I have to drive Monday’s point home just a little more. (If you have not read that piece, it would be useful to do so; it contains vital background.)
Watch the short video at the end of this post, which discusses the tension at school board meetings over the last few years—tension spurred by covid restrictions, anti-white and racialist curricula, the transing of children, and the risks to students associated with the bathroom/trans issue. The video has NBC’s standard leftward skew, naturally, but it is good enough to make my point.
Where is the rancor coming from? Yes, parents have every right to be livid about all these issues, but let’s look deeper than that. Why are they forced to deal with these issues in the first place? The answer is easy:
Public schools.
We’ve been jammed into these circumstances for so long that when casting about for solutions, we only consider what tweaks we can make to the existing system. We need more oversight. We need to pay more attention to school-board elections! We fail to consider that the system itself might be the source of the conflict.
The problem can be summed up simply: the absence of choice…
Step 1: Establish one-size-fits-all government schools (with an obvious ideological agenda).
Step 2: Force people to pay for those schools. Technically, people are “free” to send their kids to other schools (so long as they are government approved, naturally). However, since most people cannot afford to pay school taxes AND private-school tuition, they will have to send their kids to (the left’s) government schools. (And if you think these schools are not firmly in the hands of the left, you have not been paying attention.)
Step 3: Form unions for public-school teachers. These unions will negotiate with government on behalf of teachers, like this:
Union (A) goes to politician (B) and asks for more money and benefits for teachers.
Politician (B) asks for votes and campaign support in return.
A and B shake hands and make Taxpayer (C) pay for all of it.
Taxpayer (C) is not allowed into the negotiations.
Oh, silly goose, didn’t you know—the taxpayer is involved in the negotiations at election time. Hey can vote the bums out any time he likes!
Great.
The public schools will still exist. The teachers’ unions will still exist. The schools will still need to be funded. The mechanism by which they are funded, and the ways in which those negotiations take place, will not change. The incentives will still be the same. The taxpayer still won’t be in the room. The political parties won’t change. The union negotiators will be the same people, and with an over 90 percent incumbent-reelection rate in every election, so will nearly all the politicians. Power to the people!
Step 4: Create school boards to establish (the illusion of) democratic oversight of schools. You can run for school board. You can vote for school board members. You can go complain to school boards. Democracy in action! I hammered this issue Monday, so no need to more than briefly revisit it…
School boards don’t have to listen to parents. They have to pretend to. Most of the time, most parents have neither the time nor the inclination to show up to school board meetings. Board members can pay a little lip-service to the few complaints they receive from intrepid parents…and then do nothing of substance about them.
Occasionally, however, issues crop up that inspire parents to take an interest:
socially transitioning their children to live as the other sex, and to convince them to get permanently disfiguring surgeries;
telling children that if they are white, they are inherently guilty because of their very identity;
allowing rapes to take place in bathrooms by boys who identify as girls but still have the hormones and genitals of boys.
Y’know, silly stuff like that. But when that happens and parents get involved en masse, all that schools need to do is complain to the government that they are being harassed by “domestic terrorists.” Whether anything substantive is done or not, parents eventually have to go back to their jobs and lives. Sure, a few school boards might get flipped in the next election, but the overall trend-lines do not change.
Do school-board members feel threatened by the parents? Sure—the parents are furious. Given the issues at hand, the parents have every right to be enraged. But the issues are the symptom, not the cause. The. System. Is. The. Cause.
The absence of choice is the cause.
We are all forced into this conflict. Parents’ money is forcibly taken from them, forcing them to put their children in one-size-fits-all schools. These schools tend to be run by people who range from moderately LEFT to toys-in-the-attic, mentally unstable LEFT to three-hot-meals-away-from-becoming Maoist guerillas LEFT. The only oversight is this clunky system of school boards and elections that purport to offer control, consent, and choice, but deliver mostly just the illusion of them.
Take all that away and give parents choice, and 95 percent of the problem would vanish overnight.1
Granted, private schools could create similar systems of oversight—PTAs and boards and votes and the like, but such systems are far less necessary because parents have a much more effective oversight too: their money. Public school administrators, union officials, teachers, and school board members all speak the bland pablum of democracy and concern for “the children” when the local news media sticks microphones in their faces. But the truth is, they don’t have to care what parents think. Not really. Private schools, by contrast, must care, because parents can simply take their money elsewhere.
Since most normal human parents do not want their children indoctrinated, psychologically conditioned, or mutilated with hormones and surgeries, most private schools are more likely to be pretty normal.
Tragically, a few parents actually like the idea of transitioning their children. The trans-radical left has told them it makes them better people to do so, so at the slightest hiccup of childhood angst, they see a quick route to feeding their own malignant narcissism (or their Munchausen By Proxy): mutilate their own children. Thus, in a system of pure choice, a few woke, trans-radical private schools will also exist.
That is a problem for those children, and we need to find ways to protect them. But in the meantime, eliminating public schools eliminates most of the problem for most of the children and parents. And that would be a big win.
The rancor in issues such as these—and many others—is caused by the fact that we are forced into a system where we do not have choice. Every issue has the highest of stakes because every issue is ultimately decided by a vote—and everyone is forced to live by the results no matter how they voted. The notion that that constitutes “choice” and “consent” is a story we’ve been telling ourselves for two centuries, but it just isn’t true.
How you choose to spend your money—that’s choice. Where you choose to live—that’s choice. How you choose to spend your time, and with whom—that’s choice.
Voting is not. Democracy just replaces one big tyrant with lots of little ones.
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Epilogue: I know this anti-democracy thing has become a bit of a hobby horse for me lately, but I just don’t see a way around these conclusions. Feel free to try to change my mind—I am happy to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
98% is an estimated rather than a scientific quantity.
The problem is, private schools are just as bad, often worse. The accreditation bodies, such as NAIS, are ideologically captured, and I think parents essentially sign away their rights to complain. If you live in a far-Left state, lawmakers and unelected bureaucrats will heavily influence graduation requirements for all students.