This Slate piece (apparently Slate still exists!) really quite amazing:
If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
A manifesto.You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.
I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.
Wow. She says that I should give my kids a “mediocre” education, and indeed that people should do so for generations, and she calls me a bad person?
Not only is she a bad person, she is also an ignorant person. Apparently she believes that if everyone buys a product irrespective of its quality, then its quality will improve. Oh, I see:
I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.
Whatever book she read, it clearly wasn’t economics.
(Via Instapundit.)
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey adds:
Benedikt’s entire argument is that non-participants in an organization ruin it by their non-participation. It’s not the actual participants who are to blame for the institution’s failures – not the teachers, not the administrators, and not the policy-makers — but the people who avoid the failure that should be blamed.
Internet Scofflaw 