'They Might Not Be Immortal After All'

"Do we actually need and want our public schools, or do we keep them around out of fear of the teachers' unions -- and habit, like a broken child's toy we are too sentimental to throw away?"

In "A World Without Public Schools," an article in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, argues that the consensus underlying American public education has disappeared, and therefore the institution itself should disappear. "There's no reason we must have public schools," he writes."Why not liberate all the vast resources we spend on public schools to be re-channeled to private schools chosen by the nation's parents?"

Our public schools are widely agreed to be in bad shape. But these are only problems of incompetence. Others cut deeper. ... It's pretty clear that no consensus or general agreement on the nature of education is likely to exist in a country that's so divided. Which suggests in turn that, for now, the age of the American public school is over. ...

First our children must learn right from wrong, and how to approach life; then they must learn history (assuming they have already learned how to read and write). If the public can't agree on how to teach these things, it has no business maintaining public schools. And nowadays it can't. ...

There's reason to believe that when it comes to the all-important issue of teaching worldviews and moral frameworks, American public schools are so sharply and consistently biased, they disqualify themselves for the core task of educating citizens."

The entire article is worth reading.