Yesterday I neglected to mention one critical government-dominated sector that we should all be walking away from…
PUBLIC EDUCATION
This is a real soft spot in the underbelly of the beast where we can do serious damage to the system. Denying the system access to the minds of our children and, in many cases, reducing the budget dollars available to school systems that pay on a per-student basis can have real and significant downstream results.
The hardest thing in the world to break is a habit. And that’s what public school is for most people, a habit. It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s readily accessible. Of course, it’s not really free, and I’m not even talking about the property taxes we all pay… I’m talking about the cultural and psychological costs.
There’s a great line in SHALLOW GRAVE, which is a fantastic movie. Three roommates find a dead man with a briefcase full of money and decide to keep it. Later, while one of the roommates is at work, the other two go on a spending spree. When the third roommate comes home and sees what they’ve done he picks up a video camera, furious, and demands to know what it “cost.” They tell him two hundred quid, and he shouts.
“NO! Two hundred is what YOU paid for it. We don’t know the cost, yet!”
That’s how we need to think about public schooling… the price is free but the cost is the hearts and minds of our children.
Switching from public to private or homeschool is hard and it’s scary and most of us would never have considered it if we hadn’t been forced to do it by the COVID lockdowns, and in that sense we have at least one thing to be grateful for this past year. A lot of us, even those who had no interest in going through the grief of switching schools, have already done it out of necessity.
And if you haven’t, think about doing so now. There are benefits beyond avoiding the indoctrination of your children by people who don’t like you.
For one thing, you’ll be doing damage to powerful public sector unions. We all know how this scam works. The teachers are paid with tax dollars. The unions then force teachers to send some of those tax dollars to the union for advocacy efforts. The unions then turn around and use those tax dollars collected as “dues” to write huge checks to politicians willing to go to their state governments and hoover up more tax dollars for those union members while simultaneously blocking any efforts to improve performance or judge teachers and schools on their results. It’s a scam and by pulling your kids out of this corrupted system you can help to bleed this scam dry.
Oh, and there’s also insanely infuriating crap like this….
And finally, there’s an altruistic angle here as well. Some, perhaps many, parents are simply not able to pull their kids from public school for all sorts of reasons. By creating a robust system of private and homeschool success you put market pressure on those public schools that remain. And that market pressure can help parents stuck in those schools demand and recieve the changes they want for their kids.
I’m not going to say it’s easy, because it’s not. But we did it, and I can promise you that a year after the fact, you won’t remember how hard it was because your kids will be healthier and happier… and that’s all that matters.