Education

School vouchers transfer money by force, regulate private schools, and are only for the "poor." The facts from IBD.

Like Martha Nussbaum, whose Cultivating Humanity is addressed above, John M. Ellis is concerned with multiculturalism.

Conservatives and leftists often characterize the struggle over the contemporary university in the same way, though of course accompanied by opposing value judgments.

Academia has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Take a look at the recent book catalog of Duke University Press, once a prestigious publishing house. Today it features third-rate, race-obsessed, sex-obsessed, solipsistic tirades masquerading as scholarship.

The rise of home schooling coincides with the general breakdown in the public school system. It began when LBJ, our first "education president," signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, with funding of $1.65 billion. The congressional sponsor predicted, ironically, that the bill would reduce "the cost of crime, delinquency, unemployment, and welfare."

America's worry over a general moral erosion in politics and society has coincided with ever-more draconian federal control over education. What's often overlooked is that government schooling itself may be the crux of the problem. In particular, the compulsory attendance laws that exist in every state, and which are reinforced by federal programs, guarantee a captive audience for political indoctrination.

People who advocate tax-funded school vouchers for private schools frequently hail the G.I. Bill of Rights education vouchers for World War II veterans as a model. In truth, the G.I. Bill was a budget-busting middle-class entitlement scheme that had destructive effects on higher education, and set the stage for virtually all our current educational problems.

In the famed 1995 budget battles between the White House and the Congress, Bill Clinton told a whopper that put him on the rhetorical offensive. He said that Congress's proposed cuts in a particular program amounted to "raising taxes on the poor."

In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That's the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.