School’s a Private Matter for Bigwig Leftists
Charles Martel on Jul 21 2011 at 10:59 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
An interesting news item today relates how Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel got very testy with an interviewer when she asked him why he is sending his two children to a private rather than a public school.
I’m not particularly dismayed at Emanuel for resenting the question—New Jersey Governor Christie recently told a radio talk-show caller that it was none of her business where he was sending his kids to school. Rahm can certainly plausibly say the same thing.
But the difference here is that Emanuel is an ultra-leftist who should believe that his children cannot claim privilege and are needed to serve the noble cause of demonstrating his profound belief in the public schools. (As we all know, public schools are under assault by reactionaries and theocrats.)
I know the standard explanation is that a private school is more secure than a public school, therefore presents fewer problems protecting the kids of prominent politicians or officials. It’s not too hard to see what “more secure” means: not very many black students. Even Barack Obama, who is an upper middle-class white liberal in all but pigmentation, knows that the Washington, DC public schools are cesspools where any sort of discipline, whether mental or physical, is in short supply. (I emphatically don’t blame the black kids, who come from a culture mired in self-destructive behavior abetted by 45 years of Democratic Party racism.)
I’m amazed that the left, which I know just despises hypocrisy, doesn’t see how racist officials appear when they choose to privately school their children. Almost as hypocritical, I suppose, as calling for yet more money to be poured down the rat hole of public education even as Cody and Brie are heading off for classes at Almost All-White Academy.
Related posts:
- Identifying the real problem at schools
- If you needed evidence that lack of money is not the problem with our schools
- Psychological warfare at the schools
Email This Post To A Friend
13 Responses to “School’s a Private Matter for Bigwig Leftists”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Left loots, rapes, and burns entire villages. Then makes sure their children grow up in a paradise unaffected by the burning wrecks. How convenient.
Cody and Brie- LOL
The Left doesn’t like voucher programs either.
Illinois House today shot down landmark school voucher legislation that aimed to allow children to transfer from the worst-performing Chicago public elementary schools to private and parochial schools.
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/clout_st/2010/05/chicago-school-vouchers-shot-down-by-illinois-house.html
I am still waiting for a rational explanation of how fierce Democratic opposition to vouchers is not racist, especially in segregated cities like Chicago and Washington.
Why is it that the Teachers’ unions are OK with this? They give all their money to support politicians who tacitly admit that public education is inadequate by sending their children to private schools.
See #5 & #11 on the list of top all-time donors 1989-2010: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php
Two mottos inscribed upon the entrance to the Temple of Leftwing Orthodoxy:
Do as I say, not as I do!
Keep them in their place!
All else is anathema.
The Teacher’s unions are a modern mythical creature – easily identified by their big mouths (they have two-it enhances double-speak). They wear blinders – enhances their myopic vision and all of attached to a donkey. Oh, did I mention the ‘head’ is moveable and inserts at either end of the animal’s body.
Why is it that the Teachers’ unions are OK with this?
Because unions are paid by mostly public teacher salaries. Private teacher salaries are slightly different.
All those teachers who skipped school to protest wage cuts on education budgets, you think perhaps most of them were private school teachers? I believe the super majority of them were from public schools, doing as they were told by unions which collect “public” funds.
They keep blacks on the plantation so they can exploit the black demographic for votes, power, and money. They keep children in failing schools so unions can make a profit.
Basically everything the Left says about evil empires and corporations, was only ever true of the Left.
I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake, Leftists do not believe in the equal distribution of property, including services. They are Socialists who concern themselves forcing people to do what they think is right. Universal education is socialistic but accepted by essentially everyone as an acceptable imposition upon the individual. But such a popular and highly funded public endeavor is also very ripe for exploitation for political advantage. To the Dems, their children attending elite schools shows they are complying with the forced compliance. That this act also permits their children to avoid the public school system they loot and pervert for political gain is ignored.
That their children attend private schools is less significant than a comparison of curriculum. I doubt their children are being subjected to the indoctrination they use their power to impose upon public school students.
That Communism is essentially negative, confined to the prohibition that one shall not have more than an other. Socialism is positive and aggressive, declaring that each man shall have enough.
It purposes to introduce new forces into society and industry; to put a stop to the idleness, the waste of resources, the misdirection of force, inseparable, in some large proportion of instances, from individual initiative; and to drive the whole mass forward in the direction determined by the intelligence of its better half.
JKB, I doubt the Left are smarter than me. If only because bodies without heads don’t tend have a flatter IQ line.
We have paid more than a third of our income, for a total of twenty two years, for private schooling for our two kids. This qualifies me as an expert. I can tell a couple of things, maybe more.
Private schools are many things, including waiting rooms for t he kiddie nut-hut. If Junior is having trouble in school, acting out, etc., it must be the school’s fault, so they put him in the private school. He continues to act out, and, in some cases, I even saw my son’s former class mates in one of Austin’s finer laughing academies. (Never could tell him, of course, but yep, they were there.)So the canard that private schools skim the cream is not an externally observable fact.
Some private schools are as rigid as public ones, only they don’t hold out as long, before they give your child what he needs.
In the worst public schools, the kids are, most definitely, the problem. Austin is fairly typical, spending twice as much per student in problem schools. My wife was an attempted teacher for two years. I rode a bus past her school in the morning, and came to recognize some of the criminal trainees she had described. It’s no wonder she was only an attempted teacher. Many of her colleagues were married, with a husband whose income supported the famiky. The wife’s public-school teacher salary paid the private school tuition
As long as we demand exactly the same kind of education for everyone, we are not going to get much for anyone. The kids who don’t want to be in school at all create an utterly hostile environment for kids who want to learn. Now, please don’t jump to the conclusion that I want social classification in schools, in the European manner. We have a good deal of flexibility built into our educational structure, in that one may go back for schooling at any age, with relatively little difficulty.(I did.) That’s a very good thing. However, if we were to run three tracks, selected for demonstrated interests and abilities, even if that meant sending kids to different schools, where the more academic would not be beaten up by the ruffians, we’d have much better results. Nevertheless, for another generation or so, that would also produce some de facto racial segregation, and that would be intolerable.
So, we send kids to private schools, and find ways to afford them. e.g., I was a nursing student when our son was kindergarten age. My wife was a seasonal employee of the IRS, usually not working in the fall. I got the very part-time job as the janitor in a Montessori school, cleaning for an hour in the early morning, going home to shower and take him and me to our classes. We made it. He was eventually valedictorian of his private high school.
People, with more kids than they can afford to send to private school, home school, and I hope that y’all have had the opportunity to meet some of those kids, confident, articulate beyond their years, enthusiastically received in the most prestigious colleges, and knowing stuff that was being dropped form the public school curriculum before I was born. Just to give one small but specific example of the widespread dilution of curriculum, when my wife and I ware in high school, and out parents and grandparents before us, the first eighteen lines of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, in Middle English, were part of the English requirement. Reciting those lines formed the Texans’ secret handshake. This was true whether you were a West Texan, nice, good with cattle, friendly and outgoing, or an East Texan, rather less friendly, still, if you walked up to someone and said, “Whan that Aprille, with his shoures sote,” and the guy or lady replied, “The drought of March hath perced to the rote,” you knew you were meeting a countryman. No more.
My high school age daughter is reading To Kill a Mockingbird, again, because it is on the required list, although she read it in seventh grade. Why? Raaaacism! Kids must learn our racist heritage. (Yeah, the irony is not lost on me, either, that Harper Lee’s picture of 1930′s South was more complex than present- day propaganda would paint.) I agree that it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not really part of the foundation of Western Civilization. Home school kids learn the foundation. Private school kids may learn some of it. Public school kids learn very little of it. My hope is that at least some of the products of private schools might come to understand what we have lost. My knowledge is that the private school kids often get a much stronger, less subtle dose of party line.
OK, that’s not the last word on anything, but it is the last word I can say, now, as car repairs beckon.
Adams, thanks for giving us the benefit of your experience. Now that’s what we need more of, judgments derived from clear, concise, factual, and first hand testimony.
None of this, he said she said her aunt said her uncle said thing.
Truth is found more by people going out and searching for it, rather than just relying on some guru giving it to em.