Schools and Opportunities

In the United States everyone under 18 is required to go to school. That is pretty common in most of the civilized world; but, it was not always so. Up until the 1900s kids either worked on the farm or in factories and coal mines by the time they were about 12. Back in the middle ages and prior almost nobody knew how to read and write. In the 1800s it was even illegal to teach slaves how to read in much of the United States. As industry grew in the 1900s, the country needed more educated people. Prior to that the only poor and middle class people that learned to read were either in the church or the military.

It has been said that "knowledge is power" and restricting people from having access to the history of the world and an understanding of how we got where we are was restricted to the "elite", to "those in power and their children", the rest of us did not have a need to know in the eyes of the rulers of this world. Collectivism, working together, is the idea that we all deserve a chance to prove our value, a chance to prove that we can do at least as or more than others who have an advantage in the game already because of wealth, collectivism means a belief in merit over birth and connections.

I shall simplify. What method should be used to determine who succeeds? Should you succeed because your family can pay for you to succeed, because you are the most suitable and best to succeed or because of a lottery drawing? Those are all things we can build the rules around that determine who succeeds. Which do you choose? If you choose merit then you need to create a system that allows people to compete based on merit and merit alone. By destroying the public school system, do you really believe that people who cannot afford a decent school have the same chance as do those who can afford better teachers?