Contra Mozilla

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The Purpose of Public Schools

Once upon a time, public schools were established to ensure that we would have something resembling and educated populace. Increasingly, they are being used as just another laboratory in which to inflict the state- or union-approved ideology on students. The school may not be free, but they can ensure its free of education (with a few notable exceptions).

If that's not reason enough to make parents look for alternative option, a school in Wisconsin has come up with a new reason to homeschool. Children may have an older brother, but there's no Big Brother present:

A middle school in Marinette, Wisconsin got a group of 5th-8th graders together and organized a really fun game that asked students to step forward to answer “yes” to a series of highly personal questions...

I think we can all see how easily this could go sideways. This collection of information from unwitting children could be used to instigate social services investigations, to find out which parents are using their 2nd amendment right to own firearms, whether they’ve complied with Obamacare, what their lifestyle choices are, how they practice their religious beliefs, what the family’s political beliefs are, or to single out kids for forced medical or mental health treatment against the wishes of their parents. We need only look at all of the zero tolerance hysteria to see how quickly this could get out of hand.

Most kids don’t understand the greater ramifications of sharing this type of information, and that is exactly what the administrators are counting on. They are taking advantage of a relationship of trust between students and faculty, and exploiting that for their own purposes. So many things are illegal or illicit now that it’s impossible for a child to judge whether what he or she is saying will get someone into trouble.

I would ask "What could go wrong?," but that question only works if the possibility of something going wrong isn't at least a little intentional.

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