Just think of how many good private schools could be created in California from a pool of 30,000 qualified teachers who otherwise have nothing to do.
Meanwhile, these teachers are not working because the California tax base is not sufficient today to hire them. The reason why our tax base is so low is that over the past 20 years our schools have not produced enough good capitalists. In fact, back in the days of a young Walt Disney or a young Bill Gates, an enterprising young student would be advised to get out and create a job even if it’s just for himself or herself. Today the idea of creating a job is practically ignored – nearly unheard of — as a practical goal for our graduates.
And so the California economy has turned flatter these days while our schools have grown more passive and more monastic. In the Dark Ages, schools were even more passive and monastic, and it was these cloistered places of learning that set up the stage for the Western economic depression that lasted over a thousand years. But while the schools of the Dark Ages were made of priests teaching students only the rules of being a priest, today’s schools are being locked into teachers instructing students what primarily concerns a teacher.
Meanwhile, the teachers who advocate any positive expression of capitalism in our schools today are becoming proportionately fewer. In fact, the science of capitalism is not even taught in today’s standardized modern curriculum. The cultivation of capitalism requires a higher level of energy and noise, and that is not what our schools are about these days.
So it is very hard for today’s young graduates to go out and be capitalists when they have received no support for that kind of life or thinking in today’s schools. For decades now, California graduates have been spending virtually all their time trying to earn money and virtually no time trying to produce money. No wonder our state’s tax base is what it is today.
But there is a solution, I believe. Instead of being just staying unemployed indefinitely, California’s laid-off teachers could stay in touch with each other via the Internet. And then our unemployed and unused teachers might become capitalists together, organizing their own ideal private schools.
Meanwhile, practically every California education pundit agrees that California’s private schools have a lot better record turning young people into successful adults than do the state’s public schools.
Of course, the reason for this is that the state’s public schools are organized on a socialist premise, where the public pays for the schools, while private schools are paid for and partly governed by the families whose children attend the schools.
There is simply a much higher threshold for failure in a socialist system than there is in a truly free enterprise system. For example, our public schools are chained to a “bell curve” system where about one third of the students have a successful learning experience, one third just muddle through the experience, and about one third fail their “schooling.” But under socialist monopolies, you can fail as many people as you want and get away with it
In contrast, the average private school operating in free enterprise competition has to succeed with 80 percent of their students simply to stay in business.
Of course, the private school teachers are not paid as well as public school teachers, even if they receive more professional satisfaction and support in flexibly teaching their students the important things. But that picture may be changing in favor of private-school teachers. The state of Indiana has recently become the first state in the nation to implement “vouchers,” which will give families the choice of using the educational money it costs the state to educate their children in private schools.
In Indiana, with the voucher money coming into private schools, private-school teachers are looking at some real professional money going their way. It’s starting to look like the concept of vouchers – which refuses to leave the scene no matter what resistance it receives – is after all the wave of the future.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California.” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.