You may wonder, What’s a libertarian school? Good question. It’s not Summerhill. Read Mitchell Robinson’s post about Thales Academy in Apex, North Carolina, which is a voucher school.
It’s a low-cost, low-quality Private school that’s designed to standardize students and protect them from creative or critical thinking. It’s yet another entrant in DeVos’ “Cabinet of Horrors.” More of this and we will slip back into primordial slime.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I started reading the article, but I had to stop and ask if this is real. Is it? It can’t true. This must be parody. “Luddy made his fortune by building kitchen ventilation systems, making him ideally-suited to create a new school from scratch.” No. No. Just no.
Tongue in cheek!
“The bottom line is that Bob Luddy’s Thales Academy is less a school than it is a school-shaped ATM that allows Mr. Luddy and his partners to receive state tax incentives for school construction and redirected tax dollars through state-sponsored “education savings accounts” (AKA, “private school vouchers”)
Sending public money to private schools without accountability will not only lead to those that will abuse the arrangement, it will open the door to those trying to shape young minds to their way of thinking whether it is right wing political ideology or religion. One of the reasons that the right wing rejects public education is the belief that public schools and universities spread the “liberal agenda.” They see public education as the “Sodom and Gomorrah” from which students must be rescued. Of course, they also see intellectualism as anti-religion, and they believe that religion is the answer to everything. Unfortunately, this is the bias under which they operate.
Public schools are not perfect, but at least they aspire to to their best for all students. Carving up public money to send to a variety of unaccountable entities is bad policy for a country that needs to be more unified, not divided. It is pathetic that the radical right wing is dictating education policy in this country while public schools struggle to keep the lights on. Public schools do not try to represent as particular political agenda. Teachers in public schools are liberal, independent and conservative voters. Teachers teach critical thinking, not political agendas. In public education we will not see anyone with a jet that can be used to visit various satellite campuses. Public schools are accountable for the tax dollars they spend.
“school-shaped ATM” — NICE one
This is monetized child abuse.
Good morning Diane and everyone,
This is a little off topic but I just went to the NYS Health Department website to see what vaccinations are required before kids can enroll in a school. They are:
Diphtheria and Tetanus and Pertussis
Polio
Measles, Mumps, Rubella
Hepatitis B
Varicella (Chickenpox)
Meningococcal conjugate vaccine (older kids)
Haemophilus influenza type B (younger kids)
Pneumococcal conjugate (younger kids)
My point is that we have many of these diseases under control and/or know how to treat them with good treatments. Yet, we are about to send students, faculty and staff into school buildings with a highly contagious virus for which we have NO reliable vaccine, NO really excellent treatment methods and NO real understanding of the long term effects of this virus. Just think about that for a minute.
I have been thinking of little else, Mamie. What we are about to do is Trump-level insane, based as it is on Trump-level wishful, magical thinking.
You are so right! No one should be back in classrooms at this point. We know that in class learning is far superior to remote but is sickness and death better?
At least in NY the positivity rate at the moment is under 1%. With careful planning and precautions, the virus may be able to be contained. For most of the south and some of the west, going back to school with positivity rates as high as 22%, going back to school is a reckless, ill-fated notion, I am afraid. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity
Don’t worry. Not long after the kids get back in school, New York will be back where it was.
I hope NY can keep it together. Some European countries have managed to do it, but I fear you are correct.
Ah, Summerhill, required reading for Temple education undergrads in the early Sixties. That was pure libertarianism.
Watching that creepy video on “direct instruction” technique with all the hand signals, and all I kept thinking was, it’s really obedience school. For children of color, instead of pets. Wow.
If we add the “broken windows” discipline to the conditioning of minority students, we can see that this is another racist, colonial approach that public tax dollars are being used to fund.
In the pics of the visit by Mikey Dense and Ditzy DeVoid to the Thales Academy, they are shown entering a classroom with masks on (Ditzy, of course, has a bespoke mask of the same cloth as her dress) but then talking to the class without their masks. Way to model classroom safety, Mikey, Ditzy!
Quote of the day: “Study hard. Pray harder,” Mikey told the students.
Maybe that was “prey harder.” He is, after all, Trump Glee Squad Captain and Head of Nonresponse to the Coronavirus Pandemic for the Trump Maladministration.
Nothing the Pre-Socratic philosopher Thales wrote survives. We have only fragments of notions attributed to him by later writers. One of these was that all things are made of water. Perhaps this was the attraction to Pence the Dense. The entire country is under water as a result of his administration’s mismanagement, and much of it will be quite literally under water if Trump policies re: global warming and fossil fuels continue.
…designed to standardize students and STOP them from creative or critical thinking.
Enter the “alienated institutionalization of life”.
It seems nipping that “creative or critical thinking” in the bud, is a must, for a
life predetermined by institutional definition, rank and title.
Cogs (bureaucrats) don’t grow on trees. They are the fruit of bureaucratic standardization. Persuading people they are defective in some predifined
bureaucratic manner, is a class filter, no matter what you call it.
Bureaucratic indoctrination- The instrument to negate, to empty the intrinsic
spirit of its power and to fill the vacuum with new content, appropiate to the
destined role of a subordinate of/to the bureaucracy.
As if we were born to spend our life institutionalized…
We can also add the danger of endless surveillance that leads to a “Minority Report” existence.
“Persuading people they are defective in some predifined
bureaucratic manner,”
Is the result of what I call the “medicalization model” of education that has been unquestionably instituted with the standards and testing malpractice regime . Run a series of tests to diagnose the defects of the student and then apply the right corrective from the formulary of approved adjuvants to the student. Come back later, and re-diagnose and slightly alter the corrective if needed.
Better yet, do it all online, you know like online medicine, so that the diagnosing and correctives can be done all the time that the student is supposedly learning which also serves to cut out the expensive middleman known as a teacher.
Mitchell Robinson’s post is pitch perfect.
The school and practices/policies that support it are suitable additions, as you say to DeVos’ “Cabinet of Horrors.”
But primordial slime? Sounds like a topic for STEM with ingenious teachers brewing stuff.
Why do Koch-ALEC trained libertarians fear creative and critical thinking? It doesn’t make sense. Why do they want to eliminate the freedom to think creatively and critically?
The Encyclopedia Britannica says Libertarisam is a “political philosophy that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value. It may be understood as a form of liberalism, the political philosophy associated with the English philosophers John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, and the American statesman Thomas Jefferson.
“Liberalism seeks to define and justify the legitimate powers of government in terms of certain natural or God-given individual rights. These rights include the rights to life, liberty, private property, freedom of speech and association, freedom of worship, government by consent, equality under the law, and moral autonomy (the ability to pursue one’s own conception of happiness, or the “good life”). The purpose of government, according to liberals, is to protect these and other individual rights, and in general liberals have contended that government power should be limited to that which is necessary to accomplish this task.
“Libertarians are classical liberals who strongly emphasize the individual right to liberty. They contend that the scope and powers of government should be constrained so as to allow each individual as much freedom of action as is consistent with a like freedom for everyone else. Thus, they believe that individuals should be free to behave and to dispose of their property as they see fit, provided that their actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/libertarianism-politics
They only support their version of freedom, in other words an oxymoron of autocratic freedom.
autocratic freedom to a libertarian:
Definition: The power and freedom to take away everyone else’s freedom and power