We learned a lot of lessons, as Americans, from the disastrous political mistakes we made that led to the Civil War. One of those was that a democracy needs an educated electorate to survive. The idea that education is a privilege for the elite finally gave way to a fully funded public education system and laws requiring children to attend up to a certain age and grade level in the years after the war, beginning somewhere in the early 1870's. It took a while, but like most things that develop in this country, some visionary leadership articulated the rationale and got the support they needed to make it happen.
Even with the educational foundation provided by public education, politics, because it controls the public funding that pays the bills for the schools, interferes with the curriculum and content. It'a great idea that some Americans, like Horace Mann and John Dewey came up with, to have a system of compulsory public education in order to have an educated electorate that will preserve the democracy. But with individual states and smaller school districts having all kinds of operational and curriculum control, it has never achieved its ideological goal.
The public school system, its curriculum and its approach to education has always been under attack because it is so influential and because it does provide a foundational education that informs the electorate in our representative democracy. And it has always been subject to sabotage of the curriculum by anti-education conservatives. Conservatives blame public education for what they call the "liberal drift" of this country, claiming that the ideology of the political left is exclusively promoted in public schools, "forced" on a captive audience. That ideology is exactly what is behind Desantis and his attacks on education in Florida now. He claims that younger voters are unfairly pushed to the left by tax supported schools, so he is setting out to change that in his state by using the power and influence of his elected office. Fortunately, it looks like he's going to be exposed to a lot of kick back as a result.
Elections do have consequences. Democrats need to keep that thought at the very front and center of their party's campaign efforts.
Private Education is an Escape from Politically-Dominated Public Schools
In this, the most prosperous, and most powerful country in the world, we have a public education system that is moderately successful in its goal of providing for an informed and educated electorate, and we also have one that is a miserable failure and an embarrassment when compared to schools in the rest of the industrial world and the far east. Some states do a great job making sure the curriculum is centered in academic achievement and that students are exposed to all of the facts and information and are trained to be critical thinkers. I'd have no problem enrolling my child in the public schools of Massachusetts, for example, or New Hampshire or Vermont, or even Wisconsin or California.
But there are other places where the curriculum is tampered with, altered, adjusted and so buried in a culture war social agenda that the students don't have a chance to achieve. I wouldn't enroll my child in a public school in Texas, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or Louisiana, and I wouldn't touch schools in Florida, Arizona or Oklahoma. Texas, which keeps sliding toward the bottom of the pile, and where the motto of public education is "thank God for Mississippi," has so crowded out math and language arts skills in favor of kooky political garbage, that it has the highest percentage of private and charter school enrolled students in the country.
And not all private schools are segregationist academies or religious indoctrination centers. Some of those early pioneers in American education established schools, like John Dewey's University of Chicago Lab School, founded on progressive principles and with a curriculum that not only achieves academic excellence, but also shows students how to think for themselves, draw conclusions and make life choices based on real, live, down to earth facts. They don't waste time on social agendas or culture war talking points. And when their students graduate, they're prepared for the real world as it is.
It takes money to run those schools, so while that may not be the most practical solution to prevent Florida from becoming just another banana republic, it is a way to get around the restrictions. So is the ballot box.
Federal Funding is the Key
Public education probably wastes more taxpayer dollars than the military industrial complex does. It's ridiculous, what school districts come up with to spend money. It is likely an impossibility to ever get control of the school curriculums out of state legislature hands, with fingers gripped tightly around their throats. As I said before, elections have consequences. Should the Democrats get enough control of congress to have majorities in both houses, and get rid of the blockade against the senate filibuster, control of public education falls into their hands with federal support for education.
Maybe I'm dreaming, but the first thing I would do in that case is stop sending federal dollars to Florida for their public schools and cut off all of the scholarships and grants going to Florida colleges. Every penny of it. Just stop payment on the check. When they scream, tell them here's a list of things that must be taught in your schools before you get back a single cent. If that doesn't happen, so be it. Divide up their share with the other states that follow the drill.
It took several generations for the compulsory public education system to get to the point where the majority of the electorate were educated enough to understand what they were doing every time they went to the ballot box. The lack of real progress in American public education, state by state, is a sign that it would not take very long before the current crazy ignorance and fear would be able to invade and conquer. That's exactly what Desantis is after. That's why he's doing what he's doing. And that has to stop.
Elections have consequences, as Florida Democrats well know, and so do the rest of us.
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