The Future of Public Schooling
Despite the astronomical sums of government funds spent on public schools, which have actually seen student results in western nations go backward, yet we still see progressive activists and teachers unions demanding further funding from government as the solution.
The left has long held the belief that not enough funds are allocated to public schools and that the public-private schooling system Australia operates with is an unfair system. This ignores the fact that money is not the issue. Many other nations spend far less per capita on school education than we do and their results are superior on international rankings.
Schooling During the Coronavirus Pandemic
During the coronavirus pandemic schools in western nations have been closed to students (partly in due to lobbying by teachers unions) with teachers conducting their classrooms via what is known as remote learning at home under the supervision of their parents.
While some parents, especially in family households where both parents are forced to work remote learning has been a challenge. Though some parents have embraced this indirect form of homeschooling.
With teachers unions continue to lobby for schools to be closed claiming they are unsafe workplaces for them they must be careful they don’t score an own goal for the homeschooling movement.
Parents who have chosen to homeschool their children have seen their children repeatedly outperform public schools and often private schools as well.
While schools remain closed in so many jurisdictions now is exactly the right time to consider the future of schooling, and even explore the case to abolish public schooling completely which is quite compelling.
Public Schooling, Spending and Outcomes
Public schools completely ignore the basic economics of supply and demand. They do not have a reward-driven performance culture and are divorced from any competition. Public schools deprive any competition and incentives to improve.
Teachers unions make it next to impossible to get rid of dud teachers. Public schools are completely funded by taxpayers ultimately. Taxpayers have no choice in the matter. Money is taken by compulsion. Public schools are NOT free. Nothing is free. Public education costs approximately $15,000 for each student per annum. The proponents of public education also oppose school vouchers systems and charter schools.
Privatising schools and getting government out of education will remove the hordes of administrators, bureaucrats, navel-gazers, diversity officers and others. Teachers would be no longer beholden to the teacher unions and other interests, but parents. Everything about public education renders parents judgement irrelevant. Every public school gets its funding by compulsion and ever-increasing amount.
Schooling and Indoctrination
The curriculum for decades has been an incubator for Green-left activism. Public education has been completely captured by the left and is totally divorced from high achievement and academic competition.
Students are simply drafted by activist teachers as puppets for social justice and sustainability. If teachers get kids to sing kumbaya and think about human rights, refugees, climate change, Greenpeace or gender-fluidity it ticks the boxes for critical thinking. Diversity of views does not exist. Anti-capitalist, anti-Western, identity politics, critical theory and climate change is standard daily fare and set in stone. Australia being a deplorably racist country is repeated often and the stolen generation is taught as fact.
Progressive educational programs that teach children pornographic sex education instead of academic fundamentals have destroyed education. The left trap children into the public school system which as we established just above are leftist training centres. The real reason they refuse to consider vouchers systems, charter schools and attack homeschooling is that their curriculums are ‘progressive’ enough.
If you look at modern-day progressive feminists many are retro-utopian. They believe pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are unpaid work which they think should be done by surrogates. Instead of genetic mothers, they promote surrogates which commodify children and puts their wishes first. These feminists think children do not belong to anyone as this perpetuates the notion of property which is an idea of capitalism. Parenting should be collective they argue.
Schooling and Disadvantage
The left has long believed abolishing private schools will remove the class divide. It is naivety. There will always be rich, middle class and poorer because there are varying degrees of talent, intelligence, criminality and those who have not performed strongly for a whole range of reasons.
Throwing money at schools or poverty never works. For all the promises of social programs and more money for education, the results stay the same, but most often decline.
The capitalist economic system has lifted over a billion people out of poverty in the 21st century. Capitalism has transformed the standard of living on the planet in ways unprecedented in human history. It is the poorest on the planet who have benefited most. These are the same people who will benefit from a market-driven education system.
The left destroys everything they touch and are able to get control of. They have controlled the educator sector for decades with worse results. At universities, we see cancel culture and deplaforming on a daily basis.
The left has poisoned the arts and poisoned race relations with Marxist critical race theory. Race theory posits individuals as oppressed based on their skin colour. Questioning this idea amounts to tacit support for racism and makes you a racist. It is authoritarian in nature. You either agree or you are an enemy of all that is good. This has permeated the other societial institutions and the media.
Progressives do not just want capitalism to collapse but want to destroy foundational structures of society such as the nuclear family and private property. They wish to destroy liberty and inhibit prosperity. They wish for a huge administrative state which traps people into a cycle of welfare dependence and destroys their spirit.
The villains in all this are the left-academics, politicians, the media and educational institutions who should know full well the destruction of statism, but still pursue it. This is why public schooling and indoctrinating children from are young age are so important to them. This is why we must consider a private student academic performance-driven alternative
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