Uncommon Sense

I have often attributed conservatives support of school vouchers as being economic. They are paying for their kids to be educated at posh private schools, so why should they also be paying to having them educated at public schools when they do not attend those.

This quote points to a more philosophical driving force behind the whole school choice effort.

Fundamentally, it is rooted in a very old conservative belief that parents, not the government, are responsible for raising and educating their children. They do not belong to the state. Parents know their children and have the most vested interest in their child’s success. (Russ Latino)

I also recall that many of these folks refer to public schools as “government schools.” I think there is something even more fundamental going on here, something that undergirds the foundations of the elite status of the wealthy.

It seems that our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for 200,000 to 300,000 years. For almost all of that time we lived as hunter-gatherers and in such societies (families, tribes, etc.) they lived in what anthropologists call forced egalitarianism. This was not forced by some authority but by the circumstances of their existence. They shared everything: food, childcare, hunting, gathering, sex, everything. Why? Because anything else would lead to a lower chance of surviving.

This changed with the advent of farm and sedentary living, during the last 10,000 years or so. Farming and the ability to store food lead to the formation of elites, of wealth, of private property and many other aspects of human society we now consider “natural and normal,” even though these things have existed for only 3-5% of time we have existed as a species and the rest of the time we basically shared everything.

Those earlier humans didn’t own their children. The men didn’t own the women. But with the advent of farming and the ability to store food (grains can be dried to prevent rot, which is why they became the crops of choice, rather than potatoes, squash or fruit) wealth was attained and who controlled it became an aspect of our society. Clearly the largest loser in that scenario was women as they lost status, control over their own bodies, and much, much more.

So, the above quotation is an example of an ownership dispute.

If you look honestly at public schools, they were all rooted in a collective desire of people to have their children educated. People pooled their resources, hired a teacher, built a schoolhouse, etc.

Government wasn’t imposed upon us by Martians, it is just us, acting collectively. The dispute outlined in the quote above is just another case of the elites wanting ownership of their own children recognized, aka control over them, and more wealth and so on. There is no data that supports their position. If one just looks at the history of immigrants in this country, the public schools provided a pathway away from poverty and toward productive citizenship. Immigrant groups who didn’t approve of all or part of the curriculum either set up their own schools (private schools paid for by them), or provided tutoring special classes after school to add what they thought was missing (often extra English language instruction or religious instruction). Their taxes still went to educate all of the other children, from which they benefited.

The whiny bitch elites who do not want to pay for “other” children to be educated are missing the point that public schools were efforts to educate all children, be they orphans, of this religion or that, and so on, regarding secular topics needed by educated people. We all benefit from having an educated polity, but the rich elites can’t help themselves: they want their cake and they want to eat it, too.