Best. Quote. Ever.
The Des Moines Register editorial staff was really hot and bothered in a 2/5/15 staff editorial about the online schools and home-schools. (“For-profit online schools raise questions,” 2/5/15)
The big stink was that parents were enrolling their kids in online schools and Iowa law allows the money to follow the child to the online school and not the school district.
But here’s the classic quote: the Register editorial staff captures State Senator Tom Courtney (D-Burlington) as saying, “A child could be ‘sitting in front of a computer, smoking a cigarette with no parent around.’”
Those of you who know home-schooled children, like we know home-schooled children, know that children sitting or standing around smoking is a much bigger problem in the public schools.
That’s not all. Consider how the Register editorial staff is outraged by the idea that students are not in a classroom with a teacher to attend to them—in person. Instead, they see a teacher over their computer.
“They (students) can live hundreds of miles away. That’s because their entire education is provided over the Internet.”
Hundreds of miles away? Entirely over the Internet?
This, from the newspaper that for the last four years has been belittling Pro-Lifers for being anti-technology for not accepting Planned Parenthood doctors performing abortions by webcam and not in the same room.
“Technology has advanced. So has medicine,” lectured the Register editorial staff on 6/3/13 (“Medical Board Sets A Troubling Precedent for Using ‘Telemedicine’ in Iowa.”)
So, it’s okay for a doctor to not be in the same room as a woman who is getting an abortion he is prescribing?
It’s okay for a woman to hemorrhage at home and deal with the body of her dead baby alone?
But the Register believes a child learning from a teacher on a webcam should be outlawed?
Would the Register editorial staff deny poor children in rural Iowa an education? Because that’s their webcam abortion rationale.
It’s time for Pro-Lifers to respond, “Technology has advanced. So has education.”