If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad. I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.) So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better....

Is It Evil to Send Your Kids to Private School?
...If you’re an affluent upper-middle-class parent, your kids are probably going to be fine no matter what school you send them to; teaching them to be resilient and virtuous is more important than making sure they have full access to the latest in computer equipment, boutique sports and foreign-language education. And I am on the record as saying that if you oppose vouchers, you have a moral obligation to send your kids to public schools in a horrible urban school district, rather than “skimming the cream” from said school district by decamping to the suburbs as soon as your spawn reach school age....

...However, I think that Benedikt isn’t thinking through what would actually happen if everyone felt a moral obligation to send their kids to public schools. What would actually happen is that Allison Benedikt wouldn’t live in Brooklyn, because New York, like most of the rest of the U.S.'s cities, would have lost all of its affluent families in the 1970s -- the ones who stayed largely because private school, and a handful of magnet schools financed by the taxes of people who sent their kids to private school, allowed them to maintain residence without sending their kids into middle- and high-schools that had often become war zones. Anyone with any choices left that system, one way or another. But because New York had a robust system of private and parochial schools, they didn’t necessarily need to leave the city to leave the violence behind....

...Now, Benedikt could lecture you until the cows came home about your moral obligation to public schooling, but you still wouldn’t leave your kids in a school where the teachers were being set on fire (and neither, I imagine, would Benedikt). If you couldn’t send your kids to private school, you’d just move. That, in fact, is what happened to most urban school systems; any resident who had any means at all picked up and moved outside the city’s borders, beyond the legal limits of busing so that there could be no question of bused students importing these problems to their kids’ schools. ...

...Benedikt’s dictum makes sense only if parents can’t move. If they can -- and bid up the value of real estate in good school districts -- then making parents send their kids to the local schools probably doesn’t mean that all the parents in mixed-income neighborhoods will put their children, and their effort, into the local school. It probably means that they’ll leave the mixed-income neighborhood, taking their tax dollars with them.

This is nominally public schooling, but in fact, as I once remarked, parents who think that they are supporting public schooling by moving to a pricey district with good schools are actually supporting private schooling. They’re just confused because the tuition payment comes bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops.

To actually achieve what Benedikt wants, her moral rule needs to be much stronger: something like “if you can afford private school for your kids, you have a moral obligation to put your kids in the worst school within range of your workplace.” This is unworkable for a dozen reasons, most importantly, because no one would do it. ...

'Common' Mistakes
...The assumption behind treating education as a public good is that in general, educating children makes them more successful adults, and successful people are more valuable to society than unsuccessful ones. If that is true, then consigning your child to a mediocre education is harmful to the common good, because it reduces his likelihood of success--which can mean everything from becoming a gainfully employed taxpayer to discovering a cure for cancer.

Benedikt's view of what constitutes "the common good" seems to be limited to the institutions of government. It's the flip side of the Dewey-Konczal theory that any "public" action--any action that affects anyone else--justifies government intervention. And like the Dewey-Konczal theory, the Benedikt argument leads in directions that liberals ought to find discomfiting....

... Intelligent, successful people who choose to remain childless are therefore just as bad as parents who send their children to private schools.

No, actually we're worse.

Education is not the only governmental function that is affected by the decision to have children or not. By depriving the future United States of taxpayers, we are hastening the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare and increasing their burden on other people's children. At least most children who go to private schools eventually end up paying taxes.

So childless men are worse people than parents who send their children to private school. But by Benedikt's logic, childless women are even worse people than childless men.

Individual men are reproductively expendable. While making a baby requires both a mother and a father, maintaining a population requires far more fertile women than fertile men. In his 2010 book, "Is There Anything Good About Men?," psychologist Roy Baumeister cites DNA studies that have found female ancestors of currently living human beings outnumber male ones by 2 to 1. If you're puzzled as to how that could be, consider that, as Baumeister notes, Genghis Khan is "said to have [fathered] hundreds of children, probably well over a thousand." It's unlikely any woman has come within an order of magnitude of that.

Thus an intelligent, successful woman who chooses to remain childless--or even to have fewer children than she can afford--is almost certainly acting against the "common good" of keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent. Allison Benedikt doesn't say whether she has any children. It's possible she's a bad person herself....

Evict the Rich, White Liberals
...People hold capital in the form that brings them the best returns, and for the modestly affluent professional class, your lawyers and high-school principals and such, holding capital in the form of a nice house in a neighborhood with good schools provides the maximum return. Ms. Benedikt, savvy social observer that she is, concedes that “rich people might cluster.” (Might?) That the main trend in socioeconomic migration over the last few centuries or so seems to have escaped her here is not my particular concern, but it should be pointed out that the enemies of private education generally fail to consider the extent to which that rich-guy clustering provides advantages beyond high-quality schools. ...

...Redistributing funds is not sufficient; we have to redistribute people.

What we obviously must do, therefore, is turn rich white liberals out of their homes.

Ideally, they would relocate to the very worst neighborhoods, where, applying the Benedikt principle, they would do the most good. But I do not really care where they go, so long as they go.

This is not so radical an idea as it may seem. We seize investors’ capital in the name of the public good all the time. What’s good for the owner of corporate equity is good for the owner or real-estate equity. We do not need even to permanently deprive rich white liberals of their homes or the equity therein; rather, we only have to turn them out of their homes long enough to install poor families in them for the most important years of their children’s education, say the decade between seven and seventeen years of age. ...

Salon: School is a prison — and damaging our kids
...Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.

When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein).

It’s no wonder that, today, even the “best students” (maybe especially them) often report that they are “burned out” by the schooling process. One recent top graduate, explaining to a newspaper reporter why he was postponing college, put it this way: “I was consumed with doing well and didn’t sleep a lot the last two years. I would have five or six hours of homework each night. The last thing I wanted was more school.”...

School Has Become Too Hostile to Boys
As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to “shoot” a “bad guy” — his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado’s Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at “bad guys” in order to “save the world.”

In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school’s zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn’t the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys....

...Play is a critical basis for learning. And boys’ heroic play is no exception. Logue and Harvey found that “bad guy” play improved children’s conversation and imaginative writing. Such play, say the authors, also builds moral imagination, social competence and imparts critical lessons about personal limits and self-restraint. Logue and Harvey worry that the growing intolerance for boys’ action-narrative-play choices may be undermining their early language development and weakening their attachment to school. Imagine the harm done to boys like Christopher, Josh and Alex who are not merely discouraged from their choice of play, but are punished, publicly shamed and ostracized....