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(Excerpts from a longer article)

The More Things Change…

We are continually bombarded by newspaper and magazine headlines informing us of the continuing “crisis in education,” which actually is a crisis in government-operated education. Virtually all the available data reveal that the crisis is accelerating.

Educators cannot bring themselves to admit that the crisis is anything more than a temporary aberration—an aberration from the “normal” which itself was dead long before today’s administrators were born. The theories multiply, the explanations proliferate, and the crisis gets worse.

Like the sinking ship which finally takes on too much water, the government education system is irretrievable.

Like the sinking ship which finally takes on too much water, the government education system is irretrievable.

If there are no solutions, why pay higher taxes? This is the reasoning of the voters. The reasoning of the school administrators is different. They only want to discover a new source of tax money that will be acceptable to the voters, or better yet, that will not be subject to public elections at all.

That they have lost almost every battle in their war with tenured, state-supported educational bureaucrats is the direct result of the public’s abdication of personal responsibility, family by family, for the education of their children. The war was lost on the day that parents, as voters, decided to transfer the financial responsibilities of educating their own children to other members of the body politic.

Any system of education must ultimately be the reflection of, and product of, the philosophical principles of those who finance the system. The decision about the financing of any institution inescapably determines the shape and content of that institution.

Somehow, they think, education is corrupted when churches are involved, but not so when governments are involved. Like the established churchmen of two centuries ago, today’s priests and parishioners of the public schools refuse to recognize the nature of their relationship to the state.

The rise of an independent school system is a threat to public school administrators. They are as hostile to alternative educational programs as the postal system’s administrators are to United Parcel Service or anyone else carrying first-class mail.

State schools rest on a whole series of erroneous assumptions. First, that the state is ultimately sovereign in the field of education-the quasi-parent of every child. Second, that the state schools can teach children totally neutral values—universally acceptable principles that all education must provide. Third, that it is the moral as well as legal obligation of taxpayers to finance the school system. Fourth, that the professional, tenured, and civil-service-protected officials of the educational monopoly are the people best prepared to operate the educational system.

Gary North http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/educational-vouchers-the-double-tax-2/

Also see: Why Christian Education Is Important.