"Charter" school. Sounds alright, doesn't it? The Republican party is a champion of charter schools or voucher programs, and are also proponents of homeschooling. But charter schools do nothing to help the public education system, which at one point, impressively enough, educated a generation of baby boomers and post-baby boomers.
The boomers are said to be the largest and most educated group of people in the history of the public school system. The things that generation accomplished have a marked effect on modern life, some obvious and visible examples being the vast majority of the infrastructure Americans use every day. The US's public education system churned out the generation that built some of the world's most impressive dams, bridges, interstates and skyscrapers, and let's not forget our baby boomer tech giants Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But, as Chomsky points out, a debate has long raged over the very nature of education, and whether intellectual independence and curiosity should be a part of public schooling at all. Republicans have decided that education is a cost, one that can be cut with little explanation, except for one based on lies about shortfalls in social security caused by the mass retirement of baby-boomers.
