Paul Harvey Reads From His Clipping Collection, Page 2 Options

[Jon Awbrey]

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/offtopic.gif)

Yet Another Soapbox White With Foam

[Milton Roe]

All our Founding Fathers and all our Founding Mothers would be revolutionizing in their graves at the very idea that We The People have become so poorly educated that We allow ourselves to forget even for a moment what Universal Free Public Education is all about.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

Our founding fathers and mothers (particularly mothers) had never heard about "Universal Free Public Education." It would have been as wierd an idea to them as universal "free" (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) public retirement benefits and universal free retirement medical care. I don't think Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington had any taxpayer funded schooling at all. Adams went to a common school which had a tuition. Franklin had about two years of school and had to drop out because his family couldn't pay it. And so on.

Women, of course, often didn't go to school at all in the "founding father" days.

[It's the blimp, Frank]

Northern states first experimented with public “district schools,” which were run by the local government and either charged tuition or relied on property taxes. The United States was slow to follow the European model. For the most part, government resisted the temptation to run schools even as it generously supported them financially at the request of its citizens. Throughout the colonial period, all schools, secular or religious, were considered “public” schools because they served the public good. Despite early attempts at a national education system by notable proponents like Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, local communities jealously guarded their schools and their prerogative to found them, recalling the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1820s that Americans had a talent for local and voluntary initiative.

http://www.frinstitute.org/allschools1.html

[Jon Awbrey]

I know I larned all this stuff in skool sometime or other, but my grade school books are in the Attic, if ya know what I mean, so here's a random pair of “Feelin Lucky Punk” pointers torn from the Front Page of that New Fangled Googly Dogood Go Fetchum Flyer —

• Jefferson, Education, and the Franchise
• Thomas Jefferson's Bill for Universal Education at the Public Expense

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

http://www.frinstitute.org/allschools1.html

Faith & Reason Institute
666 Eleventh St. NW, Suite 450
Washington, DC 20001

Written from the point of view of an advocacy group, which is hunky dory except for that little catch about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

And really — 666 — I think we know where they're coming from.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

[It's the blimp, Frank]

I don't endorse their view that the government should pay for home schoolers, church schoolers, etc. I posted the quote because despite their ideology, they had to concede that there were "early attempts at a national education system by notable proponents like Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin." That seemed to debunk what Milton was saying.

[Jon Awbrey]

I don't endorse their view that the government should pay for home schoolers, church schoolers, etc. I posted the quote because despite their ideology, they had to concede that there were "early attempts at a national education system by notable proponents like Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin." That seemed to debunk what Milton was saying.

Sure, I know that, and there was a fair amount of what used to be common knowledge in the article, but they were naturally trying to spin it their way. And the plain fact is that FBO's have pushed for and got a whole lot more laxitude in that Church And State Firewall than we used to have when I was a kid.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/winky.gif)

[Milton Roe]

Northern states first experimented with public “district schools,” which were run by the local government and either charged tuition or relied on property taxes. The United States was slow to follow the European model. For the most part, government resisted the temptation to run schools even as it generously supported them financially at the request of its citizens. Throughout the colonial period, all schools, secular or religious, were considered “public” schools because they served the public good. Despite early attempts at a national education system by notable proponents like Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, local communities jealously guarded their schools and their prerogative to found them, recalling the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1820s that Americans had a talent for local and voluntary initiative.

http://www.frinstitute.org/allschools1.html

Yes, yes, so? Many founding fathers tried to get publically-FUNDED education, but that doesn't mean they succeeded, or that they had experienced it themselves in their own youth. Generally, neither happened. The "common" schools did charge tuition, and the idea of common schools run on property taxes (our present model) doesn't date from the revolutionary period, but from a generation or two later, at least. So if the founding fathers are going to revolve in their graves, they'd have had to do even more revolving while they were alive (revolution indeed). But I think a fair number of founding fathers, considering the way they fought Hamilton's federalism, would REALLY be revolving today at the idea of the national federal government involved in setting standards for, and paying for, community "common-school" education for kids. Perhaps not the states, but certainly the feds.

I'll bet Jefferson's skull would explode. He was the founder of the University of Virginia (one of the three accomplishments on his gravestone; his presidency is not), but that was a mixed-funded STATE and private secular university, and it should be remembered that it charged tuition, gave LOANS to the poor, and that the whole thing kicked off nearly 50 years after the revolution, just about the time of Jefferson's death. So in very many ways, it's nothing like the feds messing in K-12, ala W. Bush. (Had Jefferson been alive when The Army of Virginia went off to war with the feds in 1860, I think Jefferson would have cheered them on. He was a revolutionary and hater of central authority all his life, and didn't particularly approve of the federal Constitution, either).

Ben Franklin would have approved of state taxpayer funded common schooling. But I think even Franklin would have balked at the federal government becoming involved in something so "close to home" as K-12. Universities and colleges have always been something different, precisely because their studients are adults (for all intents and purposes, especially by colonial standards).

==

I should make my own position clear at this point. I too am the product of public school education (not in the English, but the American sense of that word). My K-12 was paid for by the state (real estate taxes and the like), and it was a great one. I had an educational experience so idyllic that if you made it into a TV show it would resemble The Andy Griffith Show, and the school part of it would bore today's audiences right out of their skulls because it was almost pure learning with almost no drama. I then went to a private university on scholarship (which supported by private donations, BTW), which was also aided by the fact that I got a 50% tuition break since my father taught there. Lucky me. So again, nirvana. I then borrowed money at low-low federally-subsidized student loan rates for graduate training at a state university, which was itself partly partly subsidized by state money. Again, nirvana. I worked a little as a wage slave in college, but nowhere near enough to support myself fully. If I'd had to do that, I could not have maintained the scholarship.

I wouldn't change a bit of how I got educated. I'm sorry that everybody doesn't have the same system I had, with the state funding things at the beginning, and the feds assisting in the post grad part. Tax FUNDING of education is a fine idea, but public RUNNING of the educational system only works if the institutions themselves are watched over by at least jaundiced conservatives, who are there to keep them from being controlled by radicals who want to teach Communism instead of chemistry. I'm all for secular education at the college level and above, so long as we count Marxism as yet one more religion, and guard against it being taught pervasively as a correct idea alongside (say) Catholicism. I'm not sure I'm ready to see the K-12 system give vouchers to religious primary and secondary schools, unless they promise not to teach religion there (or perhaps give the students a limited hour a day of it, by choice, a separate building as actually some schools in my own state did, as a compromise-- they called it "release time").

When I was growing up, K-12 kids didn't need vouchers, because there weren't any public K-12 schools that needed to hire guards, or have metal detectors because students had weapons and sold drugs. My conservative western state would not have permitted it. Today, things have gone partly to hell; and one of the problems is that the teachers unions didn't do their job, and at the federal level, the liberals managed to insert more and more leftist values, which (strangely) are generally values that make endless excuses for poor personal performance and criminal activity. Parents need a way to escape that, if their kids are not learning, or live in fear. Vouchers are obvious ways to let this happen.

I wouldn't even object to voucher-mediated needs-based taxpayer support for higher education, aka the G.I. Bill for everybody. If we could get the federal government to stop paying for madness like the Iraq war, we might even have enough money to do it. But people would rather have their war, and so long as that's true, I would rather have them spend their money for war and go without other necessities, than borrow money against their grandkids' future. Unfortunely, that's not happening either. So, I'm angry. Neither of the two major political parties in 2000 offered a way for the feds to get out of my K-12 schools, and neither one supported vouchers. In 2003, neither party stood against the Iraq war. That left voters like me with no viable alternative. The country as a whole was hell-bent on stupidity, and mostly it has gotten what it has richly deserved.

And yes, I voted for Obama in 2008. With the idea that anything (ANYTHING) has to be better than Dubya Bush.

[Jon Awbrey]

I thought the whole point of that Revolution Thang was to create a more perfect system, not to recreate what they themselves had experienced beforehand.

Seriously, Milton, their ideals were clear enough, no matter how long it takes to realize them.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

[Milton Roe]

I thought the whole point of that Revolution thang was to create a more perfect system, not to recreate what you yourself had beforehand.

Seriously, Milton, their ideals were clear enough, no matter how long it takes to realize them.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

As I said above, it's far from clear what their ideals were. Regarding today's federalist control of just about everything, I think even those arch federalists Hamilton and Madison would be horrified. Jefferson clearly would be. Probably Franklin and Adams, too.

[Jon Awbrey]

Yeah, yeah, the balance of federal and local control, but that is just an implementational detail that is always being negotiated on every issue that comes along. The fundamental principle is that being educated and informed is essential to the due exercise of one's duty as a citizen, so education must be as universal as the franchise. The rest of it comes from the fact that what the People provide the People will naturally maintain quality control over.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

[Milton Roe]

Yeah, yeah, the balance of federal and local control, but that is just an implementational detail that is always being negotiated on every issue that comes along. The fundamental principle is that being educated and informed is essential to the due exercise of one's duty as a citizen, so education must be as universal as the franchise. The rest of it comes from the fact that what the People provide the People will naturally maintain quality control over.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

The issue of control in ths cybernetic system is not an "incidental," particularly when the system goes to hell and you have to start aguing whether it was a controlled failure, or not. It's a matter where the quantity (of control) degrades to the point that the quality of the system is affected, that's the sorites problem. Which is why your education (not to mention your givernment) is not being "controlled" by the Crown in in the UK, right now. In 1776 we hit a binary wall where we decided that locus of control was just too far away, and too disinterested. The voting and representation thing was really a red herring, as if the colonies had had a few members in parliament, the results would not ultimately have been just the same (otherwise, is a little lie we tell students in K-12).

"Controlling" a process that resides a few city-blocks away from you, by a method in which your money is sent (more or less automatically as paycheck-withholding) to an entity hundreds or thousands of miles away, which then has effects which come back though layers and layers of non-transparent red tape, with strings and time delays, and always in a leaky fashion, does not qualify in my book, as actual "control." It's not even as good as controlling a rover on Mars, where the delay is only 30 mintutes or something, at worst. Instead, we now have a loop where the decission-cycle (control-loop) time is years at best, and decades at worst. It's like the Iraq war, going on now 8 years. Who controls that? Control is a binary word, of course. I've given you many reasons why the K-12 system is now out of control, from overspending to poor performance. You refuse to "see" them. What can I say? Nothing. If you won't see it, I can't make you.

I can turn your argument on its head, though, and simply observe that if you REALLY believe what the people provide, the people always maintain control over, then you really have no fundamental reason to complain about anything in this society. I know of no business which is not controlled by its customers, for example, as they provide the money that the business runs on. At the next level, you're always free to throw out of office politicians who subsidize businesses you don't like. Thus, you're in control right now, in the way you insist that *I* have to use the word. Except that you don't accept it, when the results are not the ones you like. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif) Hypocrite.

[Jon Awbrey]

I know of no business which is not controlled by its customers, for example, as they provide the money that the business runs on. At the next level, you're always free to throw out of office politicians who subsidize businesses you don't like. Thus, you're in control right now, in the way you insist that *I* have to use the word. Except that you don't accept it, when the results are not the ones you like.

You really don't know the difference between Capitalism and Democracy, do you?

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

P.S. Implementational ≠ Incidental

[Milton Roe]

I know of no business which is not controlled by its customers, for example, as they provide the money that the business runs on. At the next level, you're always free to throw out of office politicians who subsidize businesses you don't like. Thus, you're in control right now, in the way you insist that *I* have to use the word. Except that you don't accept it, when the results are not the ones you like.

You really don't know the difference between Capitalism and Democracy, do you?

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

P.S. Implementational ≠ Incidental

If you think they can't coexist, you must be confusing "Democracy" with Communism.

Businesses are much more responsive to consumer-demand than governments are to voter demand. The basic reason (at least for joint-stock publicly owned corporations) is that governments don't have to issue quarterly reports.

[Jon Awbrey]

I know of no business which is not controlled by its customers, for example, as they provide the money that the business runs on. At the next level, you're always free to throw out of office politicians who subsidize businesses you don't like. Thus, you're in control right now, in the way you insist that *I* have to use the word. Except that you don't accept it, when the results are not the ones you like.

You really don't know the difference between Capitalism and Democracy, do you?

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

P.S. Implementational ≠ Incidental

If you think they can't coexist, you must be confusing "Democracy" with Communism.

Lots of things coexist.

The US and the UK coexist …

But conflate the two systems and —

USUK❢

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

[Herschelkrustofsky]

In 1776 we hit a binary wall where we decided that locus of control was just too far away, and too disinterested.

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif) You left out the part about two antithetical philosophies about the relationship of government to the governed.

[Jon Awbrey]

In 1776 we hit a binary wall where we decided that locus of control was just too far away, and too disinterested.

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif) You left out the part about two antithetical philosophies about the relationship of government to the governed.

Now don't be trying to sell us your Red Hairing Theories —

You know it's the one Cardinal Sin we have around here …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

[Milton Roe]

In 1776 we hit a binary wall where we decided that locus of control was just too far away, and too disinterested.

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif) You left out the part about two antithetical philosophies about the relationship of government to the governed.

So I did. And the reason I did, was that this is a "made up after the fact reason" used by Jefferson in the Declaration, to justify the actions of the revolutionaries. Who were mostly merchants who didn't want the English government messing with their businesses and taking their profits. People like to keep what they earn. "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" and all that, is a new idea not then widely accepted (yes, it had been proposed by Locke, but everybody didn't get out in the streets and demonstrate for it). And this was not the reason at the hearts of very many people in the Americas. Jefferson is just blathering on, making it up, or adopting useful rhetoric, as he goes along. He would have called on Nature's God to be on his side even more, if Franklin hadn't stopped him from foaming off on that direction. I bet Jefferson would have compared George III with the Nazis, if Jefferson had known about Nazis.

Humans are such wonderful rationalizing animals and Jefferson, being a highly intelligent human, was a highly articulate rationalizer. The Declaration is a legal closing argument to be put before the jury of the world. But if you replaced the first paragraphs of the Declaration with IDONTLIKEIT, you'd get a document a little shorter, and just as true. The rest of it is WHYIDONTLIKEIT.

It is most certainly not the case that, believing that governments derive from "consent of the governed" that nation-states arrise by drawing their outer boundaries more and more widely, until they finally reach a point that 51% of people inside the boundary want to be part of the new proposed state. If you think that was how the line between the US and Canada, or the US and Mexico were drawn, you're smoking something. That's complete bullshit, and Jefferson is here being a complete bullshitter.

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif) Milton

[Jon Awbrey]

⚐

Waving the White Flag here. Milton has finally convinced me that there really is something seriously wrong with the educational system in the Late Grate United Stores of Amwayica. Time to hang it up and give it all back to the Divinely Rightful Heirs of Jolly Old George 3.0.

Do you think we can still get our deposits back on the bottles?

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

[Herschelkrustofsky]

You left out the part about two antithetical philosophies about the relationship of government to the governed.

So I did. And the reason I did, was that this is a "made up after the fact reason" used by Jefferson in the Declaration, to justify the actions of the revolutionaries. Who were mostly merchants who didn't want the English government messing with their businesses and taking their profits. People like to keep what they earn. "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" and all that, is a new idea not then widely accepted (yes, it had been proposed by Locke, but everybody didn't get out in the streets and demonstrate for it). And this was not the reason at the hearts of very many people in the Americas.

I don't think I can improve upon what Jon said, but I just can't stop myself from getting all convivial with you, Milt (cue Natalie Cole singing "Inseparable.")

• The American Revolution was not made on impulse. 150 years of planning went into it.
• It was not a tax revolt, despite the insufferable BS from Charles Beard.
• Thomas Jefferson was not a leading figure like Franklin or Hamilton.
• John Locke, like Adam Smith, was an opponent of the revolution. His slogan was, "Life, Liberty, and Property," not the pursuit of happiness, and the constitution he wrote for the colony of the Carolinas institutionalized the practice of slavery along with a feudal aristocracy.