Idle Doodle: School is just a formality

I have a friend from high school who is staunchly apolitical. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think a lot more people, mostly those who think they know politics but don't have any solid ethical or philosophical underpinning, should be like him.

He has two elementary-aged children and the older one is far more advanced compared to the peers in her class. It makes sense. She told me once with a twinkle in her eye that math is fun. He says what's wrong with public school is that there is no real opportunity for people who do better than others and everybody is dragged down to the lowest common denominator.

So her daughter gets almost nothing from her public school and gains nearly all of her education from the private after-school program.

He then said that school is just a formality. Something they have to do, but don't really gain much, if anything, out of it.

So true. But since he doesn't pay attention to politics, he hasn't really thought of solutions, only something he has to put up with.

The reason why I'm glad he's not apolitical is that if he were, given the political climate of where we live, his solution would probably be to increase funding to a broken system. Which is why we are where we are. Throwing dollar bills at a system that inherently has no competition to force them to better themselves has been the status quo losing proposition for decades. 

The real fix is to remove the system. Preferably to abolish public schools and implement a voucher system. Or alternatively, to introduce competition among public schools by allowing parents to choose which public schools to send their children to while tying funding to enrollment.