. 1703)” href=”http://maec.org/laws/eeo.html” target=”_blank”> a common and equal education for the citizens.  Then there are private schools funded by private organizations.  These schools have no requirements as to how they offer “opportunity”; in other words they can restrict their enrollments as they see fit.  Note the contradiction if you imagine a business doing this today (after that lefty governmental intrusion called The Civil Rights Act):  “Whites Only” signs outside your school sound good?  But in effect, private schools can and do discriminate against people.  One might argue that this is private school’s entire reason for being (I won’t do so here).  They may not be discriminatory if they receive any form of public funding however–keep this in mind.

Parents can, then, send their children to public school, send them to private school (if they can pay for it AND if they are accepted), home school them, and perhaps, defy the law that requires compulsory school attendance.  Hey, you have options AND opportunities!

A commenter, “Rumpole”, at the HT online forum offers this for clarification:

To those who are puzzled why there is a lawsuit regarding the state’s decision to transfer $ from public schools to religious schools, try Sec 6, from article 1 of the Indiana Constitution:

Section 6. No money shall be drawn from the treasury, for the benefit of any religious or theological institution.

This is the reason the voucher program is being contested in court and in this AP report [truncated in print version] the state Solicitor General claims:

…that the voucher system does not conflict with Indiana law because the public scholarship money would go directly to parents to use at the approved schools of their choice, not directly to parochial schools.

In an earlier post about the Missouri Facebook ban, The Errant noted that lawmakers like laws that allow them to manufacture loopholes–here we see one in action.  The STATE is not funding religious education–the people are!  Done and done.

Anyway, that is not what the Errant is trying to highlight.  The court will rule and if it negates the law then perhaps the state will take the case to the SCOTUS. (It has to be somewhat amazing that the state, in charge of the system that it is claiming is failing, would rather abdicate its responsibilities rather than try to honor them.)

It’s the misleading term “choice”–a term that propagandists like to use in place of “freedom” or “liberty”.

So, after 700 words, the point: Voucher programs are not about equality of education.  They are not about opportunity in education.  They are not about offering a “better” education.

Voucher programs are a manifestation of “free market” ideologues.  As indicated above, the meeting at the MCPL was, if not hosted, led by the “advocacy” group School Choice Indiana.  This group offers itself as an extension of The Foundation for Educational Choice which is a group involved in school policy for the sole reason that schools are a massive market to which they would like to have unfettered access.

It is that simple.  A “philosophical” position of this group might be that “free markets” yield “better” living.  Of course, there is no way to offer an example of this as no market is ever “free”.

Plausibly this is the most onerous economic philosophy/political philosophy to have been hatched.  It has as its primary goal the undermining of all that is “communal” and “social”.  It is a philosophy of pure power as all of its tenets reduce down to management by the oligarchy (those most brilliant of market manipulators).  If you want a window into the soul of this “elite” manipulation of government funding check out the blog of this WalMart scholar in Arkansas.  (Don’t just read this entry–dance around in their ideology for a while.)

I might be inclined to join in the chorus that decries the kind of education we inflict on our children–it is often abhorrent to the majority of attendees as it replicates the society that has made it.  It becomes further corporatized and managerial as it forces “standards” testing on its inmates.   We encourage no act of independence or creativity and we continue to restrict funding for those pursuits that are the lifeblood of the creative soul–the arts.

What indeed is our industrial system of “education” producing (reproducing, as the economist might say)?  Canon fodder, consumption engines, and a servant class.  What else?

I can proclaim the failure of education as a failure of society generally; I can further state that the “fix” (and that’s what it is, as in “the fix is in”) proposed by the Free Market proponents of “choice” in education will make things even worse by simply seeing students as “marks”.

Obviously there is much more to say on this and we plan on saying it.