The state-run school system as it stands is a one-size-fits-all monstrosity which crowds out private alternatives and spreads socialistic and anti-Christian propaganda. It’s time to think bigger than Friedman’s school vouchers: it’s time to separate school from state.
Crowding Out
If there is any stigma against private schools, it is their cost versus the public system. This leaves room for the public-school supporter to claim: “If there was a market for low cost, private education, it would be provided but since it is not widely met, the general consensus must remain with the public system.” The argument would be correct but for one detail: the market is being distorted by the political power of the state, preventing the entry of the firms needed to fill the void.
Public schools are funded through the taxes of a city’s citizens, which necessarily means that taxpayers without children enrolled will also pay for their upkeep; even taxpayers without children at all are subsidizing the public education of those using the system. As a result, the cost of public education is artificially low to the parents using it, a situation that could not be replicated in a free market. If the state system was a private enterprise, it would not last one year before going bankrupt since it can only survive on the subsidies provided by taxation, by political power.
Private enterprise is enormously competitive, and when unleashed, it can nearly work miracles, but what it cannot do is compete effectively with state-run firms which can bankroll their losses with taxation. As a result, it is not currently possible for private schools to fill the same niche as the public ones: they must branch out and specialize to offer a fundamentally different good than the one offered by the state. KIPP charter schools as explored by Thomas Sowell in his new book Charter Schools and their Enemies promise better academic results, and parochial schools promise a traditional and religious education. All of these are fundamentally different goods than the one provided by the state system, and this is a place to start.
So long as the public system is able to pass on its losses to the taxpayers, there will be few cracks in the state’s monopolistic control of the industry. Should the edifice finally break and a state decides to take the plunge into full privatization, the market will surge back with a vengeance and provide more options, and do so more affordably than is currently available.
Propaganda
The state always and everywhere aims at monopolizing education and there is a non-benevolent reason for this: youth are impressionable and ideas inculcated early are difficult to uproot. If the state can decide what the next generation learns, it can instill a statist ethic and worldview which quells resistance before it would take hold. State-run education is not an act of charity in practice so much as a defense mechanism against non-statist thinking.
Nothing is new about the state looking to reproduce itself and quell resistance early through education. The tactic was an invention of Prussia’s at the close of the 18th century. Vladimir Lenin, a man whose inclinations towards class and production were much different than the Prussians, is popularly, possibly apocryphally, quoted as saying: “give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted”. Whether the verbiage is precise or not, it is certainly consistent with the maximization of the state requisite for his socialism to take root. What Lenin and the Prussians had in common was the state; whatever their differences, they were both arch-statists and sought to instill the state’s ethics into the next generation.
The state instilling obedience and fomenting socialism through schools is hardly surprising. What is relatively new is an all-out assault on the norms of Western civilization in general, and Christianity in particular. Anyone who has any connection with the public schools and colleges in the past few years can affirm the immense hostility of faculty to anything which contravenes the intersectional agenda.
Schools routinely put on drag events now which flaunt sexuality in front of minors.
Further, it is an act of aggression to sexualize someone underage and thus flagrantly violates the libertarian non-aggression axiom, not to mention established law. The libertarian regardless of his actual views on the lifestyles in question, cannot condone preaching blatant sexuality to minors in state-run institutions for which attendance next to mandatory, and the barriers to opting out through the private road are kept purposefully, and artificially, high. This is blatantly hostile to dissenters, especially Christians, who do not wish to partake in this lifestyle nor have it pushed on them, something which is perfectly covered by the right of free association, the property in one’s person and social interaction.
The best answer to heinous acts such as this is to allow the market to decide what sort of sex education the next generation should get in schools. Surely, some will offer precisely this sort of sex education in leftist strongholds, but it will not extend into the hinterlands where there is still some belief in standards and decency. Mass privatization will break the stranglehold of Washington, not to mention state governments, over the curriculum and could stem the teaching of the ahistorical and racist 1619 Project, drag shows for minors, etc.
Friedman’s Vouchers
In many libertarian and conservative circles, Milton Friedman’s voucher plan is considered to be the gold standard in free-market school solutions. Instead of the current system, Friedman suggested giving a voucher for each student which could be used at public or private schools, thus opening the latter up to federal funding and presumably, helping them proliferate. Indeed, this system would be an improvement, but it is hardly the gold standard.
State money comes with strings attached. One can hardly imagine the state not coming out with guidelines of institutions eligible for the vouchers which presupposes the state setting universal standards and guidelines for all schools public and private. A consequence of the Friedman plan is total control by the state on what is and is not acceptable anywhere, not just for public schools. This would start out with relatively benign concerns about safety and mathematics standards, but would undoubtedly extend into peripheral areas which there is much disagreement about. Schools which do not provide separate bathrooms for transgender students, fail to teach a curriculum of racialized history, or even all boys or all girls schools would sooner or later find themselves on the chopping block.
If vouchers are introduced into the economics of private schools not now accustomed to this cash inflow, they will quickly build it into their operating costs, and soon it will not be a windfall but a necessity for operation. Work expands to fit the budget allowed for it. It follows that losing these vouchers would be a calamity, even if the institution had previously operated without them, and many, if not most, would bend their rules and principles to keep the state dollars flowing. Surely there would be some obstinate private schools content to lose funding rather than accommodate the state’s demands, but this cannot be expected of the majority, since this is, after all, a business.
Libertarians and conservatives taken with the Friedman model are on the right track but are not thinking bold enough. The answer is not get the state to fund the private schools too, but privatize the public school infrastructure, remove the regulatory burden on starting up a new school, and achieve the total separation of education and state.
The Separation of Education and State
By removing the state from education, a number of things will happen: the absolute size of the behemoth will shrink, teacher’s unions will have less power over the student’s educational continuity, different sorts of education will be offered and Christians, rightists, libertarians, anti-statists and free thinkers will not be forcibly subjected to the state’s propaganda.
Without the need to oversee the education of most children in the third largest country on earth, the size of the state will decrease. There will be no need for legions of teachers to be employed by the state, but most of them will not be out of the job, they will form the backbone of the new, private teaching workforce.
Without massive public school districts, strikes by teacher’s unions will be less likely and less destructive, making the recent Los Angeles teacher’s strike – which took 420,000 students out of the classroom – next to impossible. Presumably, with the regulatory environment lightened, there will be a return of yellow dog contracts which would prevent school employees from joining unions at all as a condition of employment.
In industries as complicated as education, no two firms will be alike (as opposed to snowplowing firms, which are quite alike). This diversity ensures that a greater variety of goods will be offered, allowing parents to have more control over what and how their children learn. Some schools will hone mathematics and raise engineers quicker and cheaper, others will bring the humanities to the forefront and build a new cadre of well-rounded citizens to think up tomorrow’s big ideas, still others will provide a strictly Christian or otherwise religious education and offer a whole host of classes on theology. The possibilities are as endless as they are exciting.
Finally, those who dissent from the statist, racialized and anti-Christian outlook which has seized the public schools will not be compelled to attend them. There will be schools modeled on free men and free markets, God and country or any other motifs there is a market for. America’s vibrant church community will undoubtedly get in on the action and build self-funding schools of their own as the Catholics have been doing for over a hundred years. As a bonus, with the multiplicity of firms, it will be impossible for the socialistic, racialized and anti-Christian mindset to invade all schools as it currently does under the state system. How would it do so without an easy point of entry at the administrative level and renewed resistance from empowered private schools?
Considering all these points, the case for total liberty in education is not a hard one to make. Indeed, the hard sell is maintaining the statist system as it currently stands. In light of failing schools, teacher’s strikes, anti-Christian propaganda across the board and skyrocketing costs, a reasonable person might say the statist system is a failure and ripe for replacing. Total liberty in education is an idea whose time has come, America deserves it. It is time to separate education and state.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
