The TX Republican coup against the Houston School system is truly repellent. They want to kill public schools and give the money to their corrupt friends in for-profit "education".
#uspolitics #texas #harriscounty
@vy
Really. Private and religious schools should not be permitted at all. (Certainly tuition and fees should NOT be deductible on one's income taxes.) All children should attend PUBLIC k-12 and home schooling should be disallowed unless the parent has a college degree, a teacher's certificate and the child has a disability of some sort.
What about the students who would have been better served by those options, and the teachers would would have preferred to teach in those places?
Seems like a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face.
@volkris @vy
It's "humanitarian calculus". The point to all-public schools is that local money would flow into them to make them better, as opposed to the wealthy locals shipping their kids off to a private school. It would be "easier" to increase funding for public schools if the rich and influential were required to send their kids to them. Public teachers could be paid more and picky teachers who don't want to teach Black kids or would rather pimp for Jesus can find another line of work.
I love how you are still tearing down instead of building up, encouraging teachers to find other lines of work instead of teaching students when you don't personally approve of their preferences.
Again it comes back to, well it sucks for those students who lose out on education from those teachers, but screw 'em, yeah?
They aren't the group that you personally favor, so you're happy to let that group lose out on education.
@volkris @Threadbane what kind of preferences?
I just know a few teachers, and also a few students, who prefer the other environments.
@vy @volkris
Why would I, an atheist, a social democrat politically further Left than Mahatma Gandhi, prefer White Nationalist Dominionist Xian ANYTHING? They're precisely the sort of people who should not be allowed to run schools and feed kids fascist rot, yet they can, and White Nationalist Dominionist Xians like you send their kids to them where they can learn all about blue-eyed Jesus instead of chemistry or the Holocaust, without any scurvy poor kids corrupting them.
@volkris @Threadbane Who asked you to out anyone? My point was that a preference to teach in school run on the principles of the Aryan Nation, for example, is something that a free society should not tolerate.
@vy @volkris
Of course not, but if you want a Xian, Jewish, or Muslim school, taxpayers shouldn't have to help pay for it as they do now. More and more gov't money, both a the state and federal level, is being shoveled into religious schools and it should stop.
Private schools have become an escape from school integration and a negation of the Civil Rights Act, and are primarily the preserve of privileged white people. They are no longer the "college prep" of yesteryear.
*shrug* if public schools can do better then they should, and this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
@volkris @Threadbane "shrug" is weak. If people want special schools they can fund them themselves.
@vy @volkris
You likely stand for freedoms that I don't agree with, like the right not to have your children vaccinated or to not provide them with real medical care instead of the power of prayer. "Xian" schools as they exist in the US are a form of child neglect. They are only an educational "choice" if you buy into superstition and magic instead of science and humanitarianism and think adding yet another ignorant barbarian to our already pitiably uneducated population is a good thing.
More to the point, it's not that I stand for ideas that you disagree with, it's that I stand against enforcing your or my personal opinions on other people like that.
It's not that I'm particularly in favor of one style of education or another, but that I am against blocking other people from having access to the forms of education that they think best.
I'm happy to support you in promoting educational options for children and their parents. I just don't think that you should be allowed to take educational options away from other people.
@volkris @Threadbane Should people have the right to take their children from public school and teach them nazi ideology? https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-to-know-about-a-neo-nazi-home-school-scandal/2023/02
The alternative is saying that I have the right to dictate which propaganda kids are brought up around. So let me choose what propaganda your kids are exposed to. Let me shape their brains. Yes that will work nicely.
@volkris @vy
The alternative is everybody attending public schools, not parents feeding their kids religious crap or putting them in inferior private schools that skirt school integration. The alternative is to give all children an equal chance at a decent education, not give rich kids better (or different) opportunities than those available to the poor. The US is the least upwardly mobile country in the Global North and private schools make it even less meritocratic.
@volkris @Threadbane Are children the property of parents who can decide that, for example, girls don't need to learn to read or that math is useless? Do you really think that nazi ideology and the civics courses on democratic government are both just "propaganda" and there is no obligation that society require students learn the second? To me, both of these are deeply immoral propositions.
The other side of the coin is to say that you should be able to impose your personal values on other people's kids. You know, like the Nazis did. Since you seem kind of obsessed with them.
@volkris @Threadbane So you think laws against child abuse are some nanny state imposition of personal values on other people's kids?
I mean yes. Of course they are.
You might argue that this imposition of your values on others is for the best, and that's great, but it's the thing that has to be owned.
Great, you think your values are worth imposing on other people, so proudly stand up and stand for it!
@volkris @Threadbane All government policy is an imposition of values. Your rhetoric doesn't add any clarity.
The clarity is in owning it.
It is in saying My representative is forcing this set of values on other people, and I'm okay with it. It's in accountability. It's in the democratic process.
You're up for imposing your own values on others? Great! Just own it. Don't try to avoid that by shifting accountability, just say I am forcing my values on other people.
And then yeah no problem. As long as you're doing it honestly.
@volkris @Threadbane To me, your phrasing is very unclear. If you think children are property of their parents, to be disposed of as parents (or other guardians) wish, go ahead and own it. If you think, as I do, that human beings have civil rights and that children have a right to a real education, then say it. All this libertarian nonsense is the opposite of clarity. Human beings are social animals.
I think it's pretty clear.
Well first of all I don't identify as libertarian. I have some pretty big disagreements with most of the people who seem to take on that title, but setting that aside.
No it's just a simple matter that if you want to impose your personal beliefs on other people's children, great! Just say that's what you're doing, that is factually what you are doing, and let's get on with it.
I don't think it makes sense to impose your personal values on other people while denying that's what you're doing.
It's just, well that is the factual thing being proposed, so let's get on with it.
@volkris @Threadbane
A) Children deserve medical care, access to basic education including literacy, and protection from being abused by guardians/parents
B) So you want to impose your values on those children!
That's emotional misdirection to depict freedom and human rights as an "imposition". To view forbidding slavery, for example, as an imposition on would be slave owners is not clarity, it's confusion.
@vy
I don't think you, @volkris, are being intellectually honest at all, you are simply redefining words to suit your untidy thought processes and making civilization and acculturation (the process by which the culture of a particular society is instilled in a human from infancy onward) virtual crimes. Yours is the sort of philosophical shallowness one finds in devotees of Ayn Rand. I've had my say and repeated myself already. Carry on without me.
And I don't think you are being intellectually honest if you are trying to duck the matter of imposing your values on others 🙂
So now that we have gotten what we think of each other out of the way, let's stick to the facts.
If you want to use the force of government to impose things on other parents with regard to kids or whatever else, you are trying to use force to impose your values, and maybe that's for the best, but at least admit it!
It is literally what's happening, and if you are being intellectually honest then you need to admit that.
@volkris @Threadbane I am not ducking anything. Your framing is not illuminating. One might as well argue that opposition to murder involves using the power of the state to impose some personal values on others. All that libertarian tinged assumption that the natural state of people is to live in some authoritarian family/cult doesn't get anywhere good.
@volkris @Threadbane Which ones? If you prefer the White Nationalist Dominianist Christian environment, I don't have much sympathy. Preferences are not value free.