School Vouchers: Can't We Just Teach School Stuff at School?
Ah, school vouchers. I love this issue. The public school motto of "a decent education for all" has been officially Republicanized. With the introduction of faux-religion and stupidity, two pillars of the Republican party, into our school system, our new motto is "I'll teach my kid that your kid is a blasphemous non-believer and you'll pay for it."
There was a time in America (last week, I believe) when public schools taught a group of subjects generally recognized as useful for transforming young people into thoughtful, skilled adults. Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday, we can now spend time, formerly spent teaching our children school subjects, teaching our children church subjects while forcing the states to pick up the tab! You heard right. Jews can now force Christian taxpayers to pay as they teach their Jewish children that Jesus was just a nice guy who could really entertain on a tight budget. Christians can now force Jewish taxpayers to foot the bill as they teach Christian youth that Jewish kids will burn in Hell for believing the stuff their school teaches. Radical Muslims could force Jewish and Christian taxpayers to pay for teaching their kids that Christians and Jews are an affront to Allah and therefore must be destroyed. While I'm sure that these friendly spiritual disagreements will make for some spirited interscholastic basketball rivalries, do we really want to have to pay for this system?
Wait! I've got a great idea! Let's have an educational system where we teach our children school stuff at school. You know, all those non-religious subjects that all the aforementioned schools will be teaching (except for Flat Earth Society members and Christian fundamentalist nuts, of course). I'm pretty sure that Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Satan-worshipers can all agree that 2 + 2 = 4, and that "i" usually comes before "e" except after "c." Then, parents can teach their kids that everybody who doesn't believe in their particular brand of god will face eternal damnation on their own time. Maybe over the weekends, perhaps? Yes! This will work! We could have a series of buildings all over the country that would be built and paid for only by those who attend them. This way, those who think the things they teach in a particular building are a dangerous and offensive waste of time would at least not be on the hook for the cost. We could call those buildings "churches." Or maybe "synagogues." No, let's call them "mosques." Okay, maybe we'd better let those who attend them name the buildings.
Best of all, with religion removed from schools, everybody's kids could attend the same school! They could learn, eat lunch, and play side-by-side. I'm betting they could also learn that despite what their parents teach them in those chur. . . uh, buildings on the weekends, they are all pretty much the same people. They could learn that people of different faiths can live and learn together without killing each other. They might even have a chance to learn about somebody else's religious beliefs and prefer them to their own. This could be the greatest educational system ever devised!
Faults aside, this was the system we had before Thursday. Let the Balkanization of the American school system begin!
6/29/02
