Visionaries,
Follow this debate if you can. GSS stands for Government School Supporter, and PSS stands for Private School Supporter.
PSS: Let’s compare the stats of private schools and government schools!
GSS: That would be an unfair comparison. Many of the kids in government schools are neglected.
PSS. Oops. Sorry. Let’s stop neglecting them then.
GSS: How dare you say that government schooled kids are neglected!
Whenever the debate over government education erupts, and when everyone rolls their eyes in that “here we go again” fashion, the hidden assumption is that the pro-private education sector is simply fulfilling Winston Churchill’s definition of a fanatic — someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject. “Why do we have to keep talking about this?”
Why can’t we just go back to those halcyon days of our small town when those hundreds of tax-paying parents of kids in private education just handed over the money and kept their traps shut about it? Maybe the reason the debate continues is because the unreasonable taxation continues. When you do the “Rodney-King-can’t-we-all-just-get-along-thing,” your zeal for peace and quiet does not extend so far as to let me keep the thousands of dollars forcibly lifted from me in order to keep your schools running.
If I pay the six bucks, I get to see the movie, right? If I pay thousands of dollars toward the government schools, what do I get? Does it include the right to debate the questions surrounding that education in an appropriate forum?
“Shut up, you Taliban-types! We are busy over here, using your money to teach these kids the importance of democracy!”
Cordially,
Douglas Wilson
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.