ALL MEN ARE PRORATED EQUAL 7/25/08

Blogging does funny things to a guy. I started out with a bag full of police reports accumulated during my time in that job which I made the foundation of strikemepink, pulling them out and using them whenever I ran out of other material to use. Luckily Long Island provided me with quite a bit of such material. In my twenty-five years in Westchester I never encountered anything like the succession of scandals I came across in a fraction of that time out here. Just the $11million ripoff of the Roslyn school district was enough to keep me going for weeks. Then there was the spending spree of the fire departments and lately the double-dipping school scandal along with other such dodges which never seem to end and always furnish material for a sermon to the congregation.

Gradually then I have gotten to the point that my horizon has expanded and I no longer confine myself to police stories and related matters. Like Dr. Jekyll looking into a mirror and seeing himself morphing into Mr. Hyde, I see myself turning into an all-around commentator on all kinds of things that never stimulated me before. A guru, in other words.

That brings me to a subject that’s been bothering me lately, one connected with education which by rights shouldn’t bother me because mine was finished a long time ago and so was my children‘s, so it’s only of academic interest to me now (no joke intended). My stake in the education question today is that of a taxpayer only, but that doesn’t make me irrelevant to it. Quite the contrary, as a lot of taxpayers will be quick to let you know.

I am bothered by the insistence I hear that education for all, as exists in this county, has to be equal education for all, or it violates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, common decency and equal justice under law. Actually the Constitution says nothing about education, but that doesn’t mean that it was illegal or anything like that. A series of laws were passed determining how land should be allocated in the new states looking for admission, and in so doing speaking well of education and reserving some of the land for its support. Popular education was the objective, but nothing was said of equality. Everybody would learn to read and write but not everybody would be taught Latin and Greek.

Surprisingly it was the southern segregationists of the 1950’s who first introduced the idea of “equality” as a requirement between schools when they defended segregated southern education as “separate but equal” and therefore not really discriminatory against blacks and not requiring integration to level things out. Just one picture in Life magazine showing the squalid conditions of a black classroom was enough to explode this theory. In 1954 the Supreme Court in its Brown v. Board of Education decision ordered full integration of all public schools nationwide.

The South should never have tried to maintain that equality prevailed in its segregated schools. What they overlooked was the fact that the South was the poorest section of the country and hardly had enough money to maintain its white schools at a decent level, without trying to claim that its black schools were on the same level. A claim like this defies reason, which tells us that the first duty of parents toward their children is to bring them up, i.e., educate them safely and equip them as fully as possible for adult life. In a section where the whites didn’t have enough to do this for their own children it was not to be expected that they would do it for black children.

Integration solved the problem in a way. Blacks who went to well-to-do white schools got to share in the superior education there. Poor white schools admitting blacks got poorer. Eventually re-segregation restored the status quo ante. Recognizing this, black pressure groups stopped pressing for integration but campaigned for equality instead.

As I’ve just said, this demand runs up against universal law. The law is that parents must provide for their children first and the children of other people second. This is the deepest human instinct that exists. In this country it translates into support for the schools one’s children attend and only after this has been provided can there be support for the ones they don’t attend.

Since all government everywhere exists of necessity to redistribute money, we don’t say that the poor shall have nothing from the contributions of the taxpayers. Once you get past subsistence amounts for food, clothing, shelter, and education, though, the problems of redistribution begin. As we have seen, there are people who want it to go to the length of equalizing, well, all incomes. This will never happen because the taxpaying class will always find ways to evade the full weight of taxation, but the demand for equal education, which sounds so reasonable to so many people, is a big step in that direction.

I’ll admit the idea didn’t sound so bad to me when it was first promoted in New York, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that equality was going to be achieved by taking my money and instead of spending it on my local schools, spending it on other ones far away. With my provincial, parochial outlook, spiced with xenophobia, irredentism, lycanthropy, morosis and other symptoms, it just wouldn’t do. It’s the same mindset that makes me balk at the idea of universal health insurance. This country is infested with millions of junkies, alcoholics, chronic overeaters and other thin-icers for whose mistakes I will be paying. Sorry, but I have enough to do to pay for my own.

Equality is an unlucky word anyway. There was a chap in France during the Revolution who renamed himself Egalité . It did him no good. He went to the guillotine anyway. As thousands cheered.