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Comment by traviswt | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a great case against public education, since the mechanism to address this "whoever is in power decides" situation is of course competition and free choice.

Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases. Parents are the ones who should choose, because that is how we have diversity. Home schooling gives parents the most choice, private school a step down, but public school is where the parent matters the least and we end up in perpetual holy wars like this.

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I agree with this strongly except indoctrination is not inevitable. It’s not synonymous with teaching/learning.

But it absolutely points to the problem of government in education. I don’t think most people realize how recently the schools came under the thumb of the federal government. Department of Education only started in 1980 and it hasn’t exactly raised the bar in that time.

It places constraints on educators (the experts) which make it easy to administer but harder for the educators to educate.

> Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases

Not for a second. There is such thing as education.

Exactly, and its actually generally blue states that have centralised education, and places like florida that allow chartered schools and similar ones.

So if you want to setup a private school in florida with LGBTQ+ education, I'm pretty sure you can just do that.

Not if you want to receive school voucher funds.

OK, and? It's still a free market. If people want schools with LGBTQ+ education, set one up, and do it. You can.

Why should local government help? Especially if that local government was specifically elected to not support issues like this?

Are you talking about a hypothetical place where schools are self-funded or something, or are you talking about Florida still? It's not that much of a free market if conservative-friendly charter schools get subsidized by the state but LGBTQ friendly schools don't.

Because local government has the power to collect taxes. If it chooses to selectively hand them out only to favored political institutions, then in practice this means many students won't be able to afford to attend their favored schools, and some schools will be financially non-viable. It may be the case that such schools will still exist in this environment (with a smaller student body), but that doesn't make the issue less problematic.

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