The solution to the education crisis in our country lies in shutting down the public school system and removing all regulation to allow for-profit industry to institute a school system based solely on the market.

You can delete the topic if you want, but I thought this might be an issue worth debating. Maybe it isn't, I don't know.

It is. But we have threads that already discuss the issue. And this is the third of these sarcastic threads made since last night.

i say we keep both, that is keep things the way they are, seems like everybody's doing great!

Spoiler: show

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i say keep both. it's a pretty big violation of freedom to outlaw private schooling, and I have no problem with parents who have the means sending their kids to a private school, but I am very much in favor of public schools existing and improving.

People who can't afford to send their kids to private schools just don't work hard enough -- and probably sell crack. That's their problem.

i think hanging out in N&D is turning me into a nihilist.

no joke.

I'm sure we have education threads but I haven't seen them bumped in a very long time. I don't know anything about sarcastic threads made last night - I wasn't around.

Public schooling is an endless cycle enabling those in our country who don't really want to work hard to get by generation after generation on government handouts.

Seriously, any of you libertarians want to pipe up on this? Convince me why eliminating the public school system is a good idea.

It isn't.

Are you sure? Arguments based on libertarianism and an understanding of markets, such as thodoks has presented, suggests that it is a good idea. Aren't you generally in favor of less government in every area that the private sector can conceivably take over? Isn't this one of those areas?

Yes I do favor less government almost across the board. This isn't out of a great love of free market ideals so much as it is that I believe that throughout history as governments grew stronger they also have continually sought more power and gotten drunk with the concentration of power until they are overextended and then decline, sometimes slowly, sometimes drastically. I do believe in the efficiency of the private sector over public as well, but that plays a much smaller role in my political ideology than a simple distrust of any one person or group possessing too much power.

As for education, I firmly believe that in a civilized, developed nation such as ours, education is not only a right of citizenship, but it is to the benefit of society as a whole for the populace to be well educated. When I consider nearly every problem that faces our country today, I almost always come back to the same thought: better education could alleviate this issue. Now, the fact that I believe that public education is a worthy thing for our tax dollars to be spent on does not mean I want to put down private education. In fact, more competition could really only serve to be a good thing. But to eliminate public education is not the answer. Personally, I would like to see taxpayer dollars used towards public education, but I would like it to be enacted by private citizens who have proven their skill and expertise in the area, not by politicians. So, yes, the small government person in me would love to see the bureaucracy and politics removed from the equation, but not the actual program of public education.

I realize that post was all over the map as I was trying to distill political and educational philosophy as briefly and succinctly as possibly.

In the US do you have the problem of the top universities favouring students from private schools?

DISCLAIMER: i have no real knowledge on this particular issue, and have never looked into it.

there is no issue with top schools deliberately favoring them as far as i know. at least, it is not a public in the news type story. they may be favored, i'm not sure, but i'd assume it has as much to do with actual quality of the school as anything else. but standardized test scores have a way of evening some things out.

I think most of the best primary schools in the US are public.

what grade levels are you referring to here? K-5/6?

K-12