Sarah has won numerous other awards for her writing and leadership talents. Her non-academic interests include drawing, painting, sculpting, and field hockey.

Only the free market can provide high quality and efficient schooling services.

The necessity of education, especially in today’s rapidly changing society, is still recognized as being of the utmost importance. Yet neither those concerned with the quality of schooling, nor those concerned with individual liberty are satisfied with the current system. It could be argued that the present educational system is inefficient, immoral, and inconsistent with the principles of a free society. In the area of public education, we have failed to separate financing from the production of schooling services. The government, in addition to providing financial aid to education, has also taken on the responsibility for producing educational services. Two things keep the current system working: (1) financing it by compulsory tax payments and (2) the willingness of Americans to accept the belief that there is no alternative to government production of schooling.

Much of the failure in the field of education may be traced to government intervention. One of the first errors was the system’s failure to recognize that compulsory attendance would lead to many problems. More specifically, compulsory attendance policies have failed to recognize that some students don’t belong—much less want to be—in the classroom. It’s assumed that all wants and needs of a student are met by the present educational system. Some students, however, do not want to learn and have no intention of letting others do so. Consequently, they create a disruptive atmosphere for other students and teachers. It is also assumed that all students receive benefits in excess of the costs to taxpayers. To the extent this is not true, compulsory attendance wastes both society’s resources and the student’s time and is therefore inefficient.

Second, compulsory attendance has lowered the overall standards and quality of today’s educational system. The present system is supposedly trying to be fair and equal in its treatment of each student. Yet equality never raises standards; it lowers them to the lowest denominator. This allows even the poorest student to pass graduation requirements. Lower standards restrict ambitious students and high achievers by not presenting a challenge.

Third, through compulsory attendance the State forces parents to have their children associate with uneducable children, juvenile delinquents, and the like. Those who can’t afford private schooling or tutors are “locked into” an unsatisfactory situation.

This leads us to an interesting question: “Does the parent or the State know better the educational needs of a child?” Parents are bound to their children with ties fostered by love and responsibility. Obviously, the parents know better than the State bureaucracy the wants and needs of their child—and should be able to choose the schooling that best suits their child. Yet public schooling deprives parents of this opportunity. The government taxes away parents’ income and proceeds to operate the school system as it sees fit.

“As it sees fit” usually includes suppressing the diversity that exists among individuals. A uniform code is imposed on all students, which ignores individual interests and abilities. If the government did not impose a uniform set of rules, however, people would charge discrimination. All people are not alike. Different people have different wants and public school officials cannot please everyone. There will be some parents and students who will not be satisfied with the type of education they receive. Hence, conflict arises between citizens and school boards, between parents and administrators. It is the inevitable result of government decisions rather than private ones.

The last and most powerful argument against the present public school system is that only the free market can provide high quality and efficient schooling services. Letting the market function unhampered in the production of education would likely produce an explosive growth in the number of private voluntary schools. Parents would be free to send their children to trade schools, religious schools, progressive schools, or whatever type for which there was a demand.

Those schools which meet the desires of the customer-parents would flourish. With parents making the choices, schools would have to deliver the kind of education the consumer-parents demand. It would be impossible for a school to avoid the discipline of the marketplace. Schools would be selected on the basis of performance and reputation. Any school that fails to offer what the parents and students want would have to close. If schools had to design their programs with an eye toward the market, society could be assured that everyone’s freedom would be broadened by the many new choices that would become available.

This freedom of choice for parents would also provide real academic freedom for teachers. The market would encourage teachers to improve their professional skills and would stimulate creative persons outside the present system to enter the profession. Teachers would be motivated to improve because they would face competition, not protection through tenure and seniority rules and regulations emanating from the vast, complex government educational bureaucracy. Outstanding teachers would be rewarded with raises if the present employer did not want to risk losing those teachers to another firm. Ideally, teachers’ raises would result from quality performance and not from demonstrations or picket-line participation. Those teachers who are incompetent would be either less successful in a market sys-tern, or would be “reallocated” by the market to another occupation.

The present public schooling system is clearly inconsistent with the principles of individual liberty and responsibility in a free society. Instead of raising the quality of education, it has resulted in lower standards, conflict, and inefficient use of resources. What the market has accomplished in the production of other goods and services can be realized also for educational services. []

Bixler, Scott W. “Educational Freedom.” The Freeman, (August 1975), pp. 451-60.

Friedman, Milton and Rose. Free to Choose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Hazlitt, Henry, Economics in One Lesson. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1973.

North, Douglass C. and Roger L. Miller. The Economics of Public Issues. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Peterson, Dennis L, “Education: State Coercion or Free Choice.” The Freeman (December 1984), pp, 708- 14.

Roepke, Wilhelm. Economics of the Free Society. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963.