Friday, February 09, 2007

Hillary Against Vouchers

Here's a disappointing quote from Hillary Clinton:

First family that comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher.' Next parent that comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist ...' The parent says, 'The way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. ... You gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me. So what if the next parent comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the School of the Jihad? ... I won't stand for it.

Talk about disproving herself. She just showed how government involvement in education at any level is fundamentally flawed. It should not be up to the government to tell parents what kind of school they have to send their children to. Right now everyone who does not send their children to public school is punished since they must pay for the public school and the private school. So right now the government provides disincentive to all scenarios listed by Clinton. They try to stop you from sending your kids to the Catholic school or any other kind of private school. It's not the government's job to determine what kind of school I send my kids to.

What Hillary doesn't realize (or doesn't care, since I'm sure she had the money to send Chelsea to the school of her choice) is that by trying to socially engineer children by forcing them to go to a certain kind of homogenized, government backed (thanks No Child Left Behind) school, it just winds up decreasing the quality of education. That's why the really fortunate children of parents with enough money to pay for both the public school and a private school, have such a huge advantage over their peers.

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