25 thoughts on “Public Schools Are Child Abuse”

  1. So are many faith schools.

    I find it an interesting question to consider whether indoctrinating children in “liberal” left-wing PC claptrap or Bronze Age myth is more damaging. Personally, I think it’s neck and neck.

    What is beyond doubt (IMHO) is that “faith” schools which indoctrinate their charges with the morality of 7th century banditry masquerading as a religion are worse than either.

    1. Here we go again, Bronze Age Myth. This is such a canard. Why don’t you study ancient history and literary techniques like metaphor, simile and allegory? It would give you insight into how people can acquire knowledge through means other than Natural Philosophy (which I heartily endorse.)

      Here’s some Golden Age Myths: Global Warming, Food Pyramids, Phlogiston.

    2. I go for Bronze Age myth, every time.

      The Bronze age gave us, yes, the Bible (at least as oral tradition) and the Iliad and the Odyssey (also believed to be oral traditions). Between Greek and Hebrew mythology (legendology — if there is some historical basis for the Trojan War, there is similar support for the Exodus?), that pretty much sums up the cultural, moral, and ethical components of what we call Western Culture.

      Bronze Age myth, bring it on!

    3. How about this:

      I won’t ask a priest to solve Schroedinger’s wave equation for an electron in a potential well, and I won’t ask a scientist to tell me right from wrong.

      Everyone happy here? Good.

      1. Oh, absolutely. Pope John Paul II would seem to have agreed with you, too. “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens move.” (Which was a direct quote from Galileo, interestingly enough.)

        I said “some faith schools.” To be more explicit about it, those that stuff Bible-literalist young-Earth creationist “science” baloney down children’s throats instead of actual, you know, science.

    4. A school offering a class on their religion doesn’t mean there are no other subjects or that their math and science teachers suck. Often these private schools produce better students for less money. Who cars if students also learn about moral philosophies?

      IMO, our society could use a good dose of ethics and that goes for the eggheads too.

      1. I agree. I do not mean to imply that the two are exclusive, nor that one person cannot teach both. I just wanted to point out that there is an attempt to yank religion out of the public sphere because it is “unscientific”. Well, it never intended to be scientific (notwithstanding the intelligent design group-which is useful because it can poke holes in Darwin’s theory.)

        As an aside, when I left my Catholic elementary school for 7th grade public school, I discovered that I was at a 9th grade reading level and much of my math was review. This is very common.

    5. That “Bronze Age myth” is the underpinning of Western civilization. I’ll stick with that over leftist neobarbarism any day of the week.
      Thanks for the example of Leftist bigotry, BTW.

  2. How much child abuse are we talking about here?

    In the United States, in 2012, 49,484,181 children were enrolled in 98,817 elementary and secondary public schools. What percent of those 49 million kids were being abused, in your estimation?

    I’m not sure if this is relevant to your goals, but the total K-12 enrollment in the US for 2012 was 54,876,000. Of those, 5,488,000 were in private schools (2,031,455 in Catholic schools), 1,941,831 were in public charter schools, and 1,508,000 were home schooled.
    The numbers come from here: http://www.edreform.com/2012/04/k-12-facts/

    I have no doubt that kids in _some_ public, private, and home school environments were abused, but I also have no doubt that _some_ public, private, and home school environments were wonderful. I don’t have any insights on which on environments were more abusive, and I don’t have any insights on the total amount of abuse. Do you?

    1. What difference does it make what the statistics are? Would you argue that people shouldn’t be punished for murder because it doesn’t happen very often?

      1. Your link had an anecdote. Your title, “Public Schools are Child Abuse”, is either a description of an incredibly important problem that demands immediate attention, or it is an over-generalization. If it is an over-generalization, how much of one is it? How alarmed should we be?

        Consider an argument for gun control that starts with an anecdote (5 year old Zoe shot her dad in the head with his own handgun), and then makes a giant over-generalization (any gun could fall into the hands of children! Guns fall into the hands of children every single day. People shouldn’t own guns!). Wouldn’t a good pro-gun-rights argument start with some statistics regarding gun owners of various kinds and then move on to address the statistics on responsible gun ownership and perhaps even address statistics regarding gun accidents involving children?

        Or should we simply say “What difference does it make what the statistics are? Would you argue that people shouldn’t be restricted from gun ownership because it doesn’t happen very often?”

        1. Please substitute “should be restricted” for “shouldn’t be restricted”, depending on how you want to interpret the analogy. Thanks!

        2. What was the point of your original post? Were you trying to say something sweeping about public schools, or did you want to put a spotlight on a few distressing but isolated incidents, or what?

          1. Did you want to invite a comparison between public schools and alternatives like secular private schools, Catholic schools, and the various kinds of home schooling?
            Or was the adjective “public” simply a signifier that this was our business, whereas what goes on in a private school isn’t (although, really, child abuse anywhere is a concern for everyone, so I hope that wasn’t it.)

          2. I think it would be much more rare to find this kind of rampant stupidity in a private school. Because private school teachers and administrators can be fired.

        3. There are a lot of gun safety campaigns put on by gun owners to try and prevent accidents. Public schools, however, have campaigns to increase bad behavior from teachers and administrators.

          Behavior like this isn’t an aberration. Administrators train for it and spend millions forming these policies.

    2. Bob, we have a problem here. The problem is that public schools, which are the main means of education for most of our country’s children, have transformed into an ecology that aims to capture as much as possible of the approx $13,000 dollars we spend per child per year. You don’t need anything like that much to give a child a good education, as is obvious to anyone who multiplies that number by thirty (one large class) and thinks about what he personally would need to provide to give them a year’s education. But instead of paying for a one-room school with a teacher and a few computers etc., much of that money goes to support bureaucrats from Washington and in state governments and on down. You can’t fire bad teachers, you can’t fire abusive teachers, or principals or any of them. The whole system has stopped working, if by working is meant anything to do with educating children. In far too many parts of the country, no one who can avoid it dares to send their kids to public school. That includes the president of the United States and his wife.
      Now if you’re not familiar with this situation, that’s fine. Let those who are, worry about how to fix it.

    3. More kids are raped in public schools than ever by Catholic priests yet teachers get a total pass from the anti-christian types.

  3. When my boy was a teenager he got into some trouble at school and I went in expecting to meet with the principle. Instead my wife and I met with more than a half dozen people with various titles. This was so wrong on so many levels.

    We pay them to provide us with a service. They better get their acts together or we will fire them. Well, assuming adults are still in charge… my bad, I made that same stupid assumption again.

    1. Pretty sure I would be in jail if I was a kid today and I was considered a good kid back in the day.

        1. I once got a vice principal fired because he wanted me to go to a pep rally and I wanted to study.

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