If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You're a Bad Person

That's the claim made by a Slate writer named Allison Benedikt:

Quote:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad. I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)

Yes, who cares if their kid gets a mediocre education? Obviously this piece is not aimed at suburbanites, but affluent urban liberals. Allison practically boasts about her crappy public school--why she only had to read one book in all of high school. But it's okay, because eventually she got a job at Slate and she's doing quite well.



At times you have to wonder if it's a parody piece:

Quote:

Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

Who knows, your kids might even get a first-hand education in heroin!

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=264595&goto=newpost