School Choice Week!

National School Choice Week kicks off this Sunday, January 23! It marks a great and necessary groundswell of support for significant education reform. It’s also why we changed up our homepage to all education-related material.

From our perspective, the education system is thoroughly broken. Furthermore, it is in no way designed to raise up independent, critical thinkers who can take the reins of our free society.  Don’t believe us? Here’s a quote from John Dewey, arguably the author of the progressive education system which today we call “public schools”:

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

Here’s another Dewey quote from the same document, My Pedagogic Creed:

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Here’s another Dewey quote:

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

The quotes from Dewey make it quite clear that modern education is for social ends, not individual ends. And that is the fundamental problem with the current education system. It’s not about giving children a baseline of understanding through reading, writing, and arithmetic and then teaching each child to think critically and freely through rigorous study. The modern education system is about molding individuals to the will of society.

Think about your high school experience. At about the time you started to think for yourself, did you really think that the education system wanted you to be an individual who thought freely?

National School Choice Week is about reforming education with the goal that teachers educate students to live as individuals in a free society. At its root, school choice represents competition in education.

School choice, or freedom in education, is an admirable first-step forward. It’s also something that can alleviate the miserable education conditions in many of America’s worst schools. If you have any doubt about those conditions, watch “The Lottery,” “The Cartel,” or even “Waiting for Superman.” You will be appalled. Here’s the teaser for “The Lottery”:

The first two movies may even be showing for free in your community. Find out about movies and other events at SchoolChoiceWeek.com.

Do we need more competition and a thorough rethinking of education in America? If you think so, wouldn’t you agree that individual schools and educators should be free to innovate and compete to provide children with the best possible education? Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case today.

So why not?

Well, we’ll leave you to consider that question with this final quote from John Dewey, the author of the public school system as you know it, writing in Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World.

I do not see how any honest educational reformer in western countries can deny that the greatest practical obstacle in the way of introducing into schools that connection with social life which he regards as desirable is the great part played by personal competition and desire for private profit in our economic life. This fact almost makes it necessary that in important respects school activities should be protected from social contacts and connections, instead of being organized to create them. The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation.