December 28, 2019 at 12:06 am comment to JPGrene Who governs the School System?
Family choice in education matters. It is clear to me that Greg Forster would dearly love to see parental choice in education in his lifetime.
Now, here we have John E Coons, nearly 90 years old, still working for Family Choice and justice for poor families after 50 years in the trenches. The organization T74 produced this video of their interview with Coons. Please watch it:
Look for these points:
– “We do not have public schools for poor people.” [He is saying, they are “so-called” public schools because poor families don’t have the choice of moving to effective schools.]
– “Extend choice, give it to everybody. Choice could save a good share of American families . . . make America less angry and unhappy with itself.”
– “The problem . . . much of our society is riddled with the effects of making the family weak, its independence, its authority, its responsibility . . . frustrated. And schools have contributed to that, in my view, a great deal. If you take a so-called family and strip it of responsibility and authority, you’ve taken away its dignity and you’ve taken away its effectiveness as a social good. And this society had better look out for all the ways that we have treated our families who are poor, who deserve authority. We have to make sure that they are not stripped of that dignity.”
John Coons, in a 2002 interview, talked about poor people being stripped of their sovereignty and said: “It’s a shame that there are no social science studies on the effect of choicelessness on the family. If you are stripped of power—kept out of the decision-making loop—you are likely to experience degeneration of your own capacity to be effective, because you have nothing to do. If you don’t have any responsibilities, you get flabby. And what we have are flabby families at the bottom end of the income scale.”
Coons wrote books on topic and was instrumental in the Serrano Case.
Now, Greg, I would say that it is obviously timely to be proactive about Parent Choice. Could there not be a Symposium that gathers people on the topic? Collect some papers. Publish them, or excerpts, on a website? Get someone to do an inventory of where we’re at with this topic in North America. People from various efforts — charter schools, home education, Education Savings Accounts, Scholarship Programs, etc. — would have input and attendance.
Such an effort would not only help the cause move forward but would, at the same time, put the education system on notice that such an effort is being mobilized.