Tea at Trianon: Betsy DeVos on Education Freedom

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 18, 2022

Betsy DeVos on Education Freedom

From City Journal:

We won't know the extent of the learning loss for the most vulnerable of the kids that could least afford to be locked out of their schools for months on end. The solution to this is not for them to go back into the same environment and miraculously to catch up or surpass where they were, because that's just not going to happen, absent something entirely different. That makes the case for moving to an education freedom model as quickly and as extensively as possible, and putting that power and that direction in the hands of families, many of whom have already decided. Over 1.2 million students nationally have dropped out of the traditional system. Homeschooling numbers have skyrocketed. Those kinds of opportunities need to continue to be supported and allow for other families to access those, if that's the right thing. Extra tutoring, summer school, a whole variety of ways for students to change it up and make up for that time in ways that the system is not and cannot do. (Read more.)