On universal health care and universal education
August 10, 2009emily 3 Comments »Lately, I’ve been thinking about the whole debate about universal health care in this country. I could say an awful lot about it, but nothing without sounding shrill. So instead, I’ll say this. Two hundred or so years ago, we were debating universal education in this country (ie: public schools). People were up in arms about it. Parents were convinced that public schools would be “hot beds of moral evil,” that children would imbibe “the poison of immorality, of licentiousness, of infidelity” in school, and even that education would make children (and especially girls) listless and weak. (Those quotes are real, by the way. I’d footnote them properly if I could figure out how to get my blogging software to do footnotes.) And yeah, there are some kinks in the public school system. There are some things that don’t work perhaps as well as they could. But tens of thousands of people have gotten good educations from the public school system in the US who otherwise might have fallen through the cracks. All of which is to say, maybe we should give things a chance before running around screaming about how much they’ll suck and how we’re all going to die and how the sky is falling.
Posted on August 11th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
While I don’t, in essence, disagree with you…
I think that public schools ARE a breeding ground of moral evil. It is a platform. Specific agendas are communicated through it no matter how innocently or blatantly.
The morals, ideas, and ideals communicated are malleable and often twisted to forward an idea over another (wether warranted or not).
Posted on August 11th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
The nice thing about public schools is that, if you actually do have such a hard-line belief system that you believe public schools are a "breeding ground of moral evil" you have the ability to opt out of them. People who insist that they own the moral high ground and know definitively what is or isn’t evil can find a nice private school they agree with.
If people would educate themselves by reading or listening to the debates actually taking place (CSPAN is available all over the place), they would figure out pretty quick that this health care thing isn’t the end of the world that so many Chicken Littles are proclaiming so loudly. If you aren’t interested, do your own thing.
But don’t ruin this for the rest of us. There are plenty of us out here who legitimately worry about whether our insurance companies will be therewhen they’re paid to be there…when we can’t handle the burden ourselves.
Posted on August 15th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Brilliant.