Earlier today, I had a look back through some of my older essays and papers, stuff from as far back as middle school actually. I was quite sure of myself as a kid.
I can kinda remember what it felt like to be so sure of something there was pretty much no point in even discussing it.
"Finally, Thoreau’s anti-materialistic attitude strikes me as old and worn out. Even if you do manage to destroy every consumer product in the entire world, someone will always want something they don’t have. Human beings are naturally envious, and it would be folly to think this fact can be changed. "
Here I made an interesting argument - flawed, but still interesting. I assumed that the only way to acquire goods or services was by purchasing them.
Looking at my ideas from when I was younger puts stuff into perspective for me, so I figured I would write down some of my thoughts today to read in a few years and reflect on "how silly I was."
Today, I'm thinking we should do away with the Department of Education, or at least change its function. Rather than providing public school for everyone and funding these schools with tax money, the Department of Education should instead accredit private schools to make sure they are up to standard and provide incentives for the opening of more private schools to encourage competition and make education more affordable.
Too many kids wander through high school because they take it for granted. They don't take it seriously because their parents aren't shelling out their own money to pay for it. Well, they are in the form of property taxes, but not all of them and not directly. Anyways, the cost of sending the average American's 2.2 kids to school is far less than we end up paying over our lifetimes in the form of taxes.
The argument of most people for public schools is that education is a basic human right that everyone is entitled to, up to a certain degree. Everyone just assumes this, but nobody really asks, "Why?"
Okay, maybe some people might, even after questioning the premise, still come to the conclusion that education is a basic human right, and that's fine, they're entitled to their point of view, but at least put that matter to vote to see what the community really thinks. Leave it to individual counties or cities to determine whether or not to implement a public school system. After all, I don't think there's anything about public schools being controlled by the federal government in the Constitution.
That's what I've been thinking about today.