Okay, so the Milwaukee school district is selling the naming rights to nearly every physical object in their schools. Good for them. If the public won’t provide adequate funds, then they’re gonna have to take their scratch where they can get it. No matter how disturbing, pathetic and unethical the prospect of commercial underwriting of the educational system might be.

I’m so fed up with the general public response to the funding of education—hell, the funding of any public service—that I’m tempted to scrap the public education system altogether. It seems to be a general tenet of this sort of thinking that any government-run institution, funded via taxation, is by definition bloated, inefficient and rife with corruption and graft. I’m sure this is true to some extent, as it is with any organization founded and run by fallible human beings. But at least a governmental entity has as its central charter the benefit of the People. No matter what may go wrong with any particular iteration of a given public institution, you can always point to that charter and say, “this is what we should be doing, the is the purpose to which our efforts should be bent.” The core mission of a private entity is, almost exclusively, to make money. And it should be; that’s the whole damn point behind private enterprise in a capitalist system. I just don’t feel that this core philoshophy is necessarily compatible with certain societal objectives. Like education. Or national defense. Health care. Food safety. Occupational safety. Law enforcement. Et cetera. But writing software or delivering pizzas….free enterprise all the way, baby.

If people think that their kids can get a better education for the money from the private sector, by all means, let ’em try. I’d be willing to undergo an experiment. Shut down all the public schools, abolish the Department of Education and the NEA, and refund the money directly to the American taxpayer in the form of yearly IRS disbursements. Hell, I’d even stipulate refunding the money solely to the parents of school-age children. I’m not getting anything out of my contribution to the school system as it is; I don’t see any reason to change that.

Shutter the buildings, dissolve the offices, elminate the regulations, leave the education of America’s youth to the marketplace….and let the learning commence!

I’d love to see the results of a twenty- or thirty-year test run. Hell, maybe I have it all wrong; maybe the for-profit education industry would be leaner, more efficient and responsive than the current publicly-funded one. Maybe they would really put the children first, and not skimp on facilities and staff just to appease the stockholders. Maybe they wouldn’t succumb to the irresistable impulse to use their position of influence to forward the agendas of the metastatically-moneyed youth culture industry. I’m sure stranger things have happened, though nothing in particular comes to mind at the moment.

The uppy-ups in the Milwaukee School District have assured the public that they will not accept any advertisements from purveyors of alcohol or tobacco. Personally, I think that’s being disingenuous. After all, the voters—the purported guardians of all those underserved school kids—are the ones who made this foray into advertising necessary. If they didn’t want dangerous products marketed to their kids at school, they should have ponied up the dough for the schools in the first place. As if junk food weren’t doing almost as much damage to da Youf as Olde English 800 or Kool Lights; and yet, school hallways are lined with vending machines full of all the hottest new sugary crap.

If I were the superintendant of Milwaukee schools, I’d be tempted to laissiez-faire the living shit out of the new system: cigarettes, malt liquor, pornography, firearms, whatever. The McDonalds Cafeteria. The Nintendo Athletic Field. The Cosmopolitan Magazine Eating Disorder Counseling Center….if it pays, it plays. That oughta show the stingy bastards.