'Intelligent-design' school board ousted in Penn

It is against the Constitution for public funds to be used to promote any religion.A Satanist school would be promoting Satanism, and therefore a public-funds voucher would be using your tax money to promote Satanism to children.You are OK with this?

I sent my children to private schools. I know how much it costs, and it is a lot more than $4K.What will happen, is that many of the people who take a $4K voucher will be people who would have sent their children to a private school anyway. There is no savings for those children. The voucher program is a net cost.You are still ignoring the problem that you are depending on hypotheticals.

Nwr, it is true that most parents that use vouchers have to supplement those vouchers, but many of those parents are from poorer families, often African-American families, that could not send their kids to private schools otherwise.As far as the claim that everyone sending their kids to private schools now would just get help doing so; that's a good point, but since they are all taxpayers, I don't see that as a bad thing. it helps the overall education effort.But you could do it as Democrat Jim Hunt did in NC, and adopt vouchers for basically new private schools, but call them public schools and label them "charter schools." Imo, it worked fairly well overall. Technically the schools were all public schools, but they allowed a wide diversity of schools to spring up. Some failed financially, but many did not, and they provided an alternative where educators could experiment with different educational approaches, and basically were run just like private schools.All they had to do was make sure the kids scored well enough, and to stay financially solvent, which was difficult because the voucher per student was so much less than regular public schools.if you don't want to subsidize current private schools and the kids there, you can do the charter school voucher system. Same thing though as far as vouchers.

It is against the Constitution for public funds to be used to promote any religion.A Satanist school would be promoting Satanism, and therefore a public-funds voucher would be using your tax money to promote Satanism to children.You are OK with this?

Many of the voucher system proponents are simply using a very real issue, quality of education, to divert public money heading toward public education into private schooling, and more important than that: religious institutions.The main goal for these people is not better education, but getting government support for religion.Instead of using a voucher system, the public school system could research what is working within private schools (the ones which may be doing better) or look into experimental programs for educational systems, and then institute those.Unless you are going to argue that it is the nonsecular content of the private schools which make them better, instead of the teaching methodology, there is absolutely NO reason for kids to have to change schools or money to be diverted anywhere else.As far as your argument goes with Schraf and secular education, your point is a bit disengenuous. She is arguing that there is content with no religious significance, and that alone is taught within secular educational system. To argue against that is to say that every single subject able to be taught has religious significance, and that simply is not true.Math, language, logic, history, and science do not contain religious content. Even evolutionary theory (if one wants to look at the closest thing to religious "significance" in science) is not religious content. It is an explanation of what the modern scientific method has developed as a best scientific explanation for species diversity. It is a neutral statement about a system.There is no religion of "keeping religious content out of public schools". There is a practical concern that the government provide a basic education, and during that education not to indoctrinate children with a religious belief system as that might counter what you as a parent would want to teach them.The only problem religious parents might face in this is that they cannot rely on schools to teach their kids about how to think and behave according to their doctrines, instead of taking it upon themselves. Well guess what? Same goes for the atheists. I don't know of any secular school system capable of setting out an atheist moral system for the children of atheist parents.This appears to be a misconception that religious people have about public education.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Can you prove that Shraf? Military and prison chaplains promote religion and particular religion and they are paid by the US government. Same with the Congressional chaplain/minister that opens Congress with prayer.Is opening Congress with prayer in the name of Jesus wrong?

And this is so? why? because you say so? Can you prove that?Basically, that's just a smear put out by liberals who are using public schools indirectly through the NEA to funnel campaign money to the democratic party.And you are wrong about public education. Because of fear of litigation, schools don't teach the Bible as a mandated course, nor theology, and without a fairly thorough knowledge of both of those things, one receives basically an inferiour education. The simple fact unless one understands the theological movements that shaped Western history, and understands them from the believer's perpsective so that the motive of these movements is clear, one doesn't understand basic history.Likewise, without knowing the Bible, you really are missing out in terms of literature. You just lack a basic education.

Sending one's children to a private school of one's own choice is a private individual benefit. The government should not be subsidizing private benefits. That's a conservative principle, and a good one.Public education has a different goal. It's purpose is not to provide private benefits. The basis for public education is that we will have a better society, a better economy, if everyone is educated. A society of illiterates is an impoverished society.When I pay taxes to support public education, I am not paying those taxes to help educate my children. I am paying them because it benefits me to live in a literate society. To put it simply, I pay those taxes to ensure that my neighbor's children are literate, because that is of benefit to all of society (including me). I don't know if this is a conservative principle or not, but it should be. It is certainly a pragmatic principle. Voucher systems undermine this principle, and instead treat education as if it were welfare. It demonstrates a problem in your calculations about supposed savings with a voucher program.

The original theme would seem to have had limited discussion potential.Currently some good discussion here, getting buried in a topic that it doesn't belong in. Somebody start an appropriate topic for the school funding issues (with a link back to this topic, would be nice).Closing this topic down.AdminnemooseusThis message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 11-12-2005 01:15 PM

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