Slate blogger goes full retard on education

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I'm not sure I follow the author's blogger's argument here. The thing about private and even charter schools in competition with traditional public schools is that they offer alternatives, giving parents the choice of where to send their children to be educated. Choice is always a good thing, and even 100% enrollment in old-school public schools would not guarantee anything beyond higher funding, not actual results. The end result of the public system is simply not something that is desirable for all parents and students, so choice is always needed. There are really no good reasons that these efforts to increase the quality of any school should be limited to public schools. The author fails to recognize the moral deficiency in funding public schools through theft (involuntary taxation) when private institutions (should) only rely on voluntary contributions to educate those students that choose those institutions. Every enterprise, public or private, should be allowed to succeed or fail based on its customers. Public schools shield themselves from market effects instead of living up to the same standards as private institutions.

I'm thinking that the author probably hasn't stopped drinking since high school and was thoroughly wasted when she wrote this long-winded rant. She really offers no good reason not to send your kids to private school, other than because she says so. Me, I tend to do what I want because I know better what is good for me than some stranger in another state or country. The author is a great example of why public schools are such dismal failures, and why we have to have alternatives, even if only some of us can afford them. And, yeah, anyone can get a library card and learn without ever stepping foot in a classroom. Some of the greats are autodidactics, and proud of being self-taught leaders in their fields. Benedikt is trying to be seen as relevant in a dead-end career by lashing out in the most vulgar and ignorant manner.

Read the whole article, really. Make it a drinking game. Apparently Benedikt believes tagging a rant as a manifesto will redeem her intellectual inadequacies.

Don't discount the pre-game underage drinking with the kids from the trailer park. 

Private school vs. public school: Only bad people send their kids to private school. - Slate Magazine