A Job Half Done

School boards are still democratically controlled. The school board is one of the few arenas left where old-fashioned democracy can prevail. Those 150 students have 300 parents and one hopes a lot of other sympathizers. It will be interesting to see what happens at the next school board election. The town looks like it is in a conservative region.

Sometimes winning elections isn’t enough. For example:

Congress?federal bureaucracy
School board ? teachers and staff

If I thought that the schools did a great deal of good, I might regard them as in some sense worth fighting for. But I regard schools in their modern form as positively detrimental to education, so I see only upside in abandoning them en masses.

That should have been:

Congress -> federal bureaucracy
School board -> eachers and staff

It’s worse than that, MC. The proper picture is
School board -> federal bureaucracy.
The Dept. Ed. has threatened to withhold grants and to use its vast resources to sue school districts that don’t bow to That Hideous Strength.

Conservatives and the People of the Way (i.e, the meta-Church), have got to stop thinking they can recapture and reform once-respected institutions. The sickness is terminal. The only solution is to burn it down and sow salt on the ground.

Hey, guys! What are we talkin’ about?

I will admit that sometimes democracy can be thwarted and sometimes democracy can lead to grievous errors, but I have seen it work at the local level with the right people and sufficient effort. It is worth the try. A little town like this one should be able to turn this around locally. The kids are already showing the way. This is where a local Benedict Option might actually succeed. If not here, then where?

Leo,
the local control is mostly illusory. Most of these things are determined by federal and state mandates and by the threat of civil rights litigation.

@Leo – There is nothing intrinsically good about democracy – it is merely a means to an end. When good ends are not being achieved, nor even aimed-at, then democracy is doing harm.

It is a mistake to be loyal to democracy as an ideal – not least because its meaning is so fluid and open-ended that it is almost impossible to pin down, and two ‘democratic’ systems may have nothing *at all* in common.

It is rather like the way that British people are loyal to ‘The National Health Service’ instead of simply regarding it as a way of providing (or failing to provide) health services – and an organization which is utterly different now from how it was when it began. It is like being loyal to a pig in a poke!

The best organizations are not democratic: the CJCLDS is not democratic. The best organizations are guided by Men acting in obedience to God (as best they can).

What modern society needs is power/ responsibility (especially moral responsibility) for decisions with specific individuals – and never with ‘voters’. However, this would not be of value unless the individuals were well motivated. The biggest problem with modern democracy is the corruption of the desires of people. As a society we i The West need true and good *leadership* more than ever – although it is all-but extinct – democracy will not (certainly will not) give us this.

I don’t see that battle ever being won because most people won’t acknowledge there is one. My wife homeschools our children, and every so often she makes the mistake of posting something critical about the public schools on facebook. Then all of the other neighborhood moms get on and are all defensive about their choice to send their kids to public school. They all have the attitude that since this is Utah our schools are somehow better and they aren’t corrupted like the rest of the states, but they don’t really believe that or else they wouldn’t feel the need to respond so strongly.

It’s only going to get worse from here on out, and now that gay marriage has been forced on us the topic of homosexuality is going to start rapidly showing up in all aspects of the curriculum (if it wasn’t already there before).

I understand that not everyone can homeschool. There are other options though. One of my co-workers spends tens of thousands of dollars a year to send his kids to Catholic school. It’s a sacrifice, but his children are worth more than new cars or exotic vacations. I wish I saw that attitude more in the LDS church, but I’m not holding out hope that we’ll see the public schools in Utah empty any time soon.

I think this little community using a local election (notwithstanding the limitations and faults of democracy in general) to take back their school from whatever madness has seized it would be a good hill to take and defend. This may not be a tidal change in the culture, but it could be a local victory that could benefit a decade or two or more of vulnerable children. If the Benedict Option is to succeed, it would be little local enclaves like this that will make it viable. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173215

Also, this is a particularly promising case because it is the girls who are pushing back against a male superintendent. The optics of this are not favorable to the left. The vulnerability of the left is when their various victim classes are in conflict with each other. Don’t burn down the school. That is the Furguson way. Fire the Superintendent.