If You Berate Parents for Sending Their Kids to Private School, You Are a Bad Person

Allison Benedikt’s article for Slate, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person,” is morally atrocious. Benedikt argues that parents should intentionally subject their children to a poor-quality education in the government’s “public” schools for the sake of attempting to make those schools better for some distant future generation. That is, Benedikt calls on parents to sacrifice their own children’s welfare for the sake of an alleged “common good.”

Benedikt’s piece is so ludicrous that it’s hard to believe it’s not a spoof. She says she’s not comparing parents who send their children to private schools to murderers—thereby making precisely that comparison. She then says she doesn’t support “banning private schools”—thereby raising the possibility of doing so. And she proceeds to tell parents that their child’s education doesn’t matter much, writing, “You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. . . . [C]hances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school.”

To “illustrate” this last point, Benedikt mocks the idea that children need to read great literature or the like, and she makes clear what she feels kids really need:

Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

You can’t make this stuff up. If you did, the left would scream “hyperbole!”

But here you have it. Benedikt is calling for parents to intentionally send their children to “crappy” schools where they can booze it up rather than read, for the sake of ensuring that future generations will have the opportunity to follow suit. And Slate chose to publish her prescription.

Benedikt and Slate are beyond contempt for peddling such evil. A good education is crucial to a child’s life, his success, and his happiness. And a good private education is, how shall I say it, better than a “crappy” government one.

Even if it were possible for a parent to marginally improve the “crappy” government schools by sacrificing his child’s mind and future (and it is not possible), for a parent to do so would be unspeakably evil. But, of course, the idea that anyone would ever prescribe such a thing or that any media outlet would ever promote such an idea is just hyperbole.

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Related:

• The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of our Time
• Interviews with Innovators in Private Education
• The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools

About Ari Armstrong

Ari Armstrong blogs at AriArmstrong.com, and he has written for publications including the Denver Post and Complete Colorado. He is the author of Values of Harry Potter: Lessons for Muggles, a book exploring the heroic fight for life-promoting values in the Potter novels.

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