The Father of Public Education Horace Mann wrote in 1846: “The man who has reared and educated a family of children denounces it as a double tax, when he is called upon to assist in educating the children of others also; or, if he has reared his own children without educating them, he thinks it peculiarly oppressive to be obliged to do for others, what he refrained from doing even for himself. . .” (The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men)
Today blogger Gus Van Horn writes in an essay at PajamasMedia: “In Texas, where I lived for twenty years, schoolchildren commonly cross the border from Mexico to attend public schools. Many Americans there are justifiably upset about being taxed to educate non-citizens. I sympathize, but see this as a symptom of an even larger problem: I have no children at all, and yet I have been taxed to finance the educations of other people’s children for decades.”
Whether or not you send your children to public schools — or even have children — as an American taxpayer you are forced to pay to educate other people’s children. This sticking point has meant that an awful lot of people ignore and/or rationalize the “Savage Inequalities,” as Jonathan Kozol calls them, between the education their own children get and what they let suffice for other people’s children. How else would terrible schools that pepper public education be allowed to exist? And yet how is it wrong to want the best for your own kids?
Horace Mann did not have a solution. Certainly the extension of socialism of education to a federal level by Obama can only exacerbate the problem: rich taxpayers must cough up more for other people’s children. As Gus Van Horn writes today, the welfare state (which public education really is) is the problem.
Handschooling causes other people’s children to become unique visitors to online knowledge: Whose child it is connecting to learn is unknown. For example, when the Mary Lyon webpages are visited by you if you click this link, the makers of those webpages will have no idea who is learning from them. They will not know who you are. They made the Mary Lyon pages at their cost, and offer them to you for free — no matter whose child you are. They will be glad you came and eager to let you learn what they are teaching about the American education pioneer and her challenges in educating women.
Mary Lyon and her contemporary Horace Mann would have loved it!
