> t1gercat yahoo.com> wrote

>> your premise seems to be that public schools are lousy
>> but collectively cheap so parents go for them. In reality -- not your
>> imaginary one -- public schools aren't bad.

> They're "not bad" if your aim is to turn out kids who think slavery was
> invented by evil capitalists in Britain and America, and have no clue that
> slavery is as old as humanity and that Great Britain was the first country
> in history to abolish it --- based on arguments made by Locke, Kant,
> Jefferson, and other thinkers they've never read. Kids who, having never
> read the Constitution, assume that the US is a populist democracy whose
> government may do anything "the people" wish it to do.
>
> Kids who come away convinced that the Earth is the "common property of
> Mankind," but has been expropriated by greedy capitalists who demand
> payment for access to its resources, that businesses are exploitive
> predators who drove kids into coal mines in the 18th century, slaughtered
> peaceful strikers in the 19th century, and who would today cheerfully
> peddle poisonous foods and deadly drugs but for the heroic efforts of a
> dedicated and watchful government. Kids who believe they are "entitled" to
> their "fair shares" of food, housing, health care, and all other "products
> of society," and that crime represents a "failure of society" to meet the
> needs of the "disadvantaged."
>
> Kids who cannot explain how a refrigerator or television works, cannot
> identify any planets or constellations, or any of the trees and or plants
> in their backyards, but who "know," having been tutored with the "Baseline
> Essays," that the Egyptians invented airplanes and were accomplished in
> psychokineis, that Beethoven was black and that Africans invented
> mathematics, and that astrology is a science.