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To the Editor, Altamont Enterprise, 10/17/05 This letter is in response to Aaron Harrell of Guilderland for his rambling letter of last week that started with a timid acknowledgement that “we do need to address some issues in our public education system” and ended with an assault on capitalism and some convoluted relationship to defective flak jackets for our troops. Let’s get one thing straight. There is nothing capitalist about the No Child Left Behind law. It was written by Ted Kennedy and there are at least as many Conservatives that don’t like it as there are Liberals, though for different reasons. Second, I was not writing about “public education” in my letter that Mr. Harrell referenced. I was criticizing “public schools”. Public schools these days have less to do with public education than political indoctrination. Liberals always seem to hold “public education” up as a shield to deflect any and all criticism of public schools. We have some excellent private schools that have always outperformed public schools. Now Mr. Harrell will no doubt suggest the usual boiler plate inanity that private schools pick and choose better students to start with but the fact is that they don’t. Public and private schools had much more in common fifty years ago than they do today and the decline in public school performance is a direct result of more recent changes. Relaxed discipline and an abandonment of phonetic based reading are two key changes that public schools have embraced. If given a choice, many parents would prefer that their children be given the same challenging and disciplined classroom environment that was the norm in decades past. Reasonable people can see this cause and affect relationship and it’s a joke that people like Mr. Harrell would even suggest that public schools are in any way capitalist in nature. Capitalism? Without a choice? No sir, our public schools are a perfect example of the socialist economic model. Which is why they are failing and no amount of money will change that fact. Let me give you an example of just one experience that will shed light on the mindset of your typical public school administrator. Last year my second grade son brought home a reading assignment that included the urging of parents to help in water conservation. Among the many suggestions was when showering, get wet, then turn off the water while you wash, then turn it back on to rinse. Get real! The homework also stated that you use 3 to 5 gallons of water when you flush your toilet. That’s just not true and it wasn’t true five years earlier either when my eldest son brought home the same assignment. I had a meeting with the teacher back then and together we explored the workbook that the assignment was drawn from. It was dated 1971! Even then 3 to 5 gallons was a stretch. She said that she would pay closer attention to what she sent home in the future but five years later I found myself arguing with the principle this time and she would yield no ground. I told her that if she wanted students to actually do any conserving of water that she might want to explain that water costs money. I said, after all, we are a capitalist nation. She said, that was my opinion and that many parents (the pets) thought environmental awareness was a necessary part of the curriculum. I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking that proverbial question: “If they thought it was a good idea to jump off a bridge would you follow?” I will further explore the environmental extremism of our public schools on another day but getting back to Mr. Harrell’s letter, he tries to blame an imaginary lack of funding for public schools on evil capitalist corporate CEOs. He claims they make an average of $11.8 million compared to only $27,460 for the average worker. I’d be willing to bet he listens to NPR where it would never be mentioned that teachers make an average of $50,000 for no more than 900 hours of work compared to the 2000+ hours of the average worker whose taxes pay that teacher’s salary. Teacher’s salaries are much more than the open market would bear and that is the real reason why their unions put so much energy into suppressing our right to choose. A retiring union leader admitted as much to me when we were engaged in a cordial debate several years ago. At my suggestion of choice in education she said: “Don’t you realize that the ‘glass ceiling’ has finally been broken in education?” She only began to listen to what I was saying when I asked her how she could justify a woman’s right to choose the life or death of her child but refuse her the right to a choice of educational environment. Mr. Harrell drifted even further off course by suggesting that capitalism and one CEO in particular are responsible for our troops not having armored vests in Iraq. But the real reason that they didn’t have them or much of the other equipment they could have used was because the Clinton administration with the help of John Frugal Kerry, the wealthiest Senator in US history, decimated the military budget before those of us of sound judgment put George Winner Bush in charge, twice! Lastly, Mr. Harrell suggests we…”leave the task of educating to the educators, those who have our children’s best interest at heart”. Do you even have children Mr. Harrell? There is no one on Earth but my wife and myself that can make that claim about our children and I would suggest that anyone who thinks that educating our children is the right, responsibility or better left to the State is a Socialist and has no credibility. DRC
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