Fix or Abolish Public Education?

To even imagine that we should abolish public education is very controversial and almost unthinkable, as compulsory public education in America has been around in one form or another since the 1600s and has acquired an almost religious and untouchable aura. But we need to consider the following vignettes as a context for a discussion of public schools.

• A truant officer appears on your doorstep and asks you why your child is not in school and warns you that if truancy happens again, the child will be subject to processing by a juvenile court.
• Your son tells you that today’s history discussion was to list all that is wrong with America. When he objected to the task, the teacher gave him a failing grade for the assignment. Then she started teaching Critical Race Theory.
• Your daughter is very good at math but is held back until the rest of the class catches up to her. She was told everyone has to go at the same pace.
• Your school taxes keep rising, while student test scores do not.

What is happening here? What is going wrong with public education?

What is Public Education?

By “public” education we mean “government” education for those adjectives are one and the same. And to carry these terms to their logical conclusion, we could use the word “political” because requiring school attendance, deciding what is taught, deciding how subjects are taught, and school taxes are all political decisions in public schools.

Public schools are government schools are political schools.

To answer what has gone wrong with government education, it is important to understand the moral premise underlying the K-12 government education in order to have a context for any solution.

Moral premise of government education

Answer this question: What IS the morality to forcibly remove children from their homes (compulsory attendance), teach them things their parents may disagree with (e.g. inappropriate sex education, anti-American history, objectionable philosophies), and with methods their parents may disagree with (e.g. look-say method of learning reading, lock-step advancement in the classroom), and on top of it all force the parents to pay for it (school taxes)?¹

The moral premise is that decisions on children’s education should not made by the parents but by the government in a political process. That is, parents are not responsible for their children’s education, but that it’s ok for the government as “co-parent” to “manage” the children’s education.

That is, the children’s education is the responsibility of the state, implying that the children’s lives belong (in part) to the state, meaning that the parents have to relinquish control of their children, meaning that the parents’ lives are not their own (as rearing their children in all aspects is their responsibility and part of their lives) but belong (in part) to the state.

If you review the history of government education, you will find that the underlying premises are that the children are the purview of the state and the purpose of government education is not to educate the children but to produce obedient citizens.

And it was done and is still done with a factory model. “The bells and buzzers signaling when students could come and go, the tedium of the work, the straight lines and emphasis on conformity and compliance, the rows of young people sitting passively at desks while obeying their teachers, the teachers obeying the principal, and so on—all of this was designed for factory-style efficiency and order.”

This purpose has morphed into something more palatable, such as to produce an educated society and good citizens of the world, but the underlying premise is still there – forced conformity and compliance under the direction of the government.

Even today, many public schools tend to be “totalitarian” in nature because they seek not to teach children the skills of independent living but to extinguish critical thinking and individualism. This extends even to pedagogic methods than emphasize memorization – such as the “look-say” method of reading – over critical thinking, and obedience over creativity.

So, the underlying moral premise here is that your life is not your own, but the government’s to do with it what it wishes, including controlling your children’s education. And THIS is the premise that must be questioned.

Challenge the moral premise of government schools

Challenging that premise means accepting the morality that your life IS your own, that you ARE an end in yourself and not the means to anyone else’s end, including those of your neighbors, all the people in town, or the government. You have a right to your own life. That right implies that you and you alone are the one responsible for your life and for your children’s welfare, including their education and upbringing.

Would you let the government dictate what food your children MUST eat, whether or not they like what is offered, and whether or not the food is appropriate for your children’s needs?

“No!” you would probably say. “Deciding what food to put in my children’s bodies is my responsibility, my parental responsibility.”

So, then, why do you acquiesce and let the government decide what is put into your children’s minds? Why do you abandon the parental responsibility of educating your children to the government?

You may not think that this is what you are doing, but this is what most American parents are doing.

Consequences of government education

Government education is not market-driven. Because of this …

• It doesn’t have to respond to or serve its paying customers, who are taxpayers who are forced to enroll their children and/or subsidize it.
• It is guided by the agitation of activists, the pressure of teachers’ unions, and the influence-peddling of political officials.
• It doesn’t have to compete.
• It doesn’t have to show positive results in terms of actually educating children.
• It’s income still flows (from taxes) whether or not they satisfy their “customers” who are the parents.
• Remediation courses in mathematics and English are now common for entering college students.
• Reading scores on national exam decline.

The resulting education is the product of an unaccountable government.

Is it any wonder that we have continuing battles over what is taught, how it is taught, and school taxes?

Consider that food is a basic requirement for our survival. Yet, we have a free market that satisfies that requirement. You find the store that satisfies your personal needs. If you don’t like the selection or prices at Kroger, you can shop at Albertsons. If you want specialized food, you can shop at Sprouts or Central Market. They are responsive to the desires of their customers.  And you aren’t limited to the stores in your immediate neighborhood either. Education is no different than food in these respects.

Just as there is a need for food, there is a need for education. Just as the free market provides through voluntary transactions the variety of food that the variety of human beings want, so can the free market provide the variety of education that the variety of parents (customers) want through voluntary transactions.

Purpose of Education

It is important to have a context for evaluating any kind of education, in this instance government education. The basic context is to define the purpose of education that is consonant with the requirements of a productive, flourishing, and happy human life.

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to lead his life – by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past – and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”²

This stated purpose is one I agree with. The focus is on the full development of the individual as an independent sovereign entity.

Summary of why we should abolish public education

Just like a cancer, you can’t “fix” it; you have to eradicate it completely.

To summarize, “America’s government school system is immoral, impractical, and unfixable.

“It is immoral because it is coercive—because it forces parents to submit their children to government-sanctioned educators, government-sanctioned curricula, and the whims of government bureaucrats—and because it forces Americans to fund its immoral operations at the point of a gun.

“The government school system is impractical in that it fails to educate children—and it fails to do so by design. Its goal is not and never has been to educate children; its goal is to create obedient citizens who will serve the state.

“And because the government school system is by its very nature immoral and impractical, it cannot be reformed. It must be abolished.”³

The best and only solution is to abolish government schools altogether and abolish ALL government involvement in education, from the federal government to the states to the local school districts. Separate education from the government, just as and for the same reasons we separate religion from the government. Let parents, and not government, decide what to teach, how to teach and under what conditions.

As a first step, end all compulsory school laws. Kerry McDonald, author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom, describes 4 things that would happen if we didn’t have compulsory schools in this excellent FEE article.

• There would be a power shift away from the state and toward the family. Without legal force compelling school attendance, parents would have the freedom and flexibility to assume full responsibility for their child’s education.
• As more education choices sprouted, competition would lower prices, making access to these new choices more widespread.
• There would be new pathways to adulthood that wouldn’t rely so heavily on state-issued high school diplomas.
• It would help to disentangle education from schooling and reveal many other ways to be educated, such as through non-coercive, self-directed education, or “unschooling.”

References

1. “Public Education” by Nathaniel Branden in the chapter “Common Fallacies about Capitalism in the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand.
2. “The Comprachicos” in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Ayn Rand.
3. Freedom of Education by C. Bradley Thompson in Essays from The Objective Standard.

Photo/image credits

1. High School building: G. Edward Johnson in Wikimedia
2. Public Schools = Government Schools = Political Schools: John Davis
3. 19^th century school classroom of students: Austrian National Library on Unsplash

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As you are probably aware, many discussions on this topic are sometimes unfriendly and contain logical fallacies. If you decide to leave a comment, or even outside of this post, if you decide to have a discussion, public or private, you might find it helpful to follow the suggestions on my post How to have a successful discussion.