Editor’s note: This commentary from Jason Peirce, a parent with children in Brevard Public Schools, appeared Thursday on floridatoday.com.
Recent guest columnist Adam Bryn Tritt’s use of Thomas Jefferson to make his case that public schools and the education system exist for “the collective benefit” of our “country and democracy,” and “not for the children” and their parents, is wrong-headedly backwards.
Fact is, Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers founded the United States on the idea of individual liberty. Logically, therefore, this country exists to uphold the individual liberty of the individuals comprising it, not any other way around, and certainly not the way Tritt would have it, which assumes we the people exist for the country, and government.
Indeed, Jefferson believed education was vital for the “general diffusion of knowledge” necessary for a free society to remain free.
But unlike the bloated, massively inefficient public education bureaucracy we have today, Jefferson advocated for a radically decentralized system of small “districts of five or six miles square” at most.
Even state-controlled systems were too large for Jefferson, who cautioned that schools would “be badly managed” and “depraved by abuse” to bankruptcy, if state governments managed the education of their citizens.
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