Last time on "What If the Government..." we asked the question: "What if the government ran the telephone company?"
Today we ask: "What if the government were in charge of the schools?".
Answer: One can only imagine the sorts of things that would go wrong if the government were in charge of the schools. For example, insane bureaucratic rules would mean that it could take up to 14 years to build new school buildings. Incompetent oversight could mean that hundreds of millions of dollars in construction costs would be wasted before people figured out that a new school was built on, say, a toxic waste dump.
Political pressure from lunatic fringe activists of both the left and right would cause classics of American literature, such as Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn, to be censored and removed from school libraries.
Millions of people would graduate from high school and even college as functional illiterates. And even those students who wanted to learn would be prevented from doing so by other children with chronic behavior problems against whom the school authorities are powerless to take effective action.
Again, we don't have to worry about any of this, because these nightmare scenarios would only come to pass if we actually put the government (ha! ha!) in charge of the schools. So please join us next time for another edition of "What If the Government..." and remember this thought experiment the next time somebody talks about expanding the role of government.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 11, 2003 07:13 AM