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| A Republican Brawl in 2008? | When the Missiles Start to THAAD |
Feminists Against Choice
by Christopher Chantrill
July 13, 2006 at 4:08 am
IN MICHIGAN the state legislature recently passed a bill to permit single-sex programs in the public schools. “No child would be required to attend a single-sex classroom,” writes Carrie Lukas, but parents would be allowed to choose. Those parents who believe that children learn better without the distraction of the other sex in the classroom could have their way. And those parents who believe that co-education “breeds healthy social interaction” could have their way too.
It is a radical concept, of course. The very idea that parents ought to direct their children’s education!
But the feminists object. Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women:
We strongly oppose these bills because the separation of boys and girls, and the underlying (and false) assumption that girls and boys are so different that they shouldn't even be educated together, introduces harmful gender stereotypes into public education. This could lead to, among other possible outcomes, emphasizing math and science for boys, and for girls, less rigorous course work.
Ah yes. The King Charles’s head for feminists. Off in a secret male-only classroom, there is a danger that boys will be gaining an unfair advantage over girls in math and science. We must stamp that out!
I recently spoke with a young women who delightedly told me that she was working as a genetics counselor. She had a degree in microbiology and had worked for a few years in a lab. But then she quit and went to Japan to teach English for a couple of years. Now she’s back and she much prefers her job as a counselor, helping people with genetic screening and associated life decisions, to working in a lab.
You can math-and-science girls all you like, but in the end most women will choose to do people work rather than numbers-and-things work. And why not?
But that is all by the way, and a distraction. Let us get this straight.
It is wrong and it is a gross injustice to maintain a public school system at taxpayers’ expense that impose a one-size-fits-all policy on the education of children.
It is wrong to submit the education of children to the centralizing power of political pressure groups.
It is the right of every parent to direct the education of their children.
And it is wrong for political activists to interfere with that right.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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