Whats wrong with the common school concept?
We don’t have a common pizza, a common magazine or a common church. They make no common sense. The way out of the “School Wars” is to drop the 1840s’ notion of a “common school.” Government has no business forcing kids from different backgrounds into a one-size-fits-all tablet of values. The Common School wasn’t so bad for 100 years; they imparted the Protestant majority’s values to mostly Protestant kids. Some groups escaped (e.g., Christian Reformed, Seventh Day Adventist, and Catholics); others were small and took their lumps (e.g., Jews, atheists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses). The flaw of the common school only became clear to traditionalists when the tables were turned on them. Over the last 50 years, the modernists have won control and now they use schools to impart their idea of “The Good.” But the traditionalists are not a tiny minority that can be abused with impunity. They’re escalating the school wars to try to “take back their schools.” Parent support for teachers is plummeting
