The quantity of what color is the sky in your world? is very, very large here. I had to read through it a few times to make sure it wasn't an Onion article, but no, near as I can tell, the author actually means it.
The article's title is "If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person: A Manifesto". (I know: an obvious Onion headline, right? You understand my confusion!) Its point is laid pretty bare here:
I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)
Only a hard-core statist can have such supreme confidence in the hive mind, to state an absolute truth ("But rich people will always find a way to game the system"*) and then, without even so much as a single word of physical separation, utterly ignore it as though it did not exist ("That shouldn't be an argument against an all-in approach to public education..."). See: she said it, you believe it, that settles it. What are you, a cancer to the hive mind or something?**
I think I may have to propose a new, simplified definition of statist as one who does not merely fail to recognize irony, but actively refuses to believe that it exists.
Oh, but it gets better. Check out my submission for "top zinger" among a truly bumper crop of The Stupid (emphasis mine):
And parents have a lot of power. In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in. (By the way: Banning private schools isn’t the answer. We need a moral adjustment, not a legislative one.)
Just--wow.
Please, lady, pleease make your unicorn shit the rainbows again. It's simply astounding to behold...
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* Got news for ya, hon: ain't just "rich people" who understand how to "game the system". But then again, you probably think that anyone who doesn't vote, simply does so from ignorance or apathy...right? It's truly amazing how you have this all figured out...
** She's clearly got her sense of duty...and, well, I've got mine.
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