Again, they hadn't met prosessive education. What we have is nothing like what they promoted, and if they had realized how easily public education could be corrupted by Marxism, they would have rejected the idea and left the whole thing up to families to figure out.
Franklin and the rest of the Founders worked within a defined truth framework. They couldn't imagine that materialism would change the basis of morality and that it would be so eagerly embraced by the American educational system.
If something is broken, you fix it. Not destroy it.
The value that public education has, and has always had from it’s inception, is undeniable.
The cost of it’s absence would be incalcuable.
To deny the public assured access to education leads to the very things you seem to think already exist inside a system run by well meaning, hard working educators who are democrats and republicans, left-leaning and right-leaning alike.
No one is taught to hate their race. Or their country. Or their gender. Or whatever the latest MAGA talking point is.
Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams knew one thing: a public without access to a basic education is a recipie for tyranny. It gives every advantage to the rich and powerful, and leaves the general populace illiterate, and left in the dark, easy to control, and ignorant of when their freedoms and agency over their lives is co-opted by self-interested aristocracies.
They were wrong. Public education, like all public services, becomes a tool of tyranny as the rich and organized realize they can bend it towards their own goals. All they need is money and influence to capture it.
The reality is that only a moral people can safeguard against tyranny. The only things they need for this is the ability to read and a sound moral code as the basis of their actions and interactions.
It doesn't require an elaborate public school system to ensure this happens, which is why Jefferson proposed a very limited public school experience focused on grammar.
America has been brought to the brink of ruin by its materialist public school system that has been funded by theft and led by awful people.
Families would be better off keeping their kids home and teaching them what it means to be a human being. There are all kinds of great models where this is getting done right now across the US from homeschool co-ops to online microschools.
We don't need govt schools to educate our children.
Let’s table the whole “public services” (notably controlled and regulated by… the public) are a “means of tyranny.”
It’s great if you are able and can afford to home school, or send your children to private school.
What exactly do families do that are not able, and cannot afford these things?
What happens to the children of families where both parents work day jobs, struggling to make ends meet?
What do single parents do?
Your vision of what “should be done” and what public services are is deeply flawed and myopic, at best.
You've basically made the case that public ed is a welfare and daycare program. Arguing that single parents won't have a place to put their kids is to ignore the decades-old research that says that single parent households is the single largest cause of systemic poverty in the US. Giving people this option incentives the behavior. People must be redirected back into teo parent households if we're going to break the poverty cycle. This has never been more apparent in the black community, which was thriving until the introduction of the welfare state. What difference does school make in urban areas? Most of the boys are on a path to prison even with public schools. No one in education has been able to break the cycle without substantial family support. And even then only because distinct education programs were created for a few kids with substantial private philanthropy.
You just made the case for sounding like a self-absorbed and selfish asshole without a fundamental understanding of:
A.) anyone that lives under circumstances other than your own.
2.) most basic purpose and function of a democratically controlled government, operated separate from the church.
America, and the fundamental values it was founded on are *definitely* not for you.
I recommend trying out living in a theocratic state that developed outside the effects of the reformation.
Try the Middle East. You’ll love it much more there. It’s much more your style.
Whatever I sound like to you, I look forward to the time when we are on a bitcoin standard and you cheer the govt on as it demands you give up your bitcoin to support social programs.
Meanwhile, I will be using my bitcoin to fund leaner, more efficient, locally supported educational options, which by the way, is what's going to happen regardless when the dollar becomes worthless.
