National Review's John Derbyshire has
a plan for reforming education. Fed up with the fleecing the educational establishment and their political enablers have administered to the public, Derbyshire delivers himself of the following proposal:
Here is my prescription for a reform of the nation’s education system. First, destroy all the schools. Cart away the rubble for landfill and sow the ground with salt. Abolish the federal Department of Education and all state equivalents. End all education funding from public sources.
If the inhabitants of any district then wish their kids to be educated in schools, let them raise the necessary funds themselves. Then let them build the schools themselves, like zeks. There should be just one federally approved model: an unheated wood-and-tar-paper structure with plastic sheeting for windows.
Any person above the age of twelve who wishes to attend school should have to stand outside the school gate for a month, in all weathers, pleading to be admitted. There should be a constitutional amendment banning any community from employing non-teaching staff in its schools at any ratio to teaching staff higher than one percent. And let’s have a federal penalty of 25-to-life for anyone attempting to form a teachers’ union.
Crazy, you say? No: Spending half a billion dollars you don’t have on a school to educate 4,200 students, some high proportion of whom are in the country illegally, is crazy. Shoveling seven hundred million dollars into the public sector of a state whose private sector is withering on the vine is crazy. Pretending that by spending enough money you can turn every child into a bookish child is crazy.
The proposal is satire, of course, but like all good satire it conveys a lot of truth. There is much waste in public education. The taxpayers are being squeezed to throw a lot of money on needless programs and hopeless causes. If Tea Party folks want to do something really constructive in their local communities they might publicize a line item breakdown of their school district's budget. It'd be an eye-opener.
