Uh, blanket apology for the festival of typos in my posts. The keyboard on this old laptop is getting increasingly cranky with age, like me.
Just wait till your keyboard starts telling you to keep your damn fingers off it’s lawn, and spraying with you with a hose. Damn old man laptop.
True. But still, so what? I’m arguing on principle. Beside, Barrett is a drop in the bucket of crackpots, IMHO. But since I find arguing with concrete details more engaging than arguing over abstract concepts, this debate is about the “Barretts” of America U.
The Ayn Rand within me is tempted to call the math irrelevant. But for sake of argument let’s assume you’re correct and it’s no big deal. Feel the same way about, say, the government forcing you to fund a Catholic nativity scene with your .five one-hundredths of a penny passed off as a school voucher? Ideology, theory, and philosphy are not exculisvely economic issues by nature. There’s something to be said for principle. And consistency.
That’s dangerous territory, albeit necessary.
Such dangerous, albeit necessary, territory that I disagree with funding education period.
[QUOTE=Jackknifed Juggernaut]
You’re already funding all sorts of wacko agendas, in an indirect way. Churches, for example, are tax-exempt. Guess who pays the taxes that they don’t pay.[/QUOTE
Fair complaint. Simple sollution: everyone fund your own agenda.
So because there are a handful of lunatics in academia, public education should be abolished?
Well, if we’re supposed to go all Libertarian and choose whether or not we pay taxes for things we disagree with, I vote to stop paying for the war in Iraq. I find that argument a hell of a lot more compelling than some anecdote about a part-time teacher in Wisconsin.
Agreed.
No takers?
Perhaps you could expand a bit, Biblical, on why, exactly, you disagree with public funding of education?
Public education is not a waste of money, although some money spent in it is undoubtedly wasted (as in any other human activity).
Do you really want to live in a society where only those who can afford private education get any education at all? If you think people are generally an ignorant rabble now (as I do) that’s nothing compared to how they’d be with no education at all and no way of earning an income in today’s high-tech society. Rather like the people in the theocracies that I rather suspect you hate, whose main lack is a comprehensive secular education to lift them out of the mire of superstition humans are prone to when lacking the mental tools and facts necessary for proper understanding of how the universe works.
Public Education makes the US and the world a better place, and improves your life in myriads of ways.
If he’s anything like my like-minded friend, he doesn’t want to pay for anything from which he gets no direct benefit.
Ah, but there is a benefit in having the general populace educated, as you so ably proved in the posting above.
You need an excorcism, and fast! 
How about looking at things from another point of view:
Given how politically correct morons have an astonishing tendency to make sure that their views, and only their views are permitted
- would state education benefit from evicting anyone who did not toe the line ?
In my book ‘teaching’ something and an ‘anecdotal digression’ are totally different things.
Say this place got taken over by totally PC moderators
- it would be a dead site within weeks
Thinking about it, it might be an idea to expose school kids (and quite a lot of adults) to as many opposing and raving fanatics as possible.
Postulating that 9/11 was engineered is interesting, personally I doubt that it was, but I have strong suspicions about Pearl Harbour.
Maybe I’m biased, but I derived great enjoyment from listening to the views and remeniscences of politically incorrect teachers and tutors.
Wow. He’s a member?