Monday, February 14, 2005

Not the Argument for Vouchers I Would Have Made...

...but I'll take it.

So what to do? It is not the role of public schools to confirm the religious beliefs of their students. Parents who want their children to benefit from the latest findings of science would reasonably be irked if evolutionary biology were expunged from the public school curriculum. There is another way around this conundrum. Get rid of public schools. Give parents vouchers and let them choose the schools to which to send their children. Fundamentalists can send their kids to schools that teach that the earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Science geeks can send their kids to technoschools that teach them how to splice genes to make purple mice. This proposal lowers political and social conflict, and eventually those made fitter in the struggle for life by better education will win. At least that's my theory.
This is fine as far as it goes, but in order to get to this conclusion you have to wade through about 1200 words of abuse of Michael Behe's Intelligent Design argument. But the general point is valid: school choice removes education from the realm of public policy, just as journalism and religious worship have always been.

(Via: John Derbyshire at the Corner.)

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