The National Association for Personal Rights in Education, a parental group, urges the defeat of the constitutional amendment to be voted on Nov. 3 that would impose on the state the obligation to assume preponderant responsibility (presumably at least 51 percent) for funding the public schools.
The most dangerous feature of the amendment is its rewording of the present Constitution to empower the state to strip from the family the right to control the education of its children. This is sheer educational statism.
This amendment could impose an enormous burden on the taxpayers without any demonstrated need or plan. A 50 percent increase in the state income tax is being predicted. Given a 51 to 49 balance between the state and other sources, any increase in property taxes or federal dollars would necessitate a greater state funding. Such open-ended pyramiding would be a costly nightmare for the taxpayers.
To blunt opposition, proponents of the amendment, after having rejected two chances to guarantee protection from the constant push for property taxes, are now talking of the likelihood of reduced property taxes. Such talk was used to pass the state income tax-to the subsequent disillusionment of taxpayers. If taxpayers accept this argument now, there is a bridge in Brooklyn that we would like to sell them.
The public school of today is not the public school of yesteryear. In its earlier decades this school offered-for those who accepted it-many excellent features inherited from Christian civilization such as intellectual intensity, character formation based on morality rooted in religion and the development of human capital.
But in the opinion of many families, including many one-time defenders of the system, these features have been widely displaced by educational philosophies stemming from the psychological doctrines of Wundt, Hall, Dewey, Skinner, Watson, Rogers, Simon, Columbia University and others. From these have come a lessening, often a denial, of the intellect, the manipulation rather than the education of children, the rejection of free will and moral responsibility, behaviorism, lack of academic discipline in the development of human capital, a playground mentality and other factors unacceptable to the intellectual, academic, moral and religious philosophies of many families.
The public system blames lack of money for its difficulties, but the real causes of decline in the state system are to be found in educational philosophies gone amiss. The amendment actually is hostile to the public interest because it would further entrench a state teacherhood that holds its preferential tax-supported position not through excellence, as teachers should, but through manipulation of the political system.
With those citizens, especially the poor and the poor middle-class, who through academic conviction and religious conscience dissent from the state system already having difficulty in providing schooling for their children, their problems will grow even greater under the state school taxing and spending policies that would result from this amendment-to the further violation of their personal constitutional rights to liberty and equal protection of the laws under the Bill of Rights of the Illinois Constitution.
