While we’re at it, let’s privatize the fire department, too

Shorter Tigerhawk:

Above all else, the manufactured outrage over President Obama’s address to schoolchildren should force us to recognize that public education is a farce, because a completely privatized system would resolve my non sequitur argument regarding school prayer.

Whenever I hear conservatives whining about the universal terror of public education, I always wonder if they have the faintest notion that the party for whom they usually vote was founded by people who believed, among other things, that federal land should be conveyed to the states to establish enormous, publicly funded institutions of higher learning. I’m not surprised, however, that these folks would seem to prefer the model of the antebellum South — a pig-ignorant landscape virtually devoid of public education, filled with planters’ academies for the sons of the slaveholding cousinry and finishing schools for their daughters — nor does it amaze me to see that apparently functioning adults can persuade themselves that public education was somehow irrelevant to the political, cultural, economic and military authority that made the United States the predominant fountain of democracy, whiskey and sexy on the planet over the past 150 years.

What really cracks me up, however, is their apparent belief that an educational system funded entirely by private dollars would be any more hospitable to the freedoms they seem to believe are thwarted in the public realm. Sure, you’d have a small archipelago of madrassas where Christian children memorized Leviticus and debated the methods by which velociraptors eased their hunger aboard Noah’s Ark — hell, maybe they’d even let kids bring guns to school — but if the eradication of public education actually cracked open the sort of market that libertarians seem to fantasize about, the void would be filled by corporate and foundation dollars that appreciate “free speech” even less than Youth Academies for the Exaltation and Praise of the Venerable Comrade Leader Obama, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea the public schools about which the right wing is ceaselessly bitching.