School Vouchers

[Martin Hash]

As a society we have chosen to educate all of our children – everybody’s children, regardless of whose they are. The argument against school vouchers is threefold:
(1) If you pay for your children separately, you are not contributing to the public pool of students.

(2) America aspires to be a classless society, blind to social distinctions. The biggest threat to this ideal is the patrician and elitist (bourgeois) perception that what school you go to confers superior status on those who attend them. There is the certain threat of stratification, where students (or their parents) choose to attend schools that match their peer group. This will enforce the idea of class because, of course, all the good football players will go to the "football" school, and all the good musicians will go to the "music" school; same with science, ethnicity, etc. One of public school's primary purposes is socialization, so that citizens learn how to deal with one another. Nothing causes people to express contempt more than a false (or real) sense of esprit de corps.

(3) Many, if not most, private schools are religious-based. Their curriculum is often skewed towards mystical explanations of science, loyalty to parochial organizations, and the proposition that they are “in the world but not of the world,” which engenders a sense of superiority over their fellow citizens. These are all essentially anti-social concepts, and certainly do not reinforce American cohesiveness.

It is mostly mythology that everyone in American is "equal," but the one place where we can actually claim that is true is when we educate without regard to social distinction. We can be proud of that.