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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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I mean, Freddie's main argument in the essay is that:

  1. Public schools have terrible metrics.
  2. A bunch of RWers want to abolish public schools, because of the terrible metrics.
  3. But public schools don't have terrible metrics because the schools suck. They have terrible metrics because they're the school of last resort for the children who suck.
  4. So abolishing the public schools won't fix anything; those children will still suck wherever they are.

That argument holds water.

There's a secondary argument, more implied than stated, which goes:

  1. Public schools have bad metrics.
  2. This makes non-sucky parents pull their non-sucky kids out of public schools.
  3. This very effect, rather than the quality of teaching, is why public schools have bad metrics, in a vicious circle.
  4. Hence, non-sucky parents are wrong to do this.

This argument does not hold water; propositions 1-3 are correct, but while parents doing this solely for quality-of-teaching are indeed making a mistake, there are two other valid reasons to do it: 1) their children could be harmed by the sucky kids, 2) the sucky kids may directly impair the ability of non-sucky kids to learn (I hear this one is particularly a thing recently in the USA due to various court cases and policies). I can certainly sympathise with reason #1, having had an arm broken and a tooth knocked out at one of the bad kind of public schools (my mother actually predicted that I'd lose teeth before I went there), if perhaps not reason #2 (I think better classroom control is/was in place in Australia, at least during the late 90s-early 00s when I was there).

I will note that there is a socialist solution to the problem of roughhouse public schools, and one that's fairer to poor-but-non-delinquent kids who beat the lottery - remove the delinquents from the normal public school system and put them in less-common reform schools that explicitly only serve delinquents (and possibly have the required infrastructure to stop the delinquents beating each other up). I have a vague feeling that this isn't permitted in the USA due to the aforementioned court cases and civil rights laws, although I don't know the particulars and could be wrong. But yeah, were that solution in place, Freddie would be mostly right about the secondary argument.

Reform schools totally exist in the US, but due to incentives of the US system(that is, very high parental say) they're basically only for kids who would otherwise be in Juvie.

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