Privatizing Education: Don’t turn my kid’s education into another profit center.

Hey let’s privatize our education system, says pundit X! What’s the matter with that?

The problem is that we live in a country founded on the principle that all men are created equal and as an extension of that, we include children, who are NOT responsible for their own family’s financial abilities. We should NOT punish children for their parent’s foibles. Let me re-phrase that, do you want to be the guy who walks into the school and tells all those children that their school is being sold and left to rot because their parents and their neighborhood “no longer make financial sense in the free market?”

You can call it socialism if you want, but I BELIEVE ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO A FREE EDUCATION THROUGH THE 12TH GRADE and I thought this was something we as a society established a long time ago. If left up to the private sector, eventually, where it doesn’t make financial sense, education would cease to exist. We are talking about places like downtown Detroit, Dayton, Columbus, rural WV and South Eastern Ohio. In these places, without STATE MANDATED freely available and supported education, there would be NO SCHOOLING available to those children. Would you want to live there? In your little fairy land we would have entire swaths of the country with no educational systems at all. Just like we have entire neighborhoods now without adequate grocery stores, fresh food, gas stations or even basic amenities that your free market says it “should” supply.

The real problem is profit and greed. You see it’s easier to make money in large chunks with high margin items and it’s easier to supply services to people who have plenty of money to pay for those margins. Making money a little at a time from poor people is difficult, if not impossible. So you don’t see many new businesses popping up in those places I just mentioned. It doesn’t make financial sense to go there and it never will. We don’t mandate that grocery stores move there because we don’t think that access to good fresh food and groceries is a right afforded to all people equally. And that’s fine. But what we DO NOT do is let innocent children, and yes I think children are in fact innocent and by that I mean NOT responsible for who’s birth canal they happened to be pushed through, be deprived of the right to read and do math because they don’t make financial sense. DO NOT EQUATE EDUCATION WITH MAKING MONEY. Education is NOT a business it never has been and never will be. Privatizing education is a bad idea. More profit will not equal better grades EVER.

Pundit X’s fictional fairy land does not exist. Ayn Rand is fiction and all of her theories are too. The world she created is no more real than J. M. Barrie’s Never Never Land. It never has existed and never will. What would you think if I advocated for legislation to banish all alarm clocks and alligators? As REAL as all of Rand books sound, Randian free markets are FICTION. They are not real. Alan Greenspan was wrong. Social Darwinism is bad for the country and bad for education. We are not animals, subject to death and dismemberment by those that are bigger than us. Competition does not work in many places and education is one of them.

Educating children IS and ALWAYS will be about cooperating, sharing, being kind and generous and serving the public, and GASP, not making money! DEAL WITH IT.

YOU WILL NOT turn my kid’s education into another profit center.