Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 23rd.

I'm Anastasia Gueglva.

Today's guest is Cato Education Policy analyst Neil McCluskey,

who is hosting a forum today entitled,

Why We Fight, do Public Schools Cause Social Conflict?

The forum is based on the Cato study of the same name in which Neil explains how public

schooling is inherently divisive and should be replaced with school choice.

Why have public schools contrary to original intent failed to unite diverse students?

Well the original thought was that public schools would unite people by giving kids a common experience

and it would teach them common value so the idea was that immigrant children and children from different religious backgrounds would come to America and they wouldn't really understand what it means to be American or what Americanization entails and that the schools would sort of force it on them and they'd say these are the values of Americans and

Get rid of your old folkways and become

Modern Americans with our ideals and learn to live in society.

The problem with that notion was it assumed that people would just throw out their old values, their old morals, their language, their customs, and somehow

accept an Americanization that even Americans who'd been in the country for a long time didn't

agree on.

So the problem was it failed to acknowledge

or to at least work with the fact that people,

of all backgrounds, are inherently different

and we all have different values things that we want to get out of schools and so rather than

uniting people it really forced them to fight to have their values be the values that were maintained by a single

system of public schooling that everyone had to pay to support through taxation, but only those

with the most political power could

...