There is a
whole lot of fussin’ and cryin’ and whinin’ from public school board members
around Louisiana over the Legislature’s proposed education savings accounts
(ESAs): Allen,
Bossier,
Vernon,
Jackson
and Ouachita, St.
Landry.
The Allen
Parish superintendent fulminated:
Superintendent Brad Soileau said there are
too many unanswered questions with regards to the funding including what
happens when a student leaves the district.
“You put this bill out there, yet there are
hundreds of unanswered questions,” Soileau said. “Three of the biggest is you
are going to take our money and send it elsewhere but they don’t have the same
accountability system. They are not required to take the LEAP test and they are
not held to the same standard. How is that fair? What happens when a special
education student with accommodations leaves the district? How much is
this going to cost the state? When you look at other states that have done
this, it’s been a tremendous cost.”
Like most school officials, Soileau feels
public schools are best for students. However, he said he is not against
parents’ choice.
“We just want a level playing field,
especially if you are going to give parents a choice,” he said. “I’m not
against parent choice, but there is a difference between a parent choosing to
put their child in a private school and the state funding that out of our money
and not holding people to the same standards as public schools.”
“It’s one thing to say you are not going to
hold those schools to a standard when you are not funding them, but when you
are going to start handing over money we are going to use to run our schools,
then you need to hold everybody accountable. That’s all we are asking for.”
His cry-baby
diatribe is representative of the rest.
It isn’t
difficult to understand what is going on here:
loss of money and power and influence; hurt pride and bruised egos;
government officials who believe they are entitled to ever increasing amounts
of taxpayers’ money.
They are in
dire need of a reminder of what wise Christian men have said about love of
money, pride, etc. St.
John of Sinai (+563 A.D.), whose spiritual guidebook The Ladder of
Divine Ascent remains essential reading in the Orthodox Church to this day,
offers them timely advice if they will deign to listen to it:
Avarice, or love of money, is the worship
of idols,2 a daughter of unbelief, an excuse for infirmities, a foreboder of
old age, a harbinger of drought, a herald of hunger.
The lover of money sneers at the Gospel and is a wilful transgressor. He who has attained to love scatters his money. But he who says that he lives for love and for money has deceived himself.
The beginning of love of money is the pretext of almsgiving, and the end of it is hatred of the poor. So long as he is collecting he is charitable, but when the money is in hand he tightens his hold (Step 16: 2, 3, 8; via the PDF of The Ladder and Orthodox Ethos).
Pride is denial of God, an invention of the devil, the despising of men, the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of sterility, flight from divine assistance, the precursor of madness, the herald of falls, a foothold for satanic possession, source of anger, door of hypocrisy, the support of demons, the guardian of sins, the patron of unsympathy, the rejection of compassion, a bitter inquisitor, an inhuman judge, an opponent of God, a root of blasphemy.
The beginning of pride is the consummation of vainglory; the middle is the humiliation of our neighbour, the shameless parade of our labours, complacency in the heart, hatred of exposure; and the end is denial of God’s help, the extolling of one’s own exertions, fiendish character (Step 23: 1, 2; ibid.).
Aside from
all of that, this rather ugly behavior by the school officials was actually
foreseen by our wiser Southern forefathers.
Amongst the wisest was Robert Dabney, another one of the great sons of
Virginia, who was a Christian minister, an officer on General Stonewall
Jackson’s staff during the War, a philosopher, and more besides. After the War, there was a mighty push to
institute Yankee-style universal education across the Southern States, and
Virginia eventually succumbed to the push.
Rev. Dabney’s criticisms of what arose in Virginia apply just as much,
if not more so, to Louisiana’s whiney, bed-wetting school board officers of two
and half centuries later. (From pgs.
263-4 in his Discussions,
Volume IV, Secular):
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2024/04/garlington-the-pathetic-last-stand-of-the-public-education-monopoly/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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