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One problem . . . Just who decides what should be and should not be taught?

Look up American History and you will find that for the last hundred years or so it has been tailored to whatever political group that has been in power (for instance today it is taught that Communism is not a bad thing and that certain communist dictators were actually good guys even though they slaughtered many millions of their own people in the name of progress) – not a good thing at all.

I, for one, believe that private schools are the wave of the future and that each state should have a say in what the curriculum should be.

I think this topic is a bit too vague. I'm going to abstain from this one.

I don't think there should be national education standards.

The federal government has no jurisdiction over the education of our children. The U.S. Constitution does not list education as one of the duties or responsibilities of the federal government.

I think the proper way to educate our young children is better left to the state and local governments but most importantly, to the parents.

Furthermore, I say we dismantle the Department of Education. Education is just one more thing, like health care, that the federal government needs to keep its nose out of.

I agree with you 110%.

No. In fact there should not be local or state standards either. Schools should market their curriculum to students and parents in a competitive market for education and give maximum autonomy to teachers to design their own as well.

People who are concerned that there will be too many kooky schools teaching things like say creationism, I'd have to say that there are already too many people teaching kooky things like creationism, so this is a problem created by something other than wacky school choices. The reason they can is that the schools we have don't design very effective teaching methods and force kids to study things that are of no interest or utility to them by having too many standards. Kids or parents then bail out of these institutions and do their own thing instead of actually learning material. Reducing the amount of criteria would put more people in a position to study things of use and interest to themselves and, over time, force the more kooky and useless ideas out of the marketplace if they cannot compete with others for things like college acceptance or placement or occupational success/placement.

Where is it taught that certain communist dictators were good guys? Provide evidence.

Saul Alinsky – "Rules for Radicals" is now required reading in many high schools across America.

Or haven't you ever seen the T-shirts with Che on them? These are accepted and promoted school attire along with (during the Bush administration) the T-shirts with President Bush photo and the caption "not MY president".

I know that you want statistics and numbers. All you have to do is open your eyes.

Don't know where you got this idea, but it is wrong. Teachers should NOT have complete autonomy for what is taught in their classrooms – THAT should be left up to the PARENTS!

Obviously you have never heard of that little known organization called the Parent-Teacher Association, or PTA.

I have heard of that organisation. I don't see the need for it in my universe.

The idea that teachers should have that autonomy implies that parents would chose teachers who share their ideas on teaching their children. This happens all the time with some charter schools and in countries with highly regarded primary educational systems (unlike ours), such as Finland (routinely rated in the top 2 in the world). Teachers are given a lot of leeway and expected to do something productive with it by parents and, to a lesser extent, students.

In any case, I said "maximum autonomy", not "complete". A teacher still carries a responsibility to do their duty to educate as they see fit, but if "as they see fit" is not demanded, then people have no responsibility to hire them. If you don't like the teacher, find another one. That's already what we do with colleges and universities. I don't see how that model would fail if it were expanded down the food chain.

In truth, I don't even want "parents" to be the end control over what should be taught, much less the governments that I think already meddle too much in this way. I want the market to govern that by signaling some educational paths to be useless or less marketable.

I have seen the T-shirts with Che on them. They're popular on college campuses. Not in high school. Perhaps I need to go by a high school more often. The main problem with them however is that Che T-shirts are not accompanied with a lesson indicating what his political leanings, political objectives, and political acts historically were. All it is is a damned shirt and the implication that this guy was a rebel for some reason (which makes him obviously cool to a teenager). Very few people wearing one know anything about Cuba, much less Angola or Bolivia. If it's being promoted as part of a legitimately communist system, it's not being promoted very well would be the problem there.

I don't see how protesting Bush was at all indicative of any necessarily communist sympathies. I hated that guy. So did you. Get over it. First amendment kind of thing there.

Saul Alinsky's book isn't required reading in "many" high schools. So far as I can tell it is required reading in almost none. It is considered required reading for grassroots organisations and agitation groups. Some of these are set up on high schools. Alinsky himself was more of an anarchist than a communist anyway. The distinction to someone like you is probably minimal. But there's a big political philosophical gap between being anti-power and mobilizing populism as a counterweight to labour unions, political institutions and bureaucracies, etc and being pro-statism as a communist might be.

The other problem with this critique: None of the people who you listed are communist DICTATORS who are supposedly good guys as you claim we are busily instructing children. If you're going to cite examples, at least find somebody claiming Mao or Stalin were awesome. That and fact check.

Do you have children?

This statement "In truth, I don't even want "parents" to be the end control over what should be taught," is the most asinine thing I ever heard of!

While our children were growing up we maintained a very close observance of what their schools were teaching them. I was one of the biggest pains to the school board when I was at home (unfortunately my military job took me away quite often and for extended periods of time) and when I was gone my wife was there for our children.

Our Grandchildren have been home-schooled. Mainly because the public school system in our country has been perverted and corrupted and our children do not want their children exposed to that garbage.

Any parent who does not want a say in how the teacher conducts the classes and what is being taught to their children are not living in the real world.

I guess that does leave you in your own universe then? I sure hope that you do get involved with your children's education. Mainly for their sake.

At no point did I suggest that parents should not care what their children are taught. I said that parents will ultimately not have very much control over that in the long run. Which is already true, but isn't true enough. Markets should have the veto power on this. Parents want to teach your child about young earth creationism, go right ahead. But don't expect me to give that kid a job in a decent scientific field later in life because they will lack valuable knowledge and more importantly the skill sets required to do it. That's a market signal that cannot be overridden by any parental stamping of feet.

Markets allow parents to determine what they want taught, and allow employers or colleges to accept those students who are taught what they need and reject those that are taught garbage. At present. There is no market for most schools to allow parents to determine what is taught (without pulling children out of schools entirely) and there is no signal back to those schools that they are wasting valuable time teaching children things they won't use or don't need. Particularly by high school, where things like practical skills might be more useful than learning about how to calculate secants.

The point is that parents must respond to market signals the same as schools should be doing and aren't. Some parents have done so by attempting to educate their children themselves or at least being heavily involved in that education by providing outlets for it. The reason fewer parents that should be expected do so is that there is no rational basis for them to care about such choices at all. They live somewhere, therefore their children go there for school.

Again. Try reading what I write. The only way a parent has a choice at all is in a market. But that's also the way that a parent must surrender control to indirect forces over how education will actually work. At the moment they exercise an unreasonable veto power not through money and choice but by demanding that everybody else's kids learn the same thing as their own through control of local or state school boards. This is the most asinine thing I've ever heard of personally.

And if I have kids, they're going to a private or a charter school. That I'll pick.

At least based on the present circumstances where people like you are making a bother of yourselves at school boards governing the local public schools. I'll waste some tax dollars so you can feel better about that I suppose while I practice what I preach.

I think the question should be.. just who decides what goes in the textbooks? If you have a Conservative majority on the Board of Education, that's what goes in the Textbooks.. Likewise if you have a Liberal majority… History isn't always History anymore. It's History with a twist,!!

Okay, so let me get this straight . . . . What you are saying about education is that the "market" should dictate what it is that is taught in schools – in other words kids should be evaluated to determine their potential skill level when they reach adulthood (or working age) and that should determine what they are individually taught?

I am serious here, trying to get on the same page as you are.

And are you also saying that Theology is a waste of educational time? That question is in response to your comment about young earth creationism, which I may have erroneously interpreted to mean anything that is based in religion.

There is a school board up in Montana that is trying to include graphic sexual education at the Kindergarten level and the parents are all up in arms. I have a longtime friend that is on that counties Sheriff's department and he tells me that it has almost reached the riot level as the publicly elected school board members are ignoring the will of those who have elected them and are trying to ram this stuff into the school system regardless of what the parents say.

When you have a public school system, with a publicly elected board of governance, it is those who have elected that board (the general public) who should have the final say as to what is or is not taught in those schools. Do not misunderstand me here, it just may be the right thing to teach sex education in public schools. However, if those school board members want the support of the people who voted them into office then they must be able to explain to the average parent (like me) in a way that the average parent can fully understand what the benefits are of that particular course of education is. In the case of our children, the school board was trying to implement the teaching of "New Math" in the elementary (K-6) level without changing the upper range of grades. I am sure that you can see what kind of confusion that would give the students as the advanced above the grade six level.

The only advice I have for any parent is to get involved and stay involved in your children's education.

Yes. The market should decide what is taught. Precisely. Subjects which they desire to study or their parents desire they study which have less "practical" value as determined by market demand for those skill sets or knowledge bases should be available but not mandatory. Subjects which are of some universal value should be mandated to be taught, but flexible on how those are taught (like basic mathematics and literacy. Apparently, reading comprehension shouldn't be skipped either).

Theology is not taught in public schools already. I don't see how it would be necessary or desirable to mandate that it should be taught. Parents still select "theological" teachings, such as they are, by sending their children to church or to private religious schooling. But do not I see how it would be useful for something like later job creation or the development of useful skills for later life and therefore a school which focuses on theology to the exclusion of, for example, empiricism and scientific teachings would probably be less useful and marketable in the long run.

It is possible, though by no means necessary, that learning a religious instruction and studying the texts therein would be useful for individual development on a personal level (such as for ethical foundations). Though I'm highly skeptical that religious instruction is the only manner of increasing ethical behavior, particularly with the downside cost of a more regimented and intolerant mindset left susceptible to authoritarian claims that can be used in less ethical activities (such as rallying people for military and nationalistic purposes or for religious warfare). A comparative theology class or philosophy might be more useful, but I don't see how that again should be mandatory.

More to the point, individual development is properly the purview of the individual (and to a lesser extent, the family unit surrounding that individual) rather than providing significant external goods that need a school to develop them in the first place. It's largely up to ourselves to assume some basic ethical order rather than to have it beaten into us by force.

Two points. You're still stuck on the idea that there would be school boards. There would not be. There would just be schools.

And second, I don't see a need for grade levels either, so that problem seems sort of silly. Students should be able to rise faster or fall behind as appropriate to their aptitude and interest in the material. They really shouldn't have the same homework as everyone else in the class, they shouldn't have the same classes as everyone else. They should have their own classes and their own assignments.

The problem with that is the same as mandates for what should be covered. You are assuming that some body of people will and should sit down and decide what should be taught in classrooms X,Y,Z to all students in those classrooms (and that all students should be forced to be in classrooms X,Y,Z based on meaningless criteria like their age and home location). And thus that parents should become involved in education to insure those standards are approved by them. When in reality nobody should sit down and decide that, no school boards and not certainly not undereducated parents with voting cards. Nobody should have that kind of power, particularly when it concerns other people's children.

Leave it up to the market and decentralise the power as best you can and you'll get a better performance and people won't have to worry that they're sending their children off to get condoms from schools when they are in first grade or some other supposed horror story.

You sound an awful lot like a self-proclaimed Anarchist I know of (never met him in person), or a somewhat disenfranchised Socialist. I actually suspect that you are neither, just another frustrated person – kind of like the rest of this world's population.

No need for grade levels . . . no need for competition . . . Would that mean no winners or losers too? Also no teachers? Why not just let children raise and educate themselves? Pardon my confusion here, but when our kids were young and in the second and third grades the school system we were in at the north end of Camp Pendleton had this idea of no closed off classrooms – there was just this really wide open space sort of cordoned off with groups of chairs for each grade or classroom group. Not only my kids had trouble but most of those living around us had big problems with their children. So much for Social Readjustment in the classroom environment.

Children need parameters and people (read that PARENTS) to keep them within those parameters. I suppose we will always disagree on that part of it. Parents should always be involved in their children's education. Without our involvement, our son would not hold the two Doctorates he has or be nearing his third. I never got my HS diploma until I was in my thirties and I was determined that was not going to happen with my offspring. So much for uneducated parents not having an influence on children's education . . . NUFF SAID! B)

No grade levels does not mean there is no competition between schools or between students within them. In fact, that's the highlight of the issue is competition. So I don't understand how you leaped to that conclusion. If students are able to rise and fall as appropriate to their actual acumen in a particular subject, then that sounds pretty much like a meritocratic system based, in part, on competitive forces between and among students. My experience was that being around people who were learning at a rate similar to my own, or, somehow or another, above that of my own, was far more useful educationally than sitting in a classroom with a bunch of idiots who were slowing down the whole process to a crawl instead of a run.

I'm almost certainly very, very, very far away from being a socialist. I've read socialists. I don't agree with them for the most part and find their critiques of markets rather flawed. Although strangely some of them are in agreement that schools should be ungoverned by political forces, for example Bertrand Russell was very fond of the idea, as was Orwell, both socialists. But the fleshed out idea for school choice in this manner comes from Milton Friedman, who you might have heard of as THE arch-villain capitalist of any self-respecting socialist/left-winger (see Klein, Naomi and her many books attacking him and his politics), the man who haunted their nightmares, etc, etc.

I suspect you simply don't understand market economics and competitive forces (and/or socialism) and presume that this would be a slur of some sort that would wound my feeling and make me go away or irrelevant to your worldview.

There's a big difference between anarchy and libertarianism. One still has a government that does a few things (public goods). I still think the government could be involved in the funding of schools (by collecting and levying appropriate taxes and allowing individuals to distribute them through a system of tax credits to fund scholarship), but it should have as little as possible to do in the operation of said schools. If anything. I don't think that's very anarchic. It is perhaps a very radical shift to turn over more of an inefficient publicly run system to the free market, but complaining that it's somehow socialist to do so is ridiculous. Marx himself put the operation of a government run public school system in his manifesto as essential to the achievement and success of a socialist state.

That self-proclaimed anarchist I was talking about also claims to be a member of Mensa.

Those who think they are geniuses usually are not.

I have found over time that some socialists who claim to be intellectuals are neither intelligent nor intellectual, just individuals who think they are smarter than everyone else.

What I see from what you have written is that you believe that the world and everything in it should be based on the so-called "market-driven economy", or something similar to that. If that is the case, then you should know that the market changes from one day to the next, and sometimes very drastically. One glaring example is electronic technology. When our children entered the school system we still had the old rotary dial telephones and by the time they graduated high school computers were all the rage, now as my grandchildren enter college the hand held computer (I think it is called blackberry or droid, or something like that) has all but replaced the computer and telephone – including the cell phone. In that short period of time (remember I am approaching 70) shipping has gone from crates and boxes lowered into the bowels of a cargo ship via cargo nets to computer controlled container cargo ships (I believe there is actually a seaport in Europe that is completely automated). Almost everything we touch has been manufactured without being touched by Human hands.

Those getting an education today, should their education be market driven, may not be able to compete in the world of tomorrow for that exact reason. Now you just might think that I am all wrong in my thinking, and you just might be correct in that, however, in this fast moving pace of our very modern world – who is to say what the future will be.

Education has the value of being a flexible commodity. What it teaches is not subject matter, but the ability to think and to learn and foster self-development of intellectual concerns. As such, it's vital to the success of a free people in a market driven economy (which ours is mostly, but not always). People who are not educated will always not be able to compete tomorrow as the market changes and adjusts. Case in point, many people in Michigan or Ohio who lost their jobs as the automobile market moved or became more automated. People who are educated, who have that skill set to fall back upon to train themselves to do new tasks, will have a fighting chance.

You are correct that the market focuses on creative destruction and that it shifts, sometimes very rapidly what sectors are needed and perhaps this is a problem for people relative to the stable society supposedly fostered by a mixed economy with stronger centralised controls from government (which I oppose and which you persist in believing I possess an interest in the first place by declaring me a "socialist". Socialists want nothing to do with the kind of price signals and free markets that I'm advocating here).

But you are being inflexible in thinking of education as a single tool which may become obsolete. It is, rather, a mental tool box that you put stuff in as you go.

Is this even a question that needs to be asked? If there is no standard then there is no goal. If there is no goal than there is no purpose. Why, then, should our children go along with the system to be popped out ignorant and working for the rest of their natural lives. Too much teaching occurring in school today and not enough educating…

Standards are not the same as establishing goals. Goals and uses for education can be individually determined and valued without commands from the great and powerful government (at any level). Parents as I understand it often have very different and often divergent ideas on what their children should be receiving as an education (see school board debates concerning evolution/creationism or history versus patriotism/nationalism for instance). Would these not be properly called "goals"?

Thus the question is whether it is more appropriate to leave education in state or local control, move more power to national, federal control, or alternatively, to move to a more market based system where there's very little "control" as we would think of it. I'd say that's an important question that needs to be asked.

Otherwise, I'm in agreement. Schools do far too much teaching and not enough educating. And large numbers of students drop out for precisely the reason you suggest they might. A school system which is already producing ignorance makes no difference upon the ignorant.

Whereas the children are not literally products, a market based approach to their education would seem unfitting. Yes, parents have their own goals for their children and these diverge respective to the standards laid down by parents, but educational institutions need to have a standard with produces the goal.

Correctly you say that standards are not the equivalent of the establishment of a goal- standards are seeds, goals the sowing. Concerning governmental control, I believe that the government that governs less governs best in accord with Mr. Thoreau. However, when a people are being overtaken by foe domestic as foreign, the government has the responsibility of protecting its children the same way a parent protects his children from a thief.

Let us use the family analogy. If a father sleeps in a home with his wife and has a boy and girl and they sleep in the still of the night while all is calm and a thief suddenly break in through a window- what then? Shall the father remain peaceful? No, he would batter the man senseless. Now if the mother, through some folly pursued her children so as to end their lives, should the father not turn his strength on her and retrain her will?

So ought the US government to protect its people from China, North Korea, Iran or anyone else performing and breathing threats to America. But if inside forces such as Wal-Mart, Enron (in times past), Bank of America, etc turn by their own greed to suck the blood of the people, the government has the responsibility of coming between us and protecting its people.

Education is not a national security issue. We are not being "protected". I've seen sarcastic arguments re-framing education in this way (Scott Adams wrote one recently), but they're not serious. Instead, education is a competitive ideal. Parents of American children and students should be necessarily concerned that children in Singapore or Finland or Sweden or dozens of other nations receive a higher quality education and thus that those children may be more globally competitive for high quality jobs moving forward. That's not a protective claim however. It is a demand for a good or service, properly the function of a market to provide effectively. The utility of government is, in my mind, the allocation of significant funding for primary schools, because there's a powerful externality effect to having an educated citizenry. That externality is actually best used… against the government itself (by rendering it less necessary to the functions of a society). Not against foreign foes from which we might use government to create a common defence.

The crucial problem you're having is that you're framing the children as a good or service. They are not. It is their education that is a good or service that must be sought out after in accordance with the goals of parents, employers, and other diverse actors throughout society. Markets are ideal for resolving divergent and competing claims like these.

I'm not sure where Wal-Mart is a vital foe to the lifeblood of America either. Certainly not on the level of an Enron, which committed massive frauds and deliberate manipulations of the political system, and thus was a criminal actor. Few people accepting of the existence of governments deny the role the state may play in punishing criminal behavior, or in providing defensive measures against aggressive nation-states. All Wal-Mart does is usually run a large multinational corporation however. I fail to see where it is a criminal agent or a threat. My usual bone to pick with it is the quality of many people shopping there is… representative of an American ideal we'd probably rather not see.