gat

and librarian, plus three of the eleven teachers and all those accessory personnel. We’d have the
work those folks do absorbed by the remaining eight teachers and whatever community volunteer
assistance we could recruit. This would still allow a class size of only seventeen kids per teacher,
a ratio big-city teachers would kill to get, and hardly more than half the load one-room Walden
teachers carried. Yet it would save this little community over half a million dollars yearly.
In our hypothetical example, we left Benson with eight teachers, twice the number Walden
enjoyed in its two hundred-year experience with one-room schooling. Only a calculating machine
could consider a large, consolidated school to which children must commute long distances as a
real advance in human affairs. An advance in wasting time certainly. Consider this angle now: who
in your judgment has a moral right to decide what size weight can be fastened on the backs of the
working citizens of Benson? Whose decision should that be?
From a chart included in the Education Week article, I saw that Vermont school bureaucrats
extracted $6,500 in 1995 for each student who sat in their spanking new schools. That computes
at $162 a week per kid. Is it fair to ask how private schools provided satisfactory service for a
national average of only $3,000 a kid, about $58 a week, the same year? Or how parochial
schools did it for $2,300, $44 a week? Or homeschools for a mere $500 or $1,000, or about $10
or $20 a week? Do you believe public school kids were better served for the additional money
spent?
Those other places could do it because they didn’t support an anthill of political jobs, political
purchases, and political routines. These other types of schooling understood—some through
tradition, some through analysis, some through trusting inner voices—that transferring
educational responsibility from children, parents, and communities to certified agents of the state
erodes the value base of human life which is forever grounded in local and personal sovereignty.
5 Shortly after this twelfth defeat at the hands of local citizens, the state stepped in to override the judgment of the
voters. In January 1996, the Vermont State Senate passed a bill to forcibly "lend" the Benson School District the full
amount of its twelve-time citizen-rejected budget. Benson voters would now pay the full amount demanded by the
school district plus interest!
Natural Selection
In 1895, the National Education Association announced that school science courses should be
reorganized to teach evolution not as theory but as fact. Biology textbooks began to present
evolution to secondary schools and colleges with an extraordinary aggressiveness:
We do not know of any competent naturalist who has any hesitation in
accepting the general doctrine. (Yale University Press,1895)
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