In response to this, from Mr. Eastwick:
I replied:
The main crux of this argument seems to be that those people who will benefit most from education are the ones who would have gotten it anyway: those who had "smart parents", ones that would push them to perform well academically. The reason I don't think it holds water is because in a world where the only schools are private schools, this is automatically going to price out a lot of the middle class. Most people don't even have significant savings, especially not under the age of 40, when one would be most likely to have young children. So, there could conceivably be pretty smart parents, in decent careers, that just couldn't get their kids into one of the upper tier schools in a private system.
Also, this discounts the fact that less educated parents could easily have genius children: true genius is actually kind of random if you look at history. Geniuses don't tend to come from the upper class, hell, there are many that rose from obscurity. I think Tesla and Edison are good examples of this. You can't tell me Edison didn't benefit from there being a decent public school system, right?
Honestly though, the most important thing schools do, by far, is creating a literate population. Forget math and science, none of that really matters unless you can read, and reading would likely be the first thing you learn anyway. Those immigrants from Ireland and Russia usually didn't know how to read and write in their own language, let alone in English. I don't know how exactly their kids were going to succeed without going to the one room schoolhouse.
Anyway, I guess it's true that literacy wouldn't just disappear. However, I think functional literacy, including being able to logically understand things, might go away within years, if it even exists now. Critical thinking is the second piece of the literacy puzzle, and schools at least can provide for that. We don't need sheep, my friends, we need lions. People who can think are never sheep, but could become lions. I'll let you decide which this 90% corporate Democrat forum has more of. Many of them think Macron is some type of far left winger or something.
I don't like the automobile and road argument, because I'm not sure what the automobile and road would even be for the analogy. The format of the rhetoric is "everyone who buys A needs to use B, and A is not a public good, and B is." I don't know if either education or roads are actually a public good, since both are excludable and rivalrous, which seem to be the two main criteria for a "public good". You can easily set up a toll for a highway, or a fee for a school. Also, the use of a road degrades it over time, and the resources of a school are density dependent. National defense is a true public good.
My argument would probably be that education up to a certain point is guaranteed to everyone, but professional schooling is your choice. That's pretty much what they have in England, isn't it? The problem is that college in the US is pretty much a necessity now, unless you are skilled at a trade. Ideally, we could just let everyone have free community college for gen-eds, and the last two years of college could just be lumped into various professional schools for those who want to pursue it. This wouldn't be perfect of course, but upper level classes seem to be basically prerequisites for professional school at this point, anyway.
That's all I got. This was a response to Eastwick, but anyone is free to chime in.
