Can the Free Market Provide Public Education?
Entrepreneurship Can Produce Good Education for a Mass Society
These remarks were presented at the Children’s Scholarship Fund conference “Freedom and Equal Opportunity in Education,” January 12, 2000, in New York City.
The short answer, of course, is: yes, look around. Right now, private enterprise and nonprofit organizations provide all manner of education—from comprehensive schools with classes in the traditional academic subjects, to specialized schools that teach everything from the fine arts to the martial arts, from dancing to dieting, from scuba diving to scrutinizing one’s inner self.
If we define “public education” as “what the government does now,” then it’s a trick question. Every school serves members of the public. For the sake of this discussion, we can ignore that the word “public” has been corrupted to mean “coercively financed through the tax system.” As an aside, there are signs that the words “private” and “market” are on their way to corruption as well.
The free market—and I include here both for-profit and nonprofit organizations—would provide even more education than it does now but for the “unfair competition” from government. Since government has a resource that private organizations lack—the taxpayers—it’s able to offer its services for “free.” They’re not really free, of course; in the government context, “free” means that everyone pays whether he wants the service or not. Clearly, as long as government can tax its citizens and then provide educational services to them at a marginal price of zero, much private education will never come into being. How ironic that government vigilantly looks for predatory pricing in the private sector when it is the major offender.
There is certainly nothing about education that should lead anyone to doubt that the market could provide it. Like any other product or service, education is a combination of land, labor, and capital goods directed at a particular objective—instruction in academic subjects and related matters demanded by a class of consumers, primarily parents.
Here’s where things may get contentious. Critics of market-provided education are uncomfortable with education’s being treated like a commodity, subject to supply and demand. In the marketplace, consumers ultimately determine what is produced. Entrepreneurs take risks to serve them. And fickle consumers show no mercy when something new and attractive comes along. Ask the shareholders of Boston Chicken, among others.
Why should parents alone determine what is and what is not acceptable education? But why not parents? To whose hearts are the interests of children closer? Besides, most parents would no more make educational decisions without consulting knowledgeable authorities than they would make medical decisions without consulting doctors. The uninformed-consumer argument against free-market education is a red herring.
Parents, and the private sector, should be free to determine what is and what is not acceptable academic education for the same reasons they are free to determine what is proper religious education. We don’t use the small number of neglectful parents as a pretext for government control or finance of religion. Nor should we use it as a pretext for government control or finance of schooling.
Defenders of government schooling have enlisted various economic arguments related to “market failure” to dispute the idea that parents in a free market should ultimately determine what educational services are offered. These arguments fail. Education does not have the characteristics of a “public good.” One person’s consumption of a given service can detract from another person’s consumption, and nonpayers can be excluded.
Nor does the positive-externality case succeed. Education obviously does have spillover benefits, but that is not enough in economic theory to justify government action. You would have to believe that the external benefits would cause education to be under-consumed unless the government subsidized it. No one has ever shown that. Nor could anyone. To believe that, you’d have to believe that parents engage in the following reasoning: I’d like to buy X amount of education for my child, but since society will benefit by my child’s erudition without paying anything for it, I’ll buy less than X amount of education. Ridiculous, isn’t it?
The argument that high-quality education is intrinsically too expensive for a significant portion of the population to afford also fails. A free market that can saturate society with refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines, and telephones—cellular and otherwise—can surely produce good education for a mass society. The key is entrepreneurship.
We think we know what education is and what methods work. And we do know some things. This sense of certainty might encourage us to think that education is best left to government. But we shouldn’t be so presumptuous, or we could wind up like the nineteenth-century Patent Office official who said the office should be closed because everything useful had been invented.
The world is open-ended. We don’t know exactly what we will learn tomorrow. As fallible beings, we can be sure that at any time, valuable information and opportunities are being overlooked. Scarce resources are being misdirected because our knowledge is incomplete. This is as true for education as for anything else.
What can we do to hasten the discovery and correction of error? We already have a method: entrepreneurship. What entrepreneurs do is search the landscape for instances where resources are being under-used, that is, devoted to the production of goods and services that consumers value less highly than other things those resources might be devoted to. What lures entrepreneurs to discover those instances is profit. Nothing approaches its power to stimulate discovery. Profit accrues when an alert entrepreneur, noticing what others have overlooked, switches resources from producing things consumers value less highly to producing things consumers value more highly.
The application of this principle to education should be obvious. Since we don’t know today all that we may learn about educational methods and objectives tomorrow, we need entrepreneurship in education. Government isn’t up to the task. Bureaucracy is the opposite of enterprise. It stifles enterprise. Government domination of education assures that the entrepreneurial innovation and creativity we are accustomed to in, say, the computer industry will be missing from education. There is no good substitute for the decentralized, spontaneous entrepreneurial process that full privatization of education would stimulate. But entrepreneurship has preconditions: freedom and private property on both the supply and demand sides. That means no government money. Asking for government finance is equivalent to the Founding Fathers’ asking King George to finance the American Revolution. He might have agreed—but it would have been a very different revolution.
Thus it is not only the case that the free market can provide education. We may conclude further that only the free market should provide education.
Comment by MiaZagora on 29 December 2008:
I agree that education needs to be free market.
But there are those who would point out that if some parents weren’t made to send their children at least to government schools under penalty of law, these children wouldn’t get an education at all. At least this is one of the arguments that I am getting when I have discussed it with others. I will have to admit, judging from the apparent apathy of parents toward the discipline and education of children these days, I wonder how many families fit this profile.
The other argument is how could truly poor families afford an education? Personally, I believe people choose to spend their money on what is truly important to them.
For the record, we homeschool. Our local public schools are in trouble – there are talks of closing several in the next few years. We are homeowners and our property taxes have been raised every year that they could legally raise them. I’m tired of hearing how the schools are failing, but if they only had more money…it’s hogwash.
Comment by MBA on 11 March 2009:
In a free society, parents would have the right to not educate their children if they so choose. Of course, this may put them at a disadvantage latter on. But lets be honest. An industrious person could learn everything they teach from k-12 in about a year or two, no problem. This may not be the case if schools were all private, as advances in education might improve the quality as well. But still, you could catch up pretty quickly if you wanted to. I went back to school myself and am now in medical school. Took a few years to learn the sciences to pass the MCAT, but I’m not really behind those students who went straight through. I had a humanities professor in college (who was part of the Chicago school, he taught the great books series of M.J Adler). He used to say that you could essentially learn everything there was to know about a subject in about 2 years.
Comment by Aron Martens on 24 July 2009:
Re Mia Zagora’s point on apathetic parents and the need to coerce them to send their children to school. I would argue that much of this apathy is a direct result of the current public system where parents have lost control of their children’s education and simply given up. This is the “crowding out” effect where state involvement crowds out private involvement.
On the matter of affordability, competitive markets have the incentive to constantly search for lower cost methods of providing a service thus constantly lowering real prices of the service. Virtually all products and services provided by competitive markets have improved in quality and become cheaper over time thus making at least some version available to the poor.
Comment by James Madison Fan on 24 July 2009:
Apparently Mr. Richman doesn’t understand that there really is no such a thing as a “public good” as long as those that control the good are willing to accept the consequences. Air isn’t even a public good if we, as a society, are willing to accept people dying by depriving them of it so I find it amusing when the failure of something to be a “public good” is used as a litmus test because the definition is fluid.
The thing I find interesting about a lot of Libertarian writing I’ve read is that many seem to think that “Liberty” and “Anarchy” are synonymous and that true Liberty can only be achieved without the onus of taxes. Roads should be privately owned. Schools should be privately owned. We should eliminate boarders and allow unregulated immigration from nation to nation. If you don’t like a law then civil disobedience is your right no matter how small the minority you represent. “I am a member of a group of Libertarian homicidal maniacs 1000 strong that do not like 187 PC so we have decided to protest these laws by killing you. Have a nice day.” What the hell is going on?
I always thought being a Libertarian was about securing our freedom and keeping the government at arms length, not draconian Capitalism run amok, social chaos, and a complete disdain for a citizen’s responsibility to the nation?
Education determines if your workers are putting together huts using mud, dung, and straw or mega structures using concrete and steel. Education determines if the local shaman treats you by sacrificing a chicken or you go to the Mayo clinic. Education determines if you spend your life digging furrows in the dirt using a hoe or going to the market for Cheerios.
Education may not be a “public good” by Mr. Richman’s definition but it is in the best interest of a Republic for the people that are doing the voting to be educated. It is already difficult to tolerate the ignorance of the average voter, imagine if they were not forced to attend school?
It is in the best interest of a Capitalist economy for the work force to be educated as well. The more educated the workforce the more likely an employer will be able to fill a skilled to highly-skilled position. That’s why you do not see some megacorp making breakthroughs in Nicaragua, Uganda, or Java.
As such it is in everyone’s best interest to support the educational infrastructure regardless of if they have children or not because the kid we educate today is more likely to get a job inventing and building the next widget that makes everyone’s life better thus expanding the economy instead of going on welfare and stealing your car stereo.
A stable market needs to be certain that future employees get a standardized and secular education. A stable government requires the same thing. If the market is the sole source of education then any concept of a uniform code of education evaporates and becomes market driven. If a school’s funding is contingent on keeping the parents happy then schools will be forced to change curricula based on local demands such as fundamentalist demands that Creation be taught instead of Evolution which is something I had to endure.
In addition to this Mr. Richman is proposing that private schools are undervalued due to unfair competition with public schools so they supposedly can’t compete. If he is correct this means that if tuition for private schools were allowed to find equilibrium the price of tuition would – increase – due to an increase in scarcity.
This would be exacerbated as the cost of education shifted from a public source to the parents alone. Around 80% to 90% of tax revenue is generated by the upper 5% to 10% of the economy thus at least 80% of the cost of school funding would shift from a general fund to the parents. The more children, the greater the burden while the upper 5% walk to the bank with even fatter paychecks. Brilliant. How about we find a way to subsidize the price of caviar while we are at it?
Here’s an idea, how about paying into the infrastructure that your corporation exploits so it does not collapse? If you chip away at the base of a pyramid long enough the apex is going to come crashing down. “Redistributing Wealth” is a wonderful aphorism and sometimes it is true but there are certain things that separate the US from countries like Mexico that have access to essentially the same resources we do but do not demonstrate a fraction of our prosperity and education is a big reason for this disparity.
When considering taxes we should try to remember that the motto of our Forefathers was, “No taxation without representation.” , not “No Taxation.” They understood that with Rights come Responsibilities. We should at least try to keep this in mind as well.
Comment by Robert Sprague on 24 July 2009:
re James Madison Fan: Letting the market work and moving to a completely free-market approach to education would of course ultimately force certain districts or counties for the sake of profit to lower the price. This would be due to the lower median income in those areas, people are still charitable as well and charities would step in to help educate on a \"shoestring budget\". You would be surprised at how well the schools perform already that are donation based and focused only on the education rather than mandatory physical training and expensive extra-curricular activities. Charity based schools primarily religious are an absolutely wonderful thing and they represent the heart of a society, plus, they don\’t teach with expensive propaganda tools or \"textbooks\" they tend to teach with a \"good books\" curricula. So, anyway, my point is that where \"for-profit\" schools may fail in certain extremely poor areas charity schools would take up the slack and compete very well. My experience is that they are more well rounded and have a better grasp of English (if Catholic than maybe Latin as well) than most schools and may compete better internationally. I strongly believe that our many problems as a society and nation can be attributed to the entitlement mentality and the belief that creeps into everyone\’s head the minute they graduate from college even though their education generally is crap compared to the counterpart in…say…Britain (or anywhere really nowadays) \"I am better than that\", this I contend has eliminated the labor job that is still needed and is now being outsourced (or insourced). Save your money and never buy what you can\’t afford; Savings and Production are the backbone of any solid economy and with proper saving methods any poor man or woman in the US can achieve anything. Education is not a right and our undereducated were the strength behind our recovery from the Depression because they provided the much needed hard labor that sad to say no college grad would ever do unless forced and would boy would they whine (haha). We need solid education but parents need to be the ones teaching or providing guidance as to the instruction of their child. It is scary how bad the education has been since the government took it over and think of the falsehoods taught to you that you had to unlearn. The Government has been controlling the youth and molding them into State promoting propagandists you see them already everywhere. Education must be separate from the Government in order to keep the Logos and stop the one-sided nonsense from controlling the dialectic. I agree with your take on certain tax-centric Libertarians but remember that the Government based on their own documents has really no right to tax you directly, it does so only due to the general lack of knowledge and apathy of the public. The federal Government has no right to tax anyone unless you belong to them i.e. military, government workers, or those born on federal land; everyone else is supposed to be taxed or not taxed at the state\’s discretion based on the federal tax levied as a duty to the various states and territories to support the normal workings of government. We are meant to be a confederation of member states united by commonality expressed through the strict adherence to the Constitution. How we saw the Union may have been taught into us differently since the Civil War; but the Law of the Land never fundamentally changed to enable the government we have to grow, the public just become apathetic to the cause of liberty by this terrible \"Public Education System\". Lastly, don\’t blame the rich for yours\’ or anybodies\’ plight! We as Americans were better than that once… We simply worked our asses off to raise ourselves beyond our dilemma whatever it was. Never blame anyone (rich, poor, or the working class) for your station! If you don\’t like it than work harder and you can improve it.
Comment by Robert Sprague on 24 July 2009:
sorry for the grammatical errors in previous post.
Comment by John Anello on 25 July 2009:
Amen JMF. Anarchy is not liberty; in fact it is one of the quickest paths to tyranny. However, I must say that most libertarians are not anarchists. The only libertarians that truly propose an absence of government are the followers of Murray Rothbard, I refer to them as the Branch Rothbardians. I would certainly like to see more competition in education (i.e. vouchers) but the complete elimination of public schools is neither feasible nor desirable. Poor people cannot afford to send their children to private schools; therefore, there would be no incentive for an entrepreneur to form a private school in a predominately poor area (you don’t see many Louie Vuitton stores in poor areas, do you?) As you have mentioned an educated population is beneficial to a fee society so I would certainly support government intervention in situations where the market fails to provide education.
Comment by James Madison Fan on 28 July 2009:
Mr. Sprauge,
I am not whining about the rich however I do think that if you own 90% of the wealth you have a responsibility to pay for 90% of the infrastructure that makes that wealth possible. As Lenona Helmsley said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”
I can write pages about what the rich do to avoid taxes including Congressmen trading houses so they can avoid paying Capital Gains taxes they voted to implement and increase. The talking heads in Washington love taxes, just so long as they do not have to pay them.
You mention Britain as providing a superior education to that in the US but I fail to understand why since their system and ours are similar? Their system may well be superior but it is not due to where the funding comes from since the majority of students graduate from their public school system rather than “Independent schools.”
The unskilled were not a positive in recovering from the Great Depression. Post war rebuilding loans replacing pre-Depression reparations loans to Germany did more for the US economy than a thousand CCC’s could have done.
75% of the US does not go to college. There are plenty of people available to do unskilled labor so there is no such thing as a “job Americans won’t do.” The problem is that they cannot do the job for the wage being offered because slave labor is being imported from an external market by the truckload on a daily basis. Micro Econ 101: Infinite supply of labor and finite demand for labor means wages drop. The idiots in Washington refuse to acknowledge this economic fact so they keep bumping the minimum wage trying to cure the effect rather than treating the cause.
Education is a right, however just because something is a right does not mean the public should pay for it. I have the right to go to college but that does not mean public funds should be allocated to help me achieve this goal. I have a right to drink alcohol but that does not mean public funds should be used to finance my addiction. The question of financing is not based on if something is a right; the question is if it is in the public interest to foster the behavior. It is in the best interest of the Union to have an educated electorate and it is the best interest of the economy to have an educated workforce ergo it is a “public good” though Mr. Richman would disagree.
I can agree with your opinions about an entitlement mentality contributing to our problems but privatization of schools would not cure this. The educational model you are offering would result in a virtual caste system based on classism. The lower your financial status the less likely your children would be to receive an adequate or substantive education and escape the financial tier they were born into.
As John Anello points out if there is not a market incentive to service a community (i.e., profit) then service to that community will be limited if not nonexistent. The effects would be a stark stratification of the schools based on the economics of the surrounding neighborhood. Inconsistent funding due to the surrounding tax base is already a problem for many schools and this would be grossly exacerbated if the onus of financing in low-income areas shifted to the parents alone.
If John and Jane Doe are having problems putting food on the table for their kids then they cannot pay the extra money to send their children to school, much less a good one whereas Bill and Melinda Gates can afford anything they want. So not only are you condemning the parents to life doing drudge work, you are condemning entire generations of their progeny to the same fate.
The best teachers and administrators would avoid low income schools leaving the dregs to teach classes and run schools in areas that are already overwhelmed by illiteracy and crime making a bad situation worse.
Only 25% of children attend college and only 8% achieve an advanced degree. By dismantling public education the question would go from if Junior can go to a real university to if Junior can go to kindergarten, grade school, and high school. Ignorance is already a plague so I cannot fathom a scenario where making it difficult to become literate is a good thing.
Most criminals lack an education that meets or exceed high school proficiency. If you set up a system where kids are ignorant and they do not see any potential to break out of their “caste” then crime rates are going to skyrocket and the “plebes” will sew discontent and rebellion. When you polarize a society in such a fashion you are begging for revolution.
Charitable institutions are not an adequate replacement because charity is not consistent. No teacher or administrator is going to bet his future or the future of his children on something that may not be around next year if the economy tanks and charity decreases or vanishes entirely.
Moreover, if the school is reliant on charity it would be susceptible to the same kind of manipulation you accuse the government of inflicting, if not worse. I do not want to see “School brought to you by P&G” where the vending machines are filled with Pringles and other synergistic products, the bathrooms dispense Ivory Soap, report cards are sent home with a coupon for Crest, and the teachers read commercials 20 minutes out of every 60 like pitchmen on radio and TV.
As a Libertarian I am also not thrilled with the idea of Corporate America having that kind of information. If I don’t want the Government looking through the keyhole in my front door why would I want some CEO doing it?
You ask me to “…think of the falsehoods taught to [me] that [I] had to unlearn.” Having gone to a Christian School that spent at least an hour a day hammering “good book” doctrine into my head you cannot fathom how true this is which is why I am staunchly against home schooling and private schools that do not answer to a higher source that forces them to teach fact, logic, and Science leaving canon for Sunday mass.
Comment by James Madison Fan on 29 July 2009:
John,
I am torn about vouchers because I do not like the lack of supervision that is currently part of the process. I think the schools receiving the vouchers need to be validated as financially solid as well as having their curricula examined before parents are allowed to enroll their kids. I also have establishment clause issues.
In states where voucher programs have been implemented there have been issues in regard to the solvency of private schools. In some cases due to innocent mismanagement but also due to fraud. If a private school goes bankrupt the students are returned to the public schools but the money that was allocated to teach them is gone. This means the school must educate additional students without additional funds. I think this issue can be mitigated by examining the financial history of a school with extra attention paid to new schools at startup to ensure that what they promise and what they can provide is the same thing. Schools that do not pass this litmus test cannot get public funds.
Another worry I have is by allowing parents to choose a school it will lead to racial and religious segregation. I can attest from personal experience that Christian schools are hostile to the concept of Evolution and any science that even hints that the Bible may not be the literal truth. I can easily imagine the same being true for believers in the Quran. I can easily imagine a MeCHA friendly school teaching that the Mexican Cession of 1848 was “theft.” I can also easily imagine a predominantly Black school endorsing reparations for slavery.
I am not at all fond of the concept that my tax dollar will be going to finance a political, social, or religious agenda, especially when the agenda is idiocy incarnate. A private school should teach the same curriculum as a public school. If they want to spend additional time on propagandistic reprogramming they can do that on their own time with their own money, not mine. I already spend enough time debating Creation vs. Evolution with the staggeringly ignorant; I refuse to pay for it.
I also think the 2002 Cleveland decision sets a dangerous precedent which could be abused to funnel tax dollars “indirectly” into religious coffers. It seems unlikely in the near future but when it comes to stupidity my motto is: “Never say never.” Taxing the fat seemed a ridiculous concept but some idiot decided it was actually a good idea and the idea is bouncing around Washington picking up steam. Who woulda thunk?
Comment by Rocket Man on 20 August 2009:
My wife is director of adult education tutorial program at a local charity that gets many referrals from a local junior college\’s GED program. In order to first enter the college\’s adult education program the students must be able to perform at the 6th grade level. It is astounding how many adults who are products of government education the program serves. Even though they were coerced by the government to attend school, it didn\’t work for them. We have many degrees in our family and we homeschooled our two boys so we highly value education. But it seems to me that the author is exactly correct in that the educational system would be much more effective and with a free-enterprise approach. Some obviously aren\’t getting an education under the current system and everyone is getting a poorer product under government-controlled education. I honestly feel that if it weren\’t thought of as \"free\" then people would value it more. Those who don\’t will suffer in the marketplace of life. If it were valuable enough to them then they would find a way to finance it for their children. Most have to somehow find a way to finance a college education – the last 4 years of a 16 year educational process – so why not the first 12 or so years? One thing that free-enterprise has taught us is the cost would be much much lower without government interference and involvement.
Comment by MiaZagora on 11 September 2009:
\"which is why I am staunchly against home schooling and private schools that do not answer to a higher source that forces them to teach fact, logic, and Science leaving canon for Sunday mass.\"
I don\’t answer to anyone as our state is pretty lenient on homeschoolers. Those homeschoolers who choose to test simply blow the public school test scores away. I don\’t choose to participate in state testing, because these tests do not test what a student actually knows…you can\’t do that with a multiple-guess, fill-in-the-bubble test.
We are Christians and our kids do take outside Bible courses at a local ministry, as well as participate in different activities at Church. Public schools started out using the Bible to teach many subjects and is good for everyone to study – if only for the historical (cultures) and literature elements. It would seem that today\’s school children would only benefit from reading the Bible in school rather than \"Captain Underpants\" for literature as they are currently doing.
I assume the \"higher source\" you would want me to answer to would be our illustrious local school board, which is a collection of inept bumbling idiots who couldn\’t balance a budget or set priorities if they really tried…which they don\’t.
\"Forcing\" us to teach fact, logic and Science? Anything that is true is fact. There are many homeschool courses for logic, but it\’s not in the curriculum at the local schools. We do teach Science. What you mean to say is you want homeschoolers to teach these things to YOUR specifications. How very pompous of you. That is YOUR problem, not ours. You have no bearing on my life or the lives of my children. I know homeschoolers who have gone to Harvard after having been schooled with a Christian curriculum.
I attended a private Christian school and have classmates that are public school teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. There\’s absolutely nothing wrong with a good Christian education, if the parents choose that for their children – including homeschooling parents.
Your silly hangups are between you, your parents and the school you went to and it is unfair – and quite illogical – to hold everyone to a certain standard because of your particular experience. Who died and made you King of the world? You aren\’t unique, you know. You aren\’t the first to criticize their upbringing or education and you won\’t be the last. You\’re a dime a dozen. Blaming your problems on others never solves anything.
Comment by James Madison Fan on 28 October 2009:
Ms. Zagora,
If a home school wants to teach their kid that 2+2=5 would you consider it “pompous” for me to point out it is incorrect? Likely not. However when a home school teaches a child that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old in direct contradiction of sciences like Nuclear Physics and Geology that is “pompous.” Was it “pompous” for the Catholic Church to burn Bruno for supporting the concept the Earth revolves around the Sun? Was it “pompous” of the church to condemn inoculation as a sin? Was it “pompous” of the church to condemn Benjamin Franklin for inventing the lightning rod because it protected sinners from God’s Wrath? Religion is about faith. Science is about fact. You do not need to be “pompous” to support the teaching of scientific fact any more than you need to be “pompous” to teach that 2+2=4.
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Comment by Gordon Maddox on 21 January 2010:
JMF has a different definition of a Libertarian than I do but this is not to argue with him. I do not think it would achieve any-thing. The taxes-paid statistics refer to Federal taxes—I doubt that local taxes are quite so loaded on the richer. As for voluntary (non-tax paid)schools, why not look at churches? There seem to as many around as anyone wants and none of them are supported by taxes! And they usually welcome all—as would a properly non-regulated non-tax-paid school. We had mostly non-
governmental schools until about the time of the War Between the
States and apparently people got better educations then than now.
Comment by LockDeltz on 22 October 2010:
James Madison Fan is simply an illogical moron who is ignorant about the bio-mechanism of human begins. Seriously how hard is to learn how to read and write? Or learn a skill like constructing a building. Does someone need to spend 12+ years in a school taking meaningless classes to learn how to construct a building? I’m assuming you never heard of Thomas Edison the great inventor who spent only one day in formal schooling or how about Benjamin Franklin who only spent only one year in grammar school. The author isn’t discriminating public education, what he is against is compulsory education (ie tax-payer funded/mandatory public schools). Schooling should be a CHOICE and there can never be a choice in education if taxpayers are forced to fund it.
Comment by chuck glavin on 3 January 2011:
LockDelttz is simply an illogical moron who likes to throw out statements that aren’t true to support his/her primordial beliefs. If he/she were enough of an authority on the bio-mechanism of human beings to be calling people morons for their lack of knowledge on the subject, he/she should know that a person’s brain is twice as receptive to learning language skills before age 10.
How hard is it to learn to read and write? Ask an adult who struggles with illiteracy.
Does it take 12 years to learn how to construct a building?… Yes. People aren’t born with inherent knowledge. There are steps to education. To know geometry, one must know algebra, to know algebra, one must know rudimentary mathematics. The fact that you believe an adult could just spend a few months or a few years and become an expert in any given subject shows just how ignorant you are and is a testament to our failing schools.
Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin are geniuses. They are exceptions to the rule. To use them as an example is hyperbolic and further demonstrates your willingness to say anything, (no matter how rediculous) to support your political beliefs.
In the same way you say the author isn’t disparaging public education, JMF isn’t disparaging choice. Taxpayer funded education can provide choices. One can place their child in any public school simply by moving into that district. Is that not choice? I suppose your argument would be: “many cannot afford to move into the better districts, so without the means to make the choice, there is no choice.” Exactly. Yet a system that limits one’s choices based on one’s means is different from a free market solution… how, exactly?
Look, it’s a complex situation and the bootom-line is you can’t just come in here and go: “CHOICE!” and “taxes, whaa!” and think you’ve made a compelling argument. JMF made good points, don’t think that calling him an idiot and spouting-off rhetoric and flawed logic distracts anyone from that fact.
Pingback by Sheldon Richman, Public Education & Reason.tv « FEE tv on 17 June 2011:
[...] Can the Free Market Provide Public Education? by Sheldon Richman School Choice by Walter E. Williams The Failure of American Public Education by John Hood Disestablishing Public Education by Anna David Homeschooling and Educational Choice by Dennis L. Peterson [...]
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