Does sending your kid to private school make you a scourge on society?
A Slate article sparks a debate
In what could alternately be seen as a provocative argument or a master class in trolling, Allison Benedikt at Slate says you are a bad person if you send your kid to private school. If people who can afford private school just held their noses for a few generations and deigned to send their kids to crappy public schools, one of our nation's most important institutions would improve, she says.
The story was a hit, in internet terms — it has racked up over 5,000 comments, 19,000 Facebook likes, and 1,800 tweets. And predictably, like moths to the flame, many couldn't help blasting Benedikt's article as absurd, even offensive.
"[T]he author’s Orwellian vision for a more equal and just society is, at the very least, wholly impractical," says Daniel Doherty at Townhall.
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"This is what the radical levellers want for us," argues Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. "It is the educational equivalent of Soviet economics. All that matters is that we are united in the state, no matter how stupid, ignorant, and poor it makes us."
Ross Douthat of the New York Times also got a big communism-y vibe:
John Carney at CNBC goes one step further, saying sending your kids to private school is actually really good for public school because it creates competition, which improves education for everyone: "Monopoly education would, like every monopoly known in the history of humanity, produce a poorer quality product at a greater cost."
Megan McArdle at Bloomberg is sympathetic to Benedikt's premise. "If you’re an affluent upper-middle-class parent, your kids are probably going to be fine no matter what school you send them to," she says. "And I am on the record as saying that if you oppose vouchers, you have a moral obligation to send your kids to public schools in a horrible urban school district, rather than 'skimming the cream' from said school district by decamping to the suburbs as soon as your spawn reach school age."
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But McArdle says Benedikt's theory, in practice, would be a disaster:
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Carmel Lobello is the business editor at TheWeek.com. Previously, she was an editor at DeathandTaxesMag.com.
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