Give Me Liberty

Dennis Byrne had a column in the Chicago Tribune this morning entitled “Keep Kids in School”. (Read it here) He was challenging the protest being waged by Rev. James Meeks against supposed disparities in the funding between Chicago Public Schools and suburban school districts. While I agree with Mr. Byrne that the protest is ill conceived, I don’t even come close to agreeing with his proposed solution, that “truant officers ought to round them up and take them back to school where they belong”. Since when did the government become the owner of our children? Unfortunately Mr. Byrne appears to be just another compliant, brain-washed product of our socialist “public” school system. He automatically accepts that our children “belong” in public schools, no matter how dysfunctional, ineffective and crime-ridden those schools might be.

If polled, I think that the vast majority of Americans would say that socialism is a failed economic system, with no hope of ever succeeding. Yet asked if children should be sent to “public” schools, a similar majority would probably say “yes”. Why the disconnect? Our public school system is completely socialist, pure and simple. As such, it cannot possibly succeed in providing a quality education to our children. Yet like Mr. Byrne, we are almost all products of that system, which has been with us so long that we no longer question it.

The answer is not protesting the higher amounts spent on students in suburban schools. Quite frankly, the lower amount spent in the city schools is still substantially higher than the cost at which private schools could provide a much higher quality of education. I don’t claim to know how to run a school, but then I’m not a central planner, so I don’t need to. Like Mr. Byrne, I am a firm believer in the value of education. But I have complete confidence that private schools, competing for our tuition dollars in a free market, could quickly replace our current socialist system with far better schooling at much lower cost.