Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube
Studies have shown that some alternatives to public schooling – private schooling, Catholic schooling, charter schooling, and homeschooling – provide their graduates with superior educations. The Amistad Academy in Connecticut, Connecticut Commentary noted, was such an institution.
Nationally, some public education facilities have been failing for quite some time to provide an adequate education, most especially in urban environments or in suburban poverty pockets, where the traditional family structure – mom, dad and children – has eroded over the years. All four alternative educational facilities have been viewed for decades as pedagogical replacement centers for parents dissatisfied with the quality of education provided by public schools. Were this not the case, the number of alternative education facilities would have diminished rather than increased during the past three decades.
Much to the dismay of public education union leaders, such alternatives to failing public schools have been viewed for decades escape mechanisms that allow parents a freedom of choice not available to them in the public school sandbox. We’ve known for some time that urban public schools, public school administrators, and vote hungry politicians do not appreciate such competition.
In the private marketplace, dollars follow successful ventures. Among neo-progressive legislators, Connecticut’s political landscape is littered with “concerned” legislators interested in shuttling tax money, lots of it, to failing pedagogical enterprises. All of us know that you will get more of whatever it is you choose to finance with public funds. Public tax dollars support both failing and successful public schools. While, purchasers decide the longevity of products and services in the public marketplace, the survival of goods and services in the political marketplace is decided, theoretically, by “the people” but in fact by Connecticut’s dominant Democratic Party.
Connecticut’s General Assembly is now in the process of considering a new and, the state’s drowsy media tells us, “controversial” bill that, if adopted, will enforce “equity” in pedagogical matters between all educational institutions – if not now, then in the near future. The bill makes the state an equity-enforcer that, sooner or later, will spread about the state a pedagogy that will aggressively eradicate any differences between public and market driven non-public schools. That is what “equity” means in the minds of neo-progressive levelers.
The “ask” by neo-progressives is on the face of it absurd. Equity cannot be applied to alternative means of education without destroying the efficacy of competing institutions. The thousands of homeschooling advocates, many of them parents, who showed up at the state Capitol to protest the equity bill understood perfectly the serpentine ways of the unitary state. Indeed, dissatisfied with the quality of public school indoctrination, they had been fleeing the beast for years, finally finding in alternative educational institutions a safe harbor that would afford them a creative -- and different – product. It is best to think of homeschoolers as refugees fleeing an unsuccessful and unwanted Pedagogy of the Oppressed, both the title of a book written by Paulo Freire, the third most cited book in the social sciences widely used in teacher training and certification courses.
The political lesson we should all draw from the state’s Democrat hegemony is that numbers determine policy, good or bad. Once bipartisan politics has been thoroughly vanquished – such is the case in “the land of steady habits” – a restoration of true representative democracy becomes more and more remote. Political habits are determinative.
Democracy, if the word means anything at all, indicates participation of the demos in the political life of the state. This creative participation is advanced by any state that modestly knows its own bounds, constitutional, moral and historic. Equity always mows down essential differences – in order to rule by power alone rather than to represent the people, the demos, honestly and fairly.
In a one party state in which 43 percent of the Republican population can find no representation in the General Assembly – precisely the case in Connecticut – neither small “d” democracy nor small “r” republican government is well served. Such a government must be arrogant, unheeding and destructive.
Power and force are the opposite of both democracy and representative governance. We have been well warned on this score by Edmund Burke: “Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.”
Stay updated with the latest in the Constitution State with The CT Centinal
