Public school bondage

Rocky Mountain News reports The state of Utah has just passed a landmark educational voucher program under which every family, depending on its income, will be reimbursed between $500 and $3,000 per child for annual tuition paid to the private school of their choice.

Fantastic news. I am not wild about making it a function of income; I think that each family should be able to get whatever amount of money the state has allocated per child for the public school system, and that parents should be able to direct that money to the public, private, or religious school of their choice. But this is certainly good news.

This will now give parents of modest means options that the well-to-do have long enjoyed. Their school-age children will no longer be a captive audience. Parents will be empowered as educational consumers, giving them choices and leverage consumers enjoy in all other spheres of our market economy. They'll be free to choose the educational model they believe best fits the unique needs of their children, and will be freed from the bureaucracy and politics of government-delivered education.

Wonderful.

Predictably, the educratic establishment is in full counterattack. The Utah teachers' union has launched a campaign to repeal the new law. If that fails, they'll try their luck in court. Their resistance is bred of desperation.

Absolutely. They know that the product they offer can't stand the competition.

First, the union's survival is at stake. Under a voucher system, education is still publicly financed through taxpayer dollars. That doesn't change. But what does is the union's monopoly to deliver publicly funded education exclusively in government schools. Under a voucher system, competition would bloom.

And parents would be free to choose to send their child whereever they want.

Second, there's the ideological opposition to competition and free choice in education. The educratic establishment - from administrators, to the teachers' colleges that staff the schools, to the unions that run them and the school boards they elect - is liberal to its core.

And the only way to get more liberals is to brainwash the children.

They covet their power to set the agenda, to dictate subject matter and educational techniques, to influence impressionable young minds and mold the next generation of liberal activists. They've turned their government schools into laboratories for social engineering, downgrading basic academics and old-fashioned notions of American exceptionalism, patriotism and individualism in favor of collectivism, political correctness, diversity, environmentalism, feminism, and delusional self-esteem. They have a death grip on these schools that they're loath to release.

Which is exactly why it must be done.