This continues the series of posts on education.
What is the role of government in education? The problem of central government power and corruption in relation to education is a cause of great concern for me. I still remember learning that Abraham Lincoln was a champion of civil rights who wanted to end slavery, and that American exceptionalism defeated the aggressive Soviet Union. I also now realize that there were gaping absences from my education, like the complete absence of any classes concerning philosophy, even as an introduction that scratched the surface, or any study of the decline of empires such as Rome whose glories I studied so intensely.
If there is any quick fix for the problems I am noting, it would be decentralization of power in respect to our education system. This becomes more problematic on a daily basis, as more and more federal stimulus funds are poured into local education systems. While the beltway political community often paints this as government helping small communities, I see the benefit of a temporary boost in funding being far outweighed by the cost of our central government grabbing more and more local power. Education systems will, in the long run, be forced to either permanently entrust more of their budgetary matters to federal power, or suffer the pain of doing away with an infrastructure that big government created and, consequently, only big government can support. Decentralization would help the education system of the United States to be more diverse as well, as different regions would certainly have different educational programs, and these programs could compete in the form of their graduates to show which programs had the best results.
However, no discussion of education in the United States would be complete without taking a look at the intent of our country’s founders. Here I must thank Professor Jarrell for injecting this concept into the current discussion. In a recent LFD post addressed to me and interested others, she wrote:
The Federalist Papers made it clear, to me at least, that our founding fathers believed that the government, our federal government in particular, should have nothing to do with educating the populace.
I realize it sounds a bit radical now, but I believe that any discussion of what is right and wrong about public education today must begin with a healthy debate about whether the federal government should be involved in public education at all.
Your thoughts? Thanks!
In a very soon-to-come post, I will begin yet another discussion, one that I hope will heavily involve Professor Jarrell and many others, about the original intent of our founders in relation to public education, and whether or not there is any hope of returning to their proposed system at any point in the near future.
by Elliot Engstrom
Learning from Dogs 
Those founders were only philosophical parrots living about three centuries ago… One may as well be guided by the Bible… The “founders” were greedy slave masters. Being guided by them, one would presume, is to be guided by greed, and the desire to enslave others.
Let me be clear: Jefferson was a philosophical parrot. Beautiful words, but not his own. So, the way parrots are, he did not really understand the ideas behind the words.
When it came to have to do the right thing, freeing the slave he had sex with since she was a child, and her brother, and as he promised to do to alarmed French Ancient (!) regime authorities, he did not, and re-enslaved them, once safely removed an ocean away. One may suspect that the USA will stay controversial, as long as greedy slave masters, the “founders”, are supposed to guide the young, naïve, and educated the American way, namely knowing little of what is commonly defined as civilization.
Another point: as far as being greedy, enslaving and intolerant of other religions, the “founders” did not found it at all. As I detailed somewhere on my sites, slavery was reintroduced in English speaking America a bit less than a millennium after the Franks outlawed it, under Queen Bathilde (660 CE).
Last point: cutting big power into small pieces does not make it any less powerful, or morally right. What counts is whether power is right, and clever. If the local idiots decide what is to be taught, it will still be idiotic, however small minded they are. Actually let me explain that to you: the more small minded, the more idiotic.
PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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