As midterm elections approach, the campaign platform for tea party GOP California congressional candidate Harmer will probably downplay Harmer’s opinions on public schools, writes Nick Baumann for Mother Jones. Activities and written documents related to Harmer explain his position as one really much against the existence of public schools. He considers them bastions of “socialism in education”. By cutting out the perceived socialism, Harmer believes that American education could revert back to the way it was in its “first century of nationhood”.
Getting rid of public schools no problem within the race
David Harmer’s education opinions aren’t the very same as Meg Whitman who disagrees. Whitman is the California GOP gubernatorial candidate. Whitman has gone on record that she will work to strengthen the state’s public schools. The public school issue is something Harmer has already made up his mind about. “Abolish the Public Schools” was the name of a San Francisco Chronicle in 2000 that shows his views. In essence, Harmer advocates eliminating the Department of Education and any government funding of schools, then going back to allowing parents, trade guilds, associations, fraternities, churches and charities to fund education. There is still a problem though. This is what Baumann explains. When looking at the “education for all” past in The United States has, most people’s visions are a bit blurred on the truth of what occurred, John Rury of the University of Kansas explained. Rury points out that not long ago, even high school was considered a luxury. Being disabled meant you were not going to get an education. Women and minorities could not go either. Students who did make it past primary education were usually taught just “very basic literacy and computational skills” a mere four or five months out of the year. In order to remain competitive with the rest of the world, The United States ultimately adopted taxpayer-supported public schools. According to Rury, this had to occur. It had been the only way to pay the costs that originated from more teachers and more school years.
Making the tea party opinions disappear
Based on Baumann, the GOP candidate had to talk about how bad “socialism in education” was. This was as the book “School Choice: Why You Need It – How You Get It” came out as published by Harmer who worked for the Heritage Foundation. Harmer doesn’t talk about his plan to change the education system on his campaign site although you’d think that trying to get elected to Congress would bring this issue out.
Info from
Mother Jones
motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/david-harmer-abolish-public-schools
SF Gate
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2000/08/27/SC85034.DTL
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