Educational freedom

From the start [government schools] were steeped in assumptions that were ... alien to the principles on which the United States was founded. For example, the government schools initially established in Massachusetts by Horace Mann and his Unitarian cohorts followed what has become known as the "Prussian model," holding that the individual should be educated into the service of the omnipotent state ... Nowhere does the U.S. Constitution mention education as a federal responsibility. The Framers considered education to be a matter for states and local communities to undertake.

Setting aside the bogus laments of teacher's unions and other bulwarks of the educational establishment, ... the most challenging criticism of vouchers have come from libertarians who fear the specter of increased government control of private schools, and that vouchers do not represent a way station to complete privatization of schooling but an end game ... Still, vouchers have done a lot to shake up the public school monopoly, and if they're not the final ... answer, they do give plenty of hope to strapped parents whose kids would otherwise be trapped in shoddily performing schools.

Charter schools have made inroads in various states, but I wouldn't count them as part of an eroding of state education ... Likewise vouchers ... Financed out of the taxpayers' money, these schools can't operate freely as market schools ... A free market in education requires liberty on both the supply side and the demand side. Entrepreneurs have to be free to offer any education service, subject only to the verdict of parents, who in turn must be free to spend their own (not the taxpayers') money as they wish. Only under these circumstances are schools really accountable to the parents.

Advocate of Religious Freedom: ... I believe that we should repeal all compulsory-attendance laws and church taxes and then sell the public churches to the highest bidder ... Parents should have the freedom and responsibility for rearing their children.
Advocate of Public Churching: ... Don't you realize how important religion is? Where did you come up with this idea?—certainly not in the public churches you attended as a child.
Advocate of Religious Freedom: ... I plan to send my children to church anyway. But should we force others to send their children to church?

Even if the federal government mandated a set of [educational] standards that were scientifically valid ..., the set of standards and outcomes would not be [those] most Americans would choose as acting individuals ... A free market system of education would create for those who seek different options a system that encourages the implementation of the spectrum of educational choices best viewed as experiments, just as each new product, service, store, etc., is a market experiment. The successful experiments become the market standard that new entrepreneurs seek to surpass.

The urgent solution to the education crisis is the complete separation of school and state. The public schools should be sold to the highest bidder, school taxes scrapped, and compulsory-attendance laws repealed. Anyone should be free to start any kind of school, profit or non-profit, religious or secular. There should be no governmental requirements for curricula or textbooks. Parents should be free to send their children to any kind of school—or to none at all. Laws regarding child labor and apprenticeships should be scrapped. All restrictions on homeschooling should be abolished.

I first encountered the [IEE] institute in 1995, when I was invited to speak at its annual Forum of Liberty on the subject of education and the free market ... The speaker was the mayor of a Brazilian city who told the audience how important it was that Brazil try to copy the public-schooling system in the United States ... When it was my turn, I proceeded to explain to the audience that the worst thing they could do was copy America's educational system and that the best thing they could do was turn education over to the free market. The mayor appeared stricken but began to take notes!

[B]y incorrectly describing reforms of the state educational system as "competition" and "free market," as conservatives often do, don't we run the risk of corrupting the true meaning of such terms? ... Perhaps most important, in his reference to education, Becker unfortunately failed to raise fundamental moral questions. Why shouldn't families, rather than the state, have the same authority over educational decisions as they have over religious decisions? Why shouldn't suppliers be as free to compete in supplying education as they are in supplying religion?

Like all socialist enterprises, "public education" in the United States is very high in cost and very low in positive results ... The teachers are protected by union contracts ... and they have little incentive to do their best ... Poor people can buy high-quality food, clothing, and other necessities because they get the benefit of a free market in those things. For good education, what they need is a free market in schools. If you really care about the education of children—and not just poor ones—you should forget about new taxes or "reforms" and advocate the separation of school and state.

The historical case for school choice in America goes back to the nation's founding. Adam Smith, whose writings greatly influenced America's founding fathers, noted that government-run education was likely to be inferior to privately run education. In 1859, John Stuart Mill argued that government should seek to make sure that every child gets educated, but he also wrote that government should not itself be in charge of that education. In 1955, Milton Friedman proposed vouchers as a way to separate government financing of education from government administration of public schools.

No longer is there a common understanding of the mission of public education. To the extent that one camp's vision prevails, parents in the opposing camp are embittered ... Which is why it's time to put an end to government control of the schools ... There is nothing indispensable about a state role in education. Parents don't expect the government to provide their children's food or clothing or medical care; there is no reason why it must provide their schooling ... Imagine how diverse and lively American education would be if it were liberated from government control.

"[Homeschooling] is a rejection of community and makes the home-schooler the captive of the orthodoxies of the parents." Translation: If children are taught at home, they stand a greater chance of learning about such heresies as limited, republican government, property rights, self-reliance and gun ownership, religion (gasp!), the burden of taxation, and what it means to be the kind of citizen who takes responsibility for his own children—the kinds of ideas, values, and virtues rejected by the leftists dominating the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Education, after all, is largely thought control. Unthinking people who merely repeat clichés will tell you they are all in favor of the one and absolutely opposed to the other. But it's precisely because schools do control what children and adolescents think that the power of doing so, like most forms of power, should be dispersed in private hands rather than concentrated in the state ... The correct approach is to get government out of the education business altogether. Education isn't free unless schools can define success on their own terms rather than the state's.

Under a free-market educational system, ... each family would be free to fashion the education that would fit each child ... If a child said, "I want to do nothing but play the piano for the next six months and study nothing else," that would be up to the family, not the state. And before someone says, "It would be irresponsible ... to educate the child in that way," reflect ... that many students travel abroad ... to study nothing but a foreign language and that they study [it] for several hours every single day for several weeks ... No math or science classes. Just the foreign language.

Advocates of educational freedom disagree about whether school vouchers would liberate schools and families and lead to greater freedom of choice or trap private schools in a web ... that would destroy their independence and quality ... Bast and Harmer argue that voucher plans would eventually lead to the complete separation of school and state ... Dewey counters that vouchers would not substantially reduce the state's role in education. Indeed, vouchers would create a vast system of government contractors and parents with "school stamps," a massive lobby for ever-increasing subsidies.

Regardless of why Utahans said no, in the long run they have struck a blow for education free of state control. That may seem hard to believe, since the voucher movement promotes itself as being in favor of "school choice." But while their hearts are in the right place, their solution won't get them where they want to go. The way to create school choice is not to give the state more excuses to regulate the private schools. That's what vouchers would do ... [The failed initiative] would have required private schools to "give a formal national test every year" to students ... Some choice.

Ironically, the basic problem ... is that government has been setting standards for over 150 years. Before about 1840, [it] had little or nothing to do with education ... It didn't set standards. It didn't tell children how many hours a day, how many days a year, or how many years they had to attend school. Children didn't have to attend school at all! Yet, America was a highly literate society–the most dynamic and enterprising in history. Almost everyone who wished to read and write could do so ... Reading was such an easy skill to acquire that the southern states made it illegal for slaves.

Public education's dependence on taxation ... explains much else about the public schools. And will enable us to contrast public schooling with its alternative, free market education (which includes many possibilities, including home schooling) ... In a private education market, parents, if need be, could even send their children to one school to study French and to another to study math. The market is the most flexible arrangement for satisfying consumers that can be imagined. It is precisely that flexibility that is missing in bureaucracy, whether controlled democratically or not.

Is anyone happy with the public schools? ... Whichever way they lean, people generally believe that the schools are not doing what they are supposed to ... [D]espite their widely recognized problems, [they] have a mystique that prevents people from imagining life without them ... People get nervous hearing any criticism of the schools that sounds fundamental. You may find fault with the schools ... and you may propose to tinker with them. But if you even imply that the schools ... should be changed in some really drastic way, you will stimulate a reflex response and vicious counterattack.

[L]et's say we junk the old government-school paradigm. What do we replace it with? A good clue lies with Bill Gates himself ... Yes, a free market in education! A paradigm in which the state plays no role whatsoever. No more school boards, ... school taxes, [or] school-attendance laws. A process where parents, in their role as consumers, are as sovereign as they are in ... computer industries. A system in which families decide the best educational vehicle for each of their children and in which entrepreneurs are leapfrogging over themselves to best satisfy the ever-increasing demands on them.

What would happen with true competition in school choice, with students and parents becoming truly empowered consumers instead of virtual prisoners and slaves, as they are in the socialized system that exists today? We would have an explosion in educational innovation, and unprecedented improvements as competition and choice systematically eliminated poor teachers and poor schools ... We would see incredible diversity in types of schools and styles of education meeting the diverse needs and desires of students and parents, instead of the dictates of the educational bureaucracy ...

The findings of this study ... should prove invaluable to all of those ... who are working to privatize and introduce competition into the provision of education services ... [W]e are unsurprisingly told that for-profit suppliers in developing countries, as in the developed, mainly serve the middle and upper classes. But in developing countries there are also some services geared toward the poor ... [I]f the private market for education continues to develop, with more and more people paying for just the education they choose, the "rob the poor to give to the rich" phenomenon will dissipate.

[Islamic universities] were simply places where those with knowledge could sell it to those who desired it. Lane writes, "Men who knew (or thought they knew) something, and wanted to teach it, opened a school to sell their knowledge ..." She contrasts the Islamic approach ... with the European, writing disparagingly of the "European belief that minds acquire knowledge, not by actively seeking to know, but by passively being taught whatever Authority decides that they should know." If you have ever wondered what a true free market in education would be like, this book provides some clues.

Johnson: ... Go down the list of the main criticisms: Vouchers only favor the rich. Baloney! People with money live in good neighborhoods that have good schools. Give me a break ... Vouchers are for those that don't have money, who live in the worst neighborhoods, go to the worst schools, and can't get away from them ... Let's just bring competition to public education. This is not about getting rid of public education; it is about providing alternatives that public schools very, very quickly will react to. Public schools will get better if they are subject to competition.

Smith: ... My point was that where fees are charged, the decision of a parent to transfer an offspring from a less efficient to a more efficient school, places immediate and meaningful pressure on the inferior supplier because the tuition funds automatically follow the child. The principals of US government schools, in contrast, face no such direct economic pressure. Indeed the unions of teachers in such schools usually ensure that when the student population of one school shrinks, jobs for the "losing" teachers are created elsewhere in the system.

Friedman believes that ... governments have these responsibilities, but as far as possible, they should use market mechanisms to achieve these ends. So for example, it is a responsibility of government to make sure every child is educated, but that does not mean that government has to provide the schools. Government, for example, could give vouchers or some form of school choice, private schools, but parents can chose whichever school they want to go to. So government has a social responsibility; it doesn't necessarily have to directly provide what those social responsibilities are.