Liberal film star Matt Damon unwittingly offered free advertising for school choice when he announced plans to send his kids to a private school, rather than allow them to hang out with the public school plebs.
But a Hot Air blurb from Mike Antonucci highlights more than just Damon’s assessment that “ultimately we don’t have a choice.”
It might be fun to criticize Damon for concluding that LA public schools weren’t right for his children, but even if it’s inadvertent, he’s making a strong argument for school choice. Ultimately we don’t have a choice, he says. As parents, he and his wife made a decision about what kind of education would be best for their kids, and the regular public school system doesn’t provide it. He has the money to do something about it. Others don’t. People might conclude that developing ways to address that disparity is a worthy endeavor.
But let’s leave that all aside for a second. The Guardian interview has some other wonderful moments in it. For example, when Damon’s mother, educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige, saw her son in a magazine ad for the first time, she said, “He is just a cog in the capitalist system.”
Damon goes on to detail the open-minded search for truth exemplified by America’s higher education faculty. ”She’s a professor,” he said. “If it’s not The Nation, she doesn’t read it.”
It’s nice to know that our stereotypes about closed-minded, far-left college faculty members are all wrong.
