Slate writer who admits she’s poorly educated says you’re a bad person if you want good schools for your kids

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Dumbest Thing You’ll Read Today™…

Here’s the first paragraph:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

How dare you want what’s best for your child! At least the author is nice enough to clarify that pursuing educational opportunities for your kids is not quite as evil as murdering another person. Very generous of her.

The author is nice enough to reveal to us the underlying cause of her lack of coherent logic:

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book…I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all…

She’s admitting that she is extremely ignorant of the subjects that have formed the foundation of a well-rounded education in virtually every society in human history. She doesn’t know literature, doesn’t know history, has no appreciation for art, and doesn’t show any personal curiosity or drive to learn anything about the world around her on her own.

But, wait! It’s OK! She had the opportunity to get drunk with a diverse group of people! Seriously, this is the argument she makes to prove that she had a great education:

Also remember that there’s more to education than what’s taught. As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music, and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

I’m sure parents everywhere will be relieved to learn that chugging beers is just as good as an education as actually learning all that boring reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmatic nonsense. 

Problem solved, everyone! We’ll just fire all the teachers, burn all the books, and turn the schools into bars. 

Joking aside, this is liberal hypocrisy at its worst. The author is asking people to do something that is directly against their own self-interest, with no recognizable benefit to them, all for the hope that some ephemeral benefit might be bestowed upon the collective at some future date. 

It’s no wonder many of the comments were asking if this article more properly belonged at The Onion.