Friday, January 25, 2008

We Should Have Separation Of School And State In This Country

Except for the assumption that Darwinism stands on solid ground, I have little to disagree with here.

Here's one part I liked:

As for debates over the content of classes in an education marketplace: actually, there would be nothing resembling the culture wars that have wracked government monopoly schooling since their inception (just ask me about the public school “Philadelphia Bible Riots” of 1844 or so). I wrote a book comparing school systems from classical Greece to the modern United States (Market Education: The Unknown History, Transaction Books, 1999), and the key source of the school wars we and others have experienced has always been compulsion: forcing people to either send their children to or pay for schooling that violates their convictions. When there is no compulsion, conflict is relatively insignificant. Consider other marketplaces, such as the one for religion. Do Protestants picket outside synagogues saying, “No, Jesus wasn’t just some guy, he was God!!!!” Nope. Despite the fact that people often feel very strongly about their religious views, it’s live and let live, because there is no compulsion in the religious marketplace.

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