Vox paints parents who want input on education as villains
December 2, 2021
According to a new piece from Vox, us that the religious right is trying to wrest money from the states to spend on their own religious schools.
But that isn’t what is happening at all. The religious right – like many people who support school vouchers – is asking that their money be spent on educating their children their way. It is, after all, the taxpayers who pay the taxes which the states then spend.
The heart of this argument is the one made in the New York Times just recently, saying that parents should not determine what is taught in schools. Instead, that should be done by the experts. The experts who have been to college, absorbed all that woke-ism and socialist theory, and prepare to feed what they learned to the children rather than what the students’ parents might think is a better set of mores and morals.
We do have a name for a political system in which it’s the self-appointed who rule society rather than the people themselves. That word not being “democracy,” nor, actually, “liberal.” For to be liberal is to insist that other folks get to live their way as long as they return the favor.
The specific case, Carson v. Makin, is cast as whether those who pay taxes should be forced to subsidize those religious schools. Which is a most odd argument. For if the state does not pay for students to attend religious schools then those with religious beliefs must pay twice – once in taxes to the state system they don’t use and then again in fees for the private religious school. Which is, of course, subsidy to those non-religious schools by those religious. If subsidy to religious schools is wrong then so must also be a subsidy to the non-religious.
The point here is not the specifics of the case itself. Vox is in the top 100 news and media sites, it gains some 20 million visits a month. The site declares its function as being to “explain the news”.
Well, OK, explain the news, then. Don’t give highly partial reports on such social issues. There is a battle going on here and it’s not particularly to do with religion. It’s about whether parents, or the education bureaucracy, get to educate their children as they wish. Coming down on the side of the state oligarchy is sad, yes, but it’s nowhere near as bad as not recognizing and explaining, what is really going on here.