Lengthening the School Year

There is now a conversation about the possibility of lengthening the school year. It is interesting that the discussion does not revolve around better education, but about child care. I have many issues with it, but let me summarise a few:

First, whenever the government makes a decision, one piece of or freedom is taken away. If the government mandates away from a 165 day school year to 200 or 260 days we lose the ability to make one more decision about our children's welfare and education. Sure, you can yank them out of government schools, but many families cannot afford private schools or are equipped to home school. We should remember the many lives that were lost on the battlefields of Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg and Antietam, the Argonne Forest, Iwo Jima, and now Iraq and Afghanistan - for our freedoms. They were hard won, they should not be easily lost.

If the government makes decisions about my child's welfare, it will not likely be in their best interest. When I make a decision about one child, I have a set of criteria and desired outcomes. When I make a decision about all my children, the criteria becomes more restrictive. When it is a classroom full, or a nation, the criteria is very restrictive and the outcomes will not fit all children well. Remember Rec-Soccer? When the order the team tee-shirts, they don't have time for a fitting, and usually some tiny kid spends the rest of the year running around in an XL tee-shirt. One size, or even three or four will not fit all.

There are all kinds of hidden costs. Educating our kids and providing them with supervision sounds good - but how many schools are we going to need to fit-out with air conditioning. And when you get a contractor to install AC in all these schools, take a guess with me - how well will it work? And that is just one hidden cost.

And I can't take credit for this, but radio personality Ed Norris said this on his program this morning: "If you don't do it well, don't give us more of it." Amen. There are numerous hard working, dedicated, passionate public school teachers at work in our county and our country. This is not a swipe aimed at them. But they would be the first to admit that budget constraints, class size, curriculum bureaucracy and a hundred other things makes doing their jobs very difficult.

The government is there to: "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare". It is not there to be everyone's Daddy, solving all our problems. That is our job.

Oh, and the government of the United States is to do one more thing:

...the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...

Are we going to pass on Liberty to our children, or a dependence on programs and subsidies because we were not strong enough to stand on our own two feet?