MEA: One Arrogant Bunch

The simple, unmitigated arrogance of public educators in Michigan these days has once more been put on display. While Lansing considers legislation which would pay college tuition for privately and home educated students to take college courses, those who thrive at the public trough are once again screaming about the presumed unfairness of it all.

Doug Pratt of the Michigan Education Association (a union), complains, "Now we're going to put in a program that takes money away from neighborhood schools and provides it to help fund the college tuition of private-school and home-school students? It doesn't make sense." The local private schools aren't neighborhood schools, sir? The home schooled are not part of the neighborhood, sir? Hubris on your part, my friend. Hubris.

There is no such thing as public money, Mr. Pratt. It is my money and your money pooled (or worse: taken from the unwilling because a few more people want it done than don't) for the general interest. If the public education of children is in the general interest, then so is the privately taught and the home schooled. Why should your kids qualify for what is unarguably my money too while ours can't? Merely because they don't attend the right schools (that is, the schools which pay your teachers, and your teachers only?).

That is effrontery, and nothing less. You don't have the right to our cash, Mr. Pratt, and also the universal and arbitrary right to decide how it's spent. Yet he continues as if he does anyway, whining that it's just leading to back door vouchers which public opinion (he says) does not support. So, might makes right, Mr. Pratt? If enough people vote for something, anything, mind you, then real and actual right and wrong are out the window? Is that it? Because it sure sounds like it.

Public schools, and public school workers, attendees, supporters, and employees, need to seriously examine their motives. Theirs is a special interest, and nothing more, if they and only they have a claim to government funds (or, more correctly, funds redistributed by government). We say it that way, as too many conservatives have lost sight of conservatism on this very real moral issue. Public education is not an inviolate right. Education is a personal and parental responsibility first and foremost. To deny the same things public school students may qualify for to private and home schooled pupils solely because they are not public is insulting to non public school parents and students. They pay taxes too. It's their money as much as yours.