Joseph —

I can’t judge Gov. Doyle’s balance of sincerity or hypocrisy, but I have to take polite and respectful exception to your argument here —

If he thinks the public schools are worth supporting with tax dollars, he should have sent his children there.

This would only be true if the governor’s second alternative were an exclusive, public school-only model. The fact that government has oozed into places it shouldn’t have and provided services best left to other agencies — health care, public transportation, education, and some social services — is a separate question from what do we do about it now.

While it would be much better to find private alternatives, and we should be hard at working setting them up and removing barriers to their formation and function, to call out the tumbrils and roll the heads off the government services, WHACK, would be mighty dicey before those alternatives are available.? The existing non-public schools couldn’t absorb it, any more than the public school system could absorb 150,000-plus private and home schooled students enrolling next Monday.

J. Gresham Machen, a Presbyertian?theologian from Princeton,?gave outstanding testimony?to a joint Congressional committee?against the establishment of a federal Department of Education — in 1927. I stand with him at this point, start to finish:

I think this is to be said — that when you eliminate an agency which has long been in operation you are doing something more serious than the avoidance of an entrance upon those activities; and I should have to examine the dangers which might result from the sudden elimination of such activities … I do feel, however, that there is a difference between the sphere of education and those other spheres. As I say, I think that when it comes to the training of human beings, you have to be a great deal more careful than you do in other spheres about preservation of the right of individual liberty and the principle of individual responsibility; and I think we ought to be plain about this — that unless we preserve the principles of liberty in this department there is no use in trying to preserve them anywhere else. If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.