I'm Proud to Be a Bad Person

I made it partially through and stopped. I can only believe this is just an attempt at page views by Slate and not a real opinion. More precisely, I WON’T believe this is a real opinion because doing so it actually a little depressing.

This is your best post ever (so far), Art.

I agree with the sentiment expressed above: this is your best post yet, Art.

The essential problem with the article is not that it’s a parody — it isn’t — but that the extreme communitarian ideas it contains are usually coated with pablum and sweet lies to disguise how loathsome they taste. The author — Benedikt — essentially wants everybody to sacrifice their children on the altar of the State. But this is self-evidently a Maladiktat. If the argument is taken at face value, there is no reason it should not be extended further. A lot of the problems with schools allegedly have to do with bad parenting. So why not replace parents with the state, too?

Indeed, why should we have any ‘ownership’ interest in our kids at all? You can’t own a child, only the state can own anything. So why don’t we have “public parenting” programs that take kids from the cradle to the grave, and denounce the kulaks who don’t submit their kids to the public parenting programs as refuseniks and wreckers?

It was Angus, not Mungowitz, who wrote that post over at KPC…

Thanks for posting this, Art. My response to the article was

Imagine if someone said “If you buy a car other than a GM, you are a bad person. Instead of switching to another car company, you should persuade GM to make cars more to your liking.” People would rightfully denounce it as stupid.

I was very disappointed that Matthew Yglesias referred to the article in a positive manner in a recent post.

In an attempt to be charitable to the author, didn’t Charles Murray propose something similar when he said the elites need to burst their own bubbles and start mixing with the middle/lower classes more, so that the elites’ values and behaviors rub off on them? Of course, in the case of often rebellious teenagers, I suspect this is likely to backfire and many of the upper class kids will wind up adopting the attitudes of the lower class kids rather than vice versa. Especially given one of the author’s concrete examples of this mixing is her memory of getting drunk with some kids from a trailer park before a sporting event.

But if you think that peers matter in a child’s development, as a parent, that makes it all the more imperative that you keep your kids away from bad influences in bad schools. After all the time and resources parents put in to raising kids, the idea that they would or should then let them be treated as some kind of common pool resource to aid in the education/development of other people’s kids is the type of ludicrous idea that only be offered up by someone who doesn’t have kids and probably shouldn’t.

As Art notes, too, there are a lot more effective ways than warehousing kids in schools to help them build social capital. If your goal is to help underprivileged kids, probably the best way to do that is not to change the mix of kids they associate with, but change the mix of adults.

As an aside, the durability of the Underpants Gnomes meme is both surprising and amusing.

Kind of a soft target, but fun nonetheless.
Quote from Ms. Benedikt: “I went K–12 to a terrible public school.” She has, with the best of intentions no doubt, declared her candidacy for poster child exemplifying the risks inherent in a public-school education and put the subject article on exhibit as (rather compelling) evidence.

There are a lot of things that I could say in response to this post, but I will just sum up all my thoughts in one word: BRAVO!!!!!

NZ…that is not what the Slate article’s argument was.

My children do go to public school, not that I’m particularly happy about the fact, but I agree wholeheartedly that exit and voice are both means of signaling that change is necessary for an organization. The difference of when they will be used, of course, depends on the degree to which those who are subject to the organization feel that voice will result in positive change. The fact that so many parents in so many places choose the, “Anything but the public school” option, whether private, homeschooling, cooperative education programs, or charter schools, is a testament to the fact that voice, after having been tried for a generation or more, has mostly failed.

I think some people — e.g. Lizard — are ignoring this (admittedly parenthetical) passage from Benedikt’s piece:

“By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.”

So when Kevin White writes “I want to minimize the ability of people like Alison Benedikt… to tell me how to raise my family or live my life. I believe in free expression…” he’s presenting a straw man argument plus a contradiction.

The straw man: She’s not “telling him how to raise his family,” in the sense that she’s calling for the government to forcibly move his kids out of private school and into public schools. She’s “telling him how to raise his family” in the sense that she’s urging him to voluntarily place his kids in public school, so that he has a stake in the betterment of kids who need him more than her children’s peers at private school.

The coercion: In other words, she’s engaging in “free expression,” that thing Kevin believes in so strongly. She is advancing a moral claim which not only doesn’t require any coercion, it even explicitly rejects coercion as a means to advance that moral claim, and that’s just what happens when people are free to voice their opinions.

I happen to think she’s wrong, for many of the same reasons you do (yes, you), but I’m pointing this out anyway because some of the commenters (e.g. Lizard) seem to have missed it.

PS — The sensible libertarian response to this piece is in points #1, #3, #4, and #5. Risking your children’s future well-being as part of a quixotic attempt to fix the public system — even if it’s a purely voluntary decision to so! — represents a form of (voluntary?) subservience to a government institution which, given the available evidence, is likely to make education worse not better, OR, at best, is unlikely to improve education more than the alternative strategy of allowing more school choice. There is a good libertarian response, but it’s not to compare Benedikt a “character from an Ayn Rand novel.” She’s wrong, but she’s not a fascist. Hitler didn’t say, “You know, I think you really ought to join the army,” he said, “You’re joining the army, or else, period.”

She misses the simplest solution. Even if your kids are in private school, get involved in the public school. You are still part of the public and have a financial interest in good schools for everyone. So take some time to go to the school board meetings, comment in public forums, push reforms via the electoral process. Even those who don’t have kids at all or who are aged out of the public school system can participate. The added benefit is that someone without a vested interest, i.e., student, in the school can take a bigger picture view and also sustain activism beyond the 5 or 6 years that a kid is in a school before moving on.

It is apparent from the last sentence that she is addressing this to well-to-do liberals who send their children to private schools. Those of us who aren’t liberals are hopelessly amoral.