If you Build it, They Will Come (and take it over) - Granite Grok

If you Build it, They Will Come (and take it over)

Apparently, there are some bills being considered in Concord that would place limits on the ideas that teachers at publicly-funded institutions can endorse during work hours.

The details of the bills are, I think, less interesting than the arguments that are being made against them.  That is, the people who oppose the bills are complaining that it’s an abuse of government power to use laws to try to control what people say.

That sounds reasonable.  Government should be neutral on speech, right?

But if that’s true, then the platforms that are being used by those teachers should have their tax funding withdrawn.  Because the people who control those platforms are already using government power — specifically, laws that tax people — to promote their own ideology while suppressing others.

In other words, many of the opponents of this bill don’t want the government to remain neutral on speech.  The government is already on their side, and they want to keep it there.

Which is to say, they’re perfectly comfortable with compelling you to pay taxes to support the propagation of opinions that you disbelieve and abhor, so long as they are the correct opinions.

And who will decide which opinions are correct?  Whichever ideologues have managed to take control of the public school system (including the state university system).

But here’s an idea.  Instead of trying to ‘fix’ one mistake by making a second mistake, why don’t we just undo the first?

If we set up tax-funded institutions that can be used to promote some political ideas while suppressing others, they will be used for that.  That is a certainty.

I used to think that we could safely keep public schools if they stayed away from political subjects, like history, and even evolutionary biology, to focus solely on neutral subjects, like reading, and mathematics.

But now even courses in those subjects are becoming politicized.  They are becoming less about instilling technical competence, and more about indoctrinating students with a particular world view.

It comes down to this:  If every subject in schools is going to be political, then the government shouldn’t be funding schools, period.  Because the funding itself is choosing sides.

After all, as Jefferson also noted:  ‘It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.’   To use taxes to pay for schools that prop up ideas incapable of standing on their own is not just sinful and tyrannical.  It’s wasteful and stupid as well.

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