There is a whole lot of fussin’ and cryin’ and whinin’ from public school board members around Louisiana over the Legislature’s proposed education savings accounts (ESAs):  Allen, Bossier, Vernon, Jackson and Ouachita, St. Landry.

The Allen Parish superintendent fulminated:

Superintendent Brad Soileau said there are too many unanswered questions with regards to the funding including what happens when a student leaves the district.

“You put this bill out there, yet there are hundreds of unanswered questions,” Soileau said. “Three of the biggest is you are going to take our money and send it elsewhere but they don’t have the same accountability system. They are not required to take the LEAP test and they are not held to the same standard. How is that fair? What happens when a special education student with accommodations leaves the district?  How much is this going to cost the state? When you look at other states that have done this, it’s been a tremendous cost.”

Like most school officials, Soileau feels public schools are best for students. However, he said he is not against parents’ choice.

“We just want a level playing field, especially if you are going to give parents a choice,” he said. “I’m not against parent choice, but there is a difference between a parent choosing to put their child in a private school and the state funding that out of our money and not holding people to the same standards as public schools.”

“It’s one thing to say you are not going to hold those schools to a standard when you are not funding them, but when you are going to start handing over money we are going to use to run our schools, then you need to hold everybody accountable. That’s all we are asking for.”

His cry-baby diatribe is representative of the rest.

It isn’t difficult to understand what is going on here:  loss of money and power and influence; hurt pride and bruised egos; government officials who believe they are entitled to ever increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money.

They are in dire need of a reminder of what wise Christian men have said about love of money, pride, etc.  St. John of Sinai (+563 A.D.), whose spiritual guidebook The Ladder of Divine Ascent remains essential reading in the Orthodox Church to this day, offers them timely advice if they will deign to listen to it:

Avarice, or love of money, is the worship of idols,2 a daughter of unbelief, an excuse for infirmities, a foreboder of old age, a harbinger of drought, a herald of hunger.

The lover of money sneers at the Gospel and is a willful transgressor. He who has attained to love scatters his money. But he who says that he lives for love and for money has deceived himself.

The beginning of love of money is the pretext of almsgiving, and the end of it is hatred of the poor. So long as he is collecting he is charitable, but when the money is in hand he tightens his hold (Step 16: 2, 3, 8; via the PDF of The Ladder and Orthodox Ethos).

Pride is denial of God, an invention of the devil, the despising of men, the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of sterility, flight from divine assistance, the precursor of madness, the herald of falls, a foothold for satanic possession, source of anger, door of hypocrisy, the support of demons, the guardian of sins, the patron of unsympathy, the rejection of compassion, a bitter inquisitor, an inhuman judge, an opponent of God, a root of blasphemy.

The beginning of pride is the consummation of vainglory; the middle is the humiliation of our neighbour, the shameless parade of our labours, complacency in the heart, hatred of exposure; and the end is denial of God’s help, the extolling of one’s own exertions, fiendish character (Step 23: 1, 2; ibid.).

Aside from all of that, this rather ugly behavior by the school officials was actually foreseen by our wiser Southern forefathers.  Amongst the wisest was Robert Dabney, another one of the great sons of Virginia, who was a Christian minister, an officer on General Stonewall Jackson’s staff during the War, a philosopher, and more besides.  After the War, there was a mighty push to institute Yankee-style universal education across the Southern States, and Virginia eventually succumbed to the push.  Rev. Dabney’s criticisms of what arose in Virginia apply just as much, if not more so, to Louisiana’s whiny, bed-wetting school board officers of two and half centuries later.  (From pgs. 263-4 in his Discussions, Volume IV, Secular):

Last: the lights of the wiser statesmanship of better days were adduced, to show how perilous it is to fix on the community any system whatsoever, the nature of which is, to subsidize many persons, by giving them a selfish, pecuniary interest in the perpetuation of it, or of its abuses. For, should the system prove unwise, or should new circumstances require its change or repeal, the self-interest of all these subsidized classes will prompt them to clamor and defraud the public mind, so as to make the needed repeal impossible or extremely difficult.

The course of this discussion has added a pungent illustration to the power of our last argument. No sooner was discriminating inquiry turned upon the new system, than it was discovered that it had already bribed so many classes, other than taxpayers, that candid and patriotic discussion was hopeless. A State Superintendent in the metropolis, a county Superintendent in each county, with his gang of petty tax gatherers, his school board for each “township,” his company of schoolmasters and schoolmarms, with their whole cohort of pauper parents, at once waked up to the fact that their much be praised system enabled them very conveniently to keep their hands in the pockets of other people. All these joined, in many places, in raising a mercenary clamor, which has drowned fair discussion. And our minute politicians, in whose breasts votes are the breath of life, are seen so intimidated, that hardly one of them dares whisper a doubt against the idol of the socialists. The manner in which this debate has been conducted by many of these petty place holders would have been enough, were Virginia what she once was, to overwhelm the whole affair with righteous disgust and indignation. Citizens who have the right of tax-payers, to be heard touching their rights, and State-affairs; who are, in many cases venerable for grey hairs, for experience, for integrity, and for long lives of labor and sacrifice for the honor of Virginia, have been seen yelped after by these officials (whose only known service to the State has been drawing salaries wrung from it by a grinding taxation), with obloquy and ridicule. This is an indecency which deserves only chastisement.

The time was, when Virginian officials had manners and principle enough to keep silent in a debate touching their own emoluments; they felt that delicacy, not to say common decency, prompted the leaving of such questions to he considered by that larger part of the citizens who had no pecuniary interest in the issue.

Not one to point out problems yet offer no solutions, Rev. Dabney made suggestions that sound a lot like the ESAs proposed by Louisiana legislators and already adopted in other States, while also going beyond that proposal (pgs. 189-90):

This old system [of Virginia, prior to the Yankee universal education model—W.G.] evinced its wisdom by avoiding the pagan, Spartan theory, which makes the State the parent. It left the parent supreme in his God-given sphere, as the responsible party for providing and directing the education of his own offspring. This old plan, instead of usurping, encouraged and assisted, where assistance was needed. It was wise again, in that it avoided creating salaried offices to eat up the people’s money, and yet do no actual teaching. It was supremely wise, in that it cut the Gordian knot, “Religion in the State school,” which now baffles British and Yankee wit. It set that insuperable difficulty clear on one side, by leaving the school as the creature of the parents, and not of the State. It was wise in its exceeding economy, a trait so essential to the State now. . . . Instead of the State undertaking to be a universal creator and sustainer of schools, let it invite parents to create, sustain, and govern their own schools under the assistance and guidance of an inexpensive and (mainly) unsalaried Board, and then render such help to those parents who are unable to help themselves, as the very limited school tax will permit. And let the existence of some aspiration in parents or children be the uniform condition of the aid; for without this condition it is infallibly thrown away. “One man may take a horse to water, but a hundred can’t make him drink.”

School children and their parents do not exist to uphold the current failing public school system.  It is the other way round:  Public education is meant to serve them.  But it hasn’t been doing that very well for many years now.  Nearly everyone admits that public schools are full of failing students, atheism, stoners, gangs, sexual depravity, and all the rest of it.

Louisiana’s selfish educrats need to show some Christian humility, mercy, and goodwill, and cooperate with those who want to fashion a better education system, rather than simply throw up obstacles to enable them to hold on a little longer to their ephemeral honors.