Rutland Herald: Rutland Vermont News & Information By DAVID CRARY The Associated Press

“The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war,” [D. James Kennedy, pastor of 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and host of a nationally broadcast religious program] said in a recent commentary. …

Yet even … [R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who last year said the denomination needed an “exit strategy” from public schools] says there will be a cost to America if the call is widely heeded.

“One of the great missions of the public schools was to bring together children of divergent backgrounds — I benefited from that,” he said. “There is a loss in this.”
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Capitol Hill Blue: Abandoning our public schools is not the answer By JOHN M. CRISP

The great failure of public education is that our society has been unwilling to provide the same access to quality education at all schools that we provide at our best schools. Therefore, our schools appear to stumble from crisis to crisis amid periodic calls for their replacement with voucher programs and more homeschooling.

Abandonment rather than improvement of our public schools would be an unfortunate choice. I’m attracted to the ideas of the late Neil Postman, who argues in his book “The End of Education” that to the extent that our nation enjoys a common shared culture, that culture has been developed and is passed on from generation to generation at least partly by means of the shared knowledge and ideas that we acquire during our common experience in the public schools.

In other words, because our public schools are a place where we develop a set of common stories, myths and experiences — George Washington crossing the Delaware, Betsy Ross sewing the first flag, even the fear of being sent to the principal — they encourage a sense of a shared heritage that helps pull our country together.

Homeschooling and vouchers for private schools … tend to pull us apart. All in all, our public-school system has served us well; it would be better to repair its faults than to abandon it.