You can hold this opinion without indoctrination. If you believe that inequality in education is wrong you will likely feel this way as creating a private system without inequality seems very unlikely. Not to say that public systems are necessarily equal. Obviously they can fail here too.
Public schooling was created because the government was threatened by catholic parochial education being widely available.
Catholicism has fewer cultural proscriptions than what the predominant waspy culture wanted. For example, Catholic schools in native American reservations didn't seek to undo Indian culture. This state of affairs was not acceptable and there was a chance said children would become catholic.
Thus, the WASPs, unable to organize schooling in their own churches for their children at an affordable price (a problem which still exists today.. catholic schools are empirically cheaper than other christian schools), turned to the government as the only way to combat the papists.
I am not anti public school, but I just take issues with the idea that public schools original purpose was for equality. As Thomas Sowell points out in "education in america", catholic schools do better than public ones for minorities even when accounting for socieconomic factors. This is probably why minorities disproportionately favor vouchers.
Public schools leading to equality is today a 'fact' asserted with little empirical data and any attempt at refutation is met with all kinds of accusations.
Yes. Whether it was the California missions or the Jesuit missions of Canada, by far the missionaries were better than the other European authorities. Perfect? No. Better... Yes
This is a good article detailing the original approach of the church before the authorities started getting involved. It's not what you think it is.
I will read it though I have my doubts regarding the scholastic rigor of a wordpress blog written by what appears to be a catholic apologist (not that that makes them wrong just suspect as is any apologist).
But with all respect, you don't in fact know what I think.
> But with all respect, you don't in fact know what I think.
That's fair. I shouldn't have said that.
Re the blog post... it cites several books and scholarly texts, and mainly chooses which ones to present. Now of course, that's a form of bias, but the books and source materials are explicitly listed and I believe they paint the picture even clearer than the blog post.
