At first I thought a sardonic one-liner would be sufficient to deflate your predictable rightist harangue, until I thought about it for a while and realized you had done it again: completely replaced my arguments with one you could more effectively attack. Well, I'm not going to let you get away with it.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that a major problem with our educational sytem today is the fuzzyheaded New Age psychobabble that passes for thought in the educational hierarchy today. But what has that got to do with liberal politics and thinking? Liberal politics is about resource allocation and organizational philosophy, not the feelgood kumbaya flowerchild voodoo coming out of the social and behavioral sciences. Oh, I'll concede there is a high correllation between the two, but trust this lefty mathematician/astronomer, it is neither causal nor is it universal. If you need any hard data to convince you, consider the biggest collectivists of all, the Soviets and Cubans, as well as the state capitalists in China, follow the traditional teaching methods of discipline and regimentation and they are grinding out competent scientists and engineers by the truckload in spite of their centralized educational systems. So do other, capitalist but nonetheless centralized and publicly operated, school systems in nations like Taiwan and Japan.

I'l be the first to agree with you about what is happening in the schools, but the cause is not left/right political, it is due to the society's infatuation with psychology and all the other pseudosciences that seem to have permeated these professions and been misapplied in the political debate. You may have a point when you say education is best handled in a decentralized manner, but that's not what you see in the more rigorous Communist educational systems, and it is not what you point out as proof of our schools' shortcomings. Our system of local school board control has done little to stop this nonsense from wrecking the education of this country. These collectivist systems also have other advantages ours do not, the ones that really matter, they have no fear of litigation, they don't have to abide by arbitrary and unrealistic racial quotas, and they don't have to satisfy voting parents who refuse to accept that their hoodlum kids aren't victimized little angels and require some humiliating physical punishment to persuade them from their petty rebellions. You might make a valid point these views are often championed by liberals, and I might even agree with you, but that is a totally different issue altogether than the one you are trying to put forth.

Your familiarity with my views should convince you that my politics do not make me an anomalist, and my views are quite old fashioned in a number of social contexts, but I can guarantee that I am not just a rare exception to some convenient rule designed primarily to slander any policy not in line with converting everything of value, like the education of youth, into a commodity which can be marketed. Your attack on New Age philosophy masquerading as valid social science is justified, and your observation that it is detrimental to education is, to me, self-evident. But your attempt to conflate it with liberal resource allocation philosophy is a very convenient misdirection. Converting the schools to a smorgasboard of market choices will only entrench a system that only those who can afford it will be able to send their kids to schools that work. The public school system must be public, or it will be elitist and classist, and history has shown us that even poor public schools can be effective and democratic. I know because I attended a few myself.