Education Archives
February 20, 2017
Throwing Out the Baby to Keep the Bathwater
Here’s a good example of getting things topsy turvy: This piece in The Atlantic on charter schools that have religious affiliations. If you reverse everything they say, you come close to the right order of things.
Does Religion Have a Place in Public Schools? “The question of what to do with religion in school-choice programs is how, or whether, to keep the baby while ditching the bathwater.”
Only problem is, the authors get mixed up on which is the baby and which is the bathwater, and ends up trying to ditch the baby in order to keep the dirty bathwater. The question that they should have asked is whether secular public schools have a place in a nation with religion.
Perhaps the most pervasive feature of the article is an assumption by Justice and MacLeod that “what schools are for” is to train students to be good little children all supporting the secular democrat(ic) regime. [all emphasis below is mine]
From the standpoint of democratic theory, the basic problem with school choice is this…In some ways, deregulating public education and transcending the geographic limitations of 19th-century districting laws can enhance democratic education. [which does NOT mean “the education that occurs in a democracy”]
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