Friday - September 10, 2004

Category Image Why I am Against School Vouchers


Sometimes I have supported the school voucher movement, in the same way that one would tolerate the village drunk expounding on the evils of drinking. I agree that drinking is bad, and I'm glad the issue is being addressed, but I don't think the drunkard has the best solution in mind.

Likewise, I despise public schools and think destroying public education to be the most profound and important domestic political movement in our country today. Although vouchers serve to destroy public schools, and weaken the strength of the teacher unions, in the long run vouchers will be even worse. So I've been trying to support the enemy of my enemy in the hope that public schools will be sufficiently weakened without destroying our freedom.

But I was deluding myself. The latest obscenity from congress has made it all too clear. I should have paid more attention to Congressman Dr. Ron Paul on this issue. Now congress has declared that all school children will be screened for "mental health" in an obligatory screening. Of course, we know that this will mean a windfall profit for the drug manufacturers who will continue their frightening insistence on drugging Americans with powerful psychotropic drugs like Ritalin.

If the government can force your children to be screened for "mental health," a fuzzy concept that is interpreted by people in our very poorly advanced understanding of the subject, then we know for a fact that they will take advantage of past court rulings that force parents to medicate their children. And with the amount of money involved no one should be deluded into thinking that this isn't exactly what was in mind.

Right now we have the freedom, provided we can afford to pay for both public schools through taxes and private schools with the money the government allows us to keep after taxing us, to educate our children free from government control and incompetence. But if the voucher system is successful, there will be no private schools that could afford to forego receiving government subsidies from vouchers and thus the government will have absolute control over every child in the country, without exception.

This is truly Orwellian, and frightens me supremely. Added to this they now seek to be judges of what children have proper mental "health" or ideologies and will, we can be sure, forcibly medicate children so that they will conform to government ideals of behavior.

A man's mind is the only bulwark against tyranny. If we can't control our own minds, especially on such a large scale as all school children in the country, then our society, our culture, our freedom are doomed. The road to serfdom is getting shorter and shorter.

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