Thomas Jefferson was an idiot. The idea that a society has some kind of moral or even pragmatic responsibility to educate its citizens, symbolized most acutely in his 1819 founding of our nation’s first public institution of higher education, the University of Virginia, is dumb. Public education, as we now know, is a terrible, terrible idea. The education of any person is the sole responsibility of initially that person’s family and then that person themselves. Society has no obligation to teach itself to read, count, or read.
Speaking of reading, Mr. Jefferson should have read his own precious little document a bit closer. The Declaration of Independence clearly states that each of us are created equal to begin with. For a government to try and educate its young people, then, is like saying, “God doesn’t know what he’s doing.” After all, if "all men are created equal," then why should we worry about educating everyone equally? But, really, what can you expect from a guy who cut out the passages from the Bible he didn’t like? Jerk.
Fortunately, the dismantling of public education is well under way, and I, for one, could not be more elated. Since my wife and I are both lazy, greedy, half-ass public school teachers, we are looking forward to the day when the junior high school where we do nothing but drink coffee and yell at our students is finally turned into a giant storage shed. Soon thereafter we plan on opening up our own adolescent daycare. We figure this is logical, since we both have experience with that age group and we assume all these former students will need somewhere to go while their parents work.
We’ve done the math, and we've estimated that we have enough space & patience for about twenty adolescents, give or take a tween. At five dollars per kid per hour, that’s about $800 a day. This is four thousand dollars a week, or about two hundred thousand dollars a year. Since we won’t have to pay any dues to that commie union anymore, we’re definitely going to be much better off not teaching, particularly when we start deducting things like electricity and chocolate milk from our taxes. I guess for old time’s sake, we might try and teach our daycare kids a lesson or two, but by the time they’re thirteen, we figure that really should be their own responsibility.
We won’t have to wait much longer, it seems, since stage one of getting rid of public education is just about finished. The primary objective of this stage was to force many schools into shutting down themselves as punishment for not doing well enough on standardized exams. The second stage was and is shifting funds that would have gone to help struggling public schools—schools that, by law, are required to educate most any student in their district— and offer that money to schools that often get to pick and choose who gets in the door.
Stage three has just started, which is the stage where we make it almost unimaginable why any reasonably intelligent person would want to become a public school teacher in the first place. You don’t want your best and brightest, after all, to enter into a profession that you’re trying to dismantle. Therefore it makes sense that progressive border states are doing their part by trying to obliterate nearly a century’s worth of worker’s rights. As usual, Illinois is dragging its feet, but I do have hope. Surely it’s only a matter of time before the Land of Lincoln wakes up and remembers that true greatness comes from splitting wood and teaching yourself law, not by educating the next generation for over a third-century before slouching into a respectable retirement.
No, TJ made a lot of mistakes in his longwinded career—the Louisiana Purchase? What a joke—but creating the nation’s first public university was easily his dumbest idea. Two centuries later we’re finally figuring out that public education is just not worth the money. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can be achieved much quicker without the burden of paying for someone else’s kid to go to school. As the old saying goes, “if you think education is expensive, try buying some ignorance. It’s tax deductible.”
Or something like that.
Posts
