From: jlbrand@pb2esac.uucp (Jack Brand)
Subject: Re: "encouraging tolerance" is a bad goal
Organization: Pacific*Bell ESAC, Oakland, CA.
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 04:48:29 GMT

In article <st+p4#n.phil@netcom.com> phil@netcom.com (Phil Ronzone) writes:
>In article <1992Sep29.091033.17267@pb2esac.uucp> jlbrand@pb2esac.uucp (Jack Brand) writes:
>Since money for the schools is being coerced (taxed) from people, they rightly
>feel that they should not pay for ideas to be to taught to their kids that
>they disagree with.

And here it is that you and I irreconcilably part company.  To my way
of thinking any school which exists to merely teach ideas that the
kids' parents agree with is throwing regard for Truth right out the window.

>2. The State forces a belief monopoly on schools (and on private tutoring
>   as well in many states), thus making hard to impossible for some parents
>   to have their kids taught as they wish.

And thank goodness.  If you and yours like the idea of schools teaching
Truth-as-defined-by-the-prejudices-of-mom-and-pop so be it; I don't
subscribe to that theory of education.  The most valuable thing a good
education can do is to say, in effect, "welcome all, but regardless of
what beliefs you may bring in the door, we will hold them all up to the
light of cold evidence, and those beliefs that are worthy of surviving
will and those that won't aren't worth clinging to."  This, of course,
scares the bejeezus out of religious folks, whose worst fear is that
their kid will chuck whatever gospel they've tried to raise them by.
(You will notice that the large majority of parents "home-schooling"
their kids purportedly for a "better education" are doing so for purely 
religious reasons.)

The best way to insure that everyone's prejudices remain as intact as
possible is to shut down the Evil Secular Humanist public schools and
ship the kidlets off to the local extension of your church.  This will
happen shortly, mostly because public schools have in many areas fallen
down on the job they were supposed to be doing.  Americans were never
ones to be accused of caution when it comes to throwing the baby out with
the bathwater.

>So in reality, you have posed an impossible situation -- sort of like
>asking how the NAZIs could not be anti-semitic.

Well, some of us live in the real world, too - working within the public
school system because it exists, we believe it should not entirely be
thrown overboard, and that alternatives may be much worse.  Therefore,
to me, asking a question that I did ("should we teach Disability Awareness?")
really bears little resemblence to some sort of Nazi analogy.

>Note that if we changed to NOT teach tolerance, we'd then be pissing off
>a different set of parents.

True.  But just because something *might* go wrong with a method does
not invalidate the method.  Of course the easy way out is to throw
up our hands and say "Gosh, there's a chance this scheme of teaching
kids somewhat independent of the day-to-day whims of the parents could
go wrong, so we give up.  It's all a bad idea."

Some of us do not choose the easy way out.

>See what happens when FOA is fucked with?

Yes - that it will take fine tuning to make a society work.  Sorry, life is
not easy, fair, clear-cut, or black and white.  I am not quite yet
convinced that marching to a narrow slogan ("Pure FOA, never deviated from, 
is the Answer") will produce one long throb of happy motoring for our
society.

"There is no substitute for talent, experience, intelligence and hard work."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)

This includes simplistic political philosophy.

jb
============================================================================
"Religion prevents our children from having a rational education."
				Lord Bertrand Russell, 1930
Xref: sparky ba.politics:5795 ca.politics:8366