
People need someone to look up to
I never found anyone who fulfilled my need
A lonely place to be and so I learned to depend on me

I decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadow
If I fail, if I succeed at least I'll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all inside of me
The greatest love of all is easy to achieve

Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all

To a Christian, that's all nonsense -- even blasphemous. My teacher, Mrs. Hall, probably thought it was a great song for building kids' self-esteem. She didn't say "and if you think loving others or loving God is more important than loving yourself, you're an idiot", but that's the message that is implicitly conveyed. She wasn't trying to undercut Christian teachings (and in fact this was a Lutheren school!), but she did so nevertheless. Secular humanism is so pervasive among educators that no one even notices.

In contrast, try to imagine a public school class singing about loving God and loving other people.

Update:
Cypren comments quite extensively.

To attempt to teach children that science holds the answers to everything in life is to blatantly lie to them, a violation of everything for which an educator should stand.

Of course, propose an argument like this and you'll often hear things such as, "no credible scientist questions the veracity of , so we're not going to put it in the same basket as a bunch of religious teachings," and they're quite right--because in their minds, scientists' credibility depends precisely upon them not questioning certain venerated assumptions. In the days of old, scientists were precisely those people who studied the world around them and drew conclusions they could prove, speculated upon that which they could not, and often did so in defiance to the rule of the established religion threatened by uncovering of the facts. Modern science, however, has become almost pseudononymous with the secular humanist worldview, and is now, itself, the establishment, ruthlessly ridiculing and suppressing new theories and discoveries which challenge its hallowed assumptions of ultimate human supremacy. Truth is no longer important if it interferes with belief.

I've written before about the school voucher program that's been proposed for Washington DC, and as of today it's one step closer to reality. Obviously, I'm in favor of the idea; vouchers are possibly the only way to reinvigorate our public education system, because they put it in in competition with private education. Competition forces everyone to improve, and along with some (hopefully minimal) regulations, I expect the program to be a resounding success.

That is, if the Senate passes it. You see, the Congress has direct control over what goes on in the Capital, and although the House has just passed a version of the bill, the Democrats in the Senate are threatening a filibuster. Surprisingly, there are at least two prominent Democrat Senators who are in favor of the program:

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved the measure Thursday by a party-line 16 to 12 vote, though Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a longtime voucher opponent, joined Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., in crossing over and supporting the provision.

Senate Democrats hope to kill the measure on the Senate floor with a filibuster.

It's hardly a "party-line vote" when a quarter of the Democrats on the committee break ranks, but whatever.

The Democrats' filibuster fall-back is getting to be quite annoying, isn't it? More than that, there is some brewing controversy over the constitutionality of the filibuster used as a device to permanently block majority rule in the Senate, particularly in executive contexts, such as approving Presidential nominees.

This is not to say that all filibusters raise constitutional questions. There is a long history of their use in the legislative context, and they can serve a legitimate purpose by not foreclosing debate on legislation prematurely. But in the executive context, when presidential appointments are at issue, filibustering appellate nominees is an unprecedented, though still not necessarily unconstitutional, step. If employed merely to guarantee a reasonable and limited period of debate before proceeding to an up or down vote, a brief filibuster might pass constitutional muster. But in the cases of Estrada and Owen, when the filibuster is being used not to debate, but to kill their nominations by denying the majority its right to consent to them, serious constitutional issues arise.

Yes, the Constitution permits the Senate to set its own rules. But that is hardly a blank check entitling the Senate to amend the Appointments Clause by raising the confirmation bar from simple majority to super majority, to aggrandize power by upsetting the balance between the congressional and the executive branches, and to threaten the independence of the third branch, the federal judiciary. The conclusion is inescapable. Whenever Senate Democrats, a minority of the body, filibuster judicial nominations, obstruct an up or down vote, and deny the majority its right to consent to the appointments, they subvert the Constitution.

Update:
I'm not sure why I thought 2 was a quarter of 14...?