Freedom to Let Go: coauthored by Lij Miki
I went to elementary school in Los Angeles' Unified School District (LAUSD). An early taste of the State is a good forewarning. Its negation, the market, is also to be familiarized with. My view of the market then is different than it is now. Now, I know its bigger. The rialto exists everywhere and anywhere we decide to exchange goods and services. Whether this exchange is dressed in a compulsory, or voluntary attire. In LAUSD, it is of the compulsory calling. As with any and all systems of the compulsory kind, there are chaotic consequences.
Behavior is quoted as the most nefarious suspect in the case against miseducation of our youth, both on this side of the Mississippi and East of it. I concur. Special Education classrooms are at times stuffed with more kids with disorderly conduct than mental disabilities. The students with mental disabilities are directly analogous to nonviolent offenders of Johnny Law in the prison industrial complex. Nonviolent offenders' recidivism grows as their contact with violent offenders grow. Behavior is a contagion. State law, as it stands, confines kids with bad behavior to circulation. If they are not liked at one school they are bounced to another with similar problems. The root of the matter remains unaddressed.
To get to the root of a problem you must be radical- definitionally so. If you do no not believe that we have specific inviolable rights grounded in the brute fact of our humanity, you have no business here. Neither reading this, nor walking the same plane of existence. We are endowed with the inalienable freedom to associate. This much both authors of this paper agree with. Our disagreement lies in this axiom's application to the rialto- which really is a debate about, what is the rialto? To go further would be to digress.* Our freedom of association should not be defended in only the obvious markets of stock exchanges, grocers, gas stations, massage parlors, and churches. It should be defended in our public schools.
Public schools are not allowed to unequivocally expel students for disruption, or other disrespectful behavior. Some violent behavior can become grounds for expulsion, after bounding over hurdles of commissars and their beloved paperwork. This is a problem. Excluding the equal opportunity debate, store owners can legally open or close their doors to anyone of their choosing. Hence the mantra "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone". Public schools should be granted the same right.** Corporal punishment is dead and gone in the United States' public school system. Whether you think it effectively molded behavior, or not, it was leverage to be used against students. Now it is not there. Amongst the peaceful methods, we should take heed from how we reward and reprimand each other in the rialto. We reward each other through voluntary purchases. We reprimand each other through refusing to trade, or disassociation. The threat of disassociation, if it exists at all in public schools, is a flaccid banana beneath an anvil falling from the heavens.
The belief that the federal government should decide which kids are to go to which schools is tertiary- a fashion left to the ages two million years ago. It comes down to philosophy. Do we have the right to limited mistakes in public schools, or to an unlimited amount of mistakes? To right the chaos caused by kids with bad behavior we have to empower public schools with the right to associate. The conjoined twin of association is the freedom to disassociate. When I say public schools, I mean just that. Not the federal government, nor the state government, nor the county government. An assembly of people involved with the students on a consistent basis should host the right to let them stay or let them go.
"... Thus says the Lord God of Israel: Let my people go" (Exodus 5:1)
Post Scriptum:
*I, Henok Elias, believe that the only just method of education is the voluntary variety. Selected and paid for freely by the likes of you and I. In the same fashion as Chapstick, Trident gum, cheap haircuts, and dandelions are. The best possible world for maximal education is to privatize education from head to toe.
** I, Henok Elias, see this right as applicable even in the cases listed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, black males can oppose that act without hating themselves.
Helpful links: the rights of store owners, Center for Public Integrity research, UCLA research, the rights of school owners