I consider public education necessary for all who can't afford private education and not evil at all. I have little faith that a for profit system will out of the goodness of its heart fund the Native Americans, urban centers, or any other area without the economic base to justify it.
The strength of the public system is that it potentially allows all to florish according to their abilities and not to their starting economic conditions. While it has its flaws, this system allows some of our best minds to transcend class conditions. Cliched as it may be, one wonders how many potential Einsteins are out there busting their butts for 2 or 3 dollars a day.
Anyway, away the specifics of the Native American case, I still wonder about your opinion on child labor. It seems to me that a strictly capatalist system of education will only promote child labor as opposed to lessening it.
As to public education being unpopular, I think its strengths outweight its weaknesses. The people who don't want to support it can either try to afford private education for their children or try to support the voucher programs that weaken the system by extracting money from an already weakened system. The process of governmental spending to me is to serve the public good where there is no immediate profit motive for the private sector to do so. Education, environmental controls,and protection of civil liberties make no profit, and yet are ultimately necessary to all.
Historically education has been the province of the well off. Another advantage of the public system in America is that it compells all classes to mix at least for awhile before they go their seperate ways. This allows at least for some appreciation of how others live as opposed to highly stratified situations one gets in other countries where one rarely bump up against others of different means. An example is the English private system(ironically called the public system there). Those Eton and Sandhurst fellows see things in a different light generally speaking I would bet.
Perhaps in other countries where education is still a rare commodity and where the maintenance of a largely unskilled labor force is perceived as desirable for the economy can I see where private education works. And as the Information Age continues to develop I think that the concept of obligate commercial private education will go the way of the buggy whip.
ABB