Guns! Sex! Education! (but mostly Education)
Finkelstein has a response to a response to an article about young people and their guns. I’m not so tied up in the essence of that particular argument (because it doesn’t look to me that either of the numerical analyses are strong enough to base a stance on), but let’s talk about me. I may lack Larry Kudlow’s eerie ability to turn anything into a discussion of the stock market’s enormous success under Bush, but I can surely smell an opportunity to bang on about the need for conservatives to stress the availability of a decent education, with scant regard for the actual thrust of discussion.
My comment on Fink’s response was:
The government doing a ‘tackling single parenthood’ push is bound to be an utter, and embarassing, failure.
Given that conservative philosophy basically requires, as a fundamental assumption, that everyone has a chance to do well (our mean approach to social welfare, tougher approach to punishment, etc, all depend on this assumption) and given that we can hardly expect to stop people committing the activities that lead to single parent families (because rumour has it that people have sex whatever the government says), one key has to be to provide access to an acceptable education for everyone, by one means or another.
If we can point to the fact that everyone has a chance, that they get access to the necessary tools with which to improve their lives, then being mean to the people that don’t make use of those tools looks a lot more defensible. Of those necessary tools, many (most?) come in the form of education; that has, of course, to be an educational experience that is as proofed as possible against lamentable parenting (because that’s something else that we are unlikely to be able to change). All a conservative government can do is to give human nature the opportunity to do the sorts of things that we judge as ‘good’; we can’t change human nature itself. That’s why I mention ‘access’ to a decent education; you can’t make that horse drink if it doesn’t want to, but if the chance is passed up, keep your hands out of my pocket when the rest of your life turns into a Festival of Suck.
I just don’t understand why some conservatives will ignore the issue of education quality/availability and then pretend that we live in an equal-opportunity sort of society. We can’t make life fair and shouldn’t try, we can’t make everyone equally talented and we shouldn’t pretend that everyone is equally talented, but we can give people a chance to achieve their potential at the time in their lives when they are best able to build the required tools and are also most dependent on others to guide their experiences. Yes, it’s going to be really expensive and yes, it’s going to take a lot of time. I’m not saying that the Federal government should fix everything (please Lord, no), just that conservatives should have it as a priority. If we are to be intellectually honest, if we are going to have a meritocratic society where individuals bear the full weight of their failures and benefit from the full force of their successes, we need to know that they all got the chance to make a start.
I think maybe you misdiagnose the argument those conservatives are making. First of all, I don’t know that most conservatives CARE particularly much about equality as a general principle–or to the extent that they do, if it is juxtaposed with liberty, they will opt for liberty every time. So they don’t see the twin losses that a really meritocratic educational system would entail–economic liberty lost through taxation, local control of education lost through what would have to be a geographically redistributionary mandate–as being worth it.
Secondly, I think they doubt the efficacy of any given federalized system to create a meaningfully level playing field, though they certainly suspect that an attempt to do so WOULD succeed at costing a lot of money. And in that particular doubt and assumption, I would be inclined to concur with them. The bottom line is that there hasn’t been much indication that ANY top-down solution meaninfully improves any particular educational system, regardless of money spent; if there were, the courts would have mandated that approach in a variety of jurisdictions.
Comment by Rojas — 2/16/2007 @ 8:56 pm
Meritocracy in later life, it seems to me, relies on opportunities in earlier life. What is often characterised as the meany attitude of conservatives is just putting on people the responsibility for their own lives, based on the belief that they made their own breaks. I don’t think that assumption works if a decent education isn’t available to everyone.
I share their waryness of the solution being a federal issue. That’s what I was referring to when I said that I don’t think that the Federal government should fix it; conservatives, though, should be mindful of it as an issue at every level, and push for action at the most appropriate level (which, apart from the school district level, might be at the state level).
Comment by Adam — 2/16/2007 @ 9:06 pm
[...] make poor school districts any better unless they have the funds that they require. As I have said before, I think that education has to be a conservative priority and that’s inevitably going to cost [...]
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