Writing this week for Townhall.com in anticipation of his next
televised special for 20/20, maverick news correspondent
John Stossel penned another damning indictment of public
education:
At the meeting we watched, lots of important people
attended: a director of programs for exceptional children, a
resource teacher, a district special education coordinator, a
counselor and even a gym teacher. The meeting went on for 45
minutes. ‘I’m seeing great progress in him,” said the principal.”So
I don’t have any concerns.” Well, Gena still had a concern: Her son
[age 18 and a senior in one of South Carolina’s public high
schools] could barely read.
Was Dorian just incapable of learning? No. ABC News did see
great progress in him — when we sent him to a private, for-profit
tutoring center. In just 72 hours of tutoring, Sylvan Learning
Center brought Dorian’s reading up more than two grade levels.
In 72 hours, a private company did what South Carolina’s
government schools could not do in over 12 years.
Unlike his perpetually bemused, celebrity-chasing co-anchor,
Stossel is too smart to take the privatization meme out of
education and into areas where it has more trouble. Accordingly,
you won’t find him comparing the strategic airlift capacity of
honorable mercenary firms like Blackwater Security Consulting with
that of the U.S. Air Force, for example. His bias in favor of
private enterprise is, for the most part, laudable.
A related thought: My friend Bill has long been of the opinion
that the proper response to the Islamist attacks on America of
September 11, 2001 would have been to have Congress issue “letters
of marque and reprisal” that essentially put a publicly-funded
bounty on the heads of terrorists like Osama bin Hidin’. It is a
source of consternation for Mr. Bill and others who hew closely to
the libertarian line (not least among them Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas)
that the actual American response involved toppling governments in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
I sympathize very much with that viewpoint, but find that
relying on letters of marque and reprisal ducks the question of
whether the machinery of law enforcement is equipped for conflict
with non-governmental but multinational and parasitic entities like
al Qaeda. Such letters also impart an undeserved celebrity or
notoriety to their targets. In our present situation, they would
leave the false impression that democracy’s quarrel is with
particular individuals rather than with the
death-cult-and-fantasy-caliphate ideologies they espouse.
In other words, Bin Hidin’ and his ilk don’t deserve spots on
the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, because — in an irony that should
appeal to progressives but frequently escapes the notice of people
on the left — terrorist motivations matter more to long-term
American and Western security than the number of bombings and
beheadings any one terrorist is responsible for.
AM I WALKING THE LINE between between prudence and thought crime,
with the Inquisition on one side and the ACLU on the other? Indeed
I am. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, echoing the scriptural
admonition that “by their fruits ye shall know them,” “ideas have
consequences.” In this case, it’s theological ideas that have
consequences, in large part because many of his followers remain
overawed by Mohammed’s triple career as prophet, politician, and
warlord. It seldom occurs to the alumni of madrassas and
radicalized mosques that this dinner-theater parody of Christ’s
threefold office (priest, prophet, and king) is forever doomed to
the off-Broadway circuit because it’s miscast and you can’t dance
to it. Moreover, brave souls who try to hum along anyway tend to
attract fatwas from imams most likely to resemble used-car salesmen
in the dhimmi and Dickensian mold of characters like Uriah Heep.
While I’m ruminating about the limitations of such antique tools
of statecraft as letters of marque and reprisal, it’s worth
remembering that John Quincy Adams, the underrated sixth president
of the United States (1825 to 1829), understood Islamism as well as anyone: “Adopting
from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law the doctrine of one
omnipotent God, [Mohammed] connected indissolubly with it the
audacious falsehood that he was himself His prophet and apostle.
Adopting from the new revelation of Jesus the faith and hope of
immortal life and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust
by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the
gratification of the sexual passion,” Quincy Adams wrote, too soon
to have modern scholars of comparative religion like Karen
Armstrong wrinkle their noses in distaste at his blunt and
allegedly ignorant speech.
Keenly attentive to libertarian aspects of history as he is, my
friend Bill probably knows that colonial privateers played a
crucial role in the American Revolution. Richard M. Ketchum’s
excellent book, Victory at Yorktown recently reminded me
that that battle might have turned out differently had three Yankee
privateers not attacked a sloop carrying a dispatch warning British
admiral Thomas Graves of the approaching French fleet. Admiral
Graves never got the message, because the captain of the sloop was
forced by the attacking privateers to run aground on Long Island.
To save the dispatch, he threw it overboard.
There are any number of other examples of private initiative
that helped the public good, but Bill perhaps forgets that even in
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of letters of marque
and reprisal, there was widespread recognition of a federal role in
national defense. Without such recognition, the Articles of
Confederation would not have yielded however grudgingly to the
Constitution, and the fledgling U.S. Navy and Marine Corps wouldn’t
have cut their teeth in fights with Muslim pirates who preyed on
shipping off the coast of Africa.
In short (and as Stossel reminds us), the case for abolishing
the Department of Education as a cabinet-level bureaucracy remains
strong. The case for abolishing the Department of Defense? Not so
much.
