I’m A Libertarian on Education

by La Shawn on 06.01.06

in Education

Friday, June 2: Behold the power of the blogosphere!

Update (2:37 p.m.): I read yesterday about a separatist government school for hispanics called Academia Semillas del Pueblo. A show called McIntyre in the Morning is investigating the school, which is supported by racialist organizations like La Raza. After a reporter’s interview with the principal, someone tried to run him down.

(MM has more on this. So do Ed Driscoll, Betsy Newmark, who links to a related article by Wendy McElroy [a libertarian?] ), and Wizbang.

Private race- or ethnicity-based schools, no problem. Government-sanctioned and supported race- or ethnicity-based schools, BIG PROBLEM. History lesson (although the court’s reasoning stunk).

United Nations-approved compulsory education? Sounds farfetched, eh? At the rate we’re going, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. Higher education, whatever. General education, never.

If our Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, is citing foreign law, what’s to prevent foreigners from having a say in our K-12 public education system? The foreign government of Mexico already dictates our immigration policy…

Blogger Henry Cate interviews black homeschooler Jennifer James.
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When it comes to education, I’m a libertarian.

In fact, I once interviewed for an education policy analyst position at the Cato Institute. We talked about the need for a free market approach to education, the repugnance of government monopoly, etc., and everything was going so well. Then the interviewer asked my opinion on “legislating” morality, i.e., homosexuality. Though I tried to restrain myself, the social conservatism came gushing out.

What a mess that was. By the way, I didn’t get the job. :?

Milton Friedman

Anyway, back to the topic. Ideally, government should stay out of the education “business,” especially the federal government. Well-known economist and libertarian Milton Friedman sums up the libertarian position in The Role of Government in Education:


The role assigned to government in any particular field depends, of course, on the principles accepted for the organization of society in general. In what follows, I shall assume a society that takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity. In such a free private enterprise exchange economy, government’s primary role is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free. Beyond this, there are only three major grounds on which government intervention is to be justified.

One of the grounds for justification for government’s interference intervention in the free market is what Friedman calls a “neighborhood effect”:

A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but to other members of the society; the education of my child contributes to other people’s welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society. Yet it is not feasible to identify the particular individuals (or families) benefited or the money value of the benefit and so to charge for the services rendered. There is therefore a significant “neighborhood effect.”

In other words, libertarians believe that compulsory, government-financed education can be justified by the common societal benefit of general education. I think most conservatives and liberals would agree.

We divide on the “nationalization” of education; that is, how involved the government should be in education. This is where I’m libertarian and why I no longer support George Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. To require a uniform standard of academic achievement and teacher qualifications across the country is a noble but unrealistic idea. Some schools have more low achieving students than others. Highly-qualified teachers may be attracted to high-quality schools, and no amount of bonus or benefits will lure them to low quality schools, especially in bad neighborhoods. No wonder teachers cheat (and aren’t qualified themselves) and help out students on standardized tests. They know the students have no chance of meeting the minimum required scores. If the schools fails, they face consequences.

The liberal tendency is to throw more money at the problem rather than approach it from a different angle. A modest approach would be more school vouchers for low-income children. An ambitious and radical approach would be the libertarian way.

Friedman says it is taken for granted that because government subsidizes education, government should be directly involved with the administration of schools. This doesn’t necessarily follow. If heavy government involvement stems from a paternalistic concern about educating children of all classes and abilities, it must be balanced with individual freedom in a democratic society. Friedman explains how both could be accomplished:

Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an “approved” institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions of various kinds. The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards.

As cited earlier, libertarians believe a stable and democratic society requires acceptance of a common set of values. With government monopolizing education, however, a “common set of values” becomes harder to define, and individuals have less freedom in this area. There is also less competition between schools and lower incentives for schools to improve. So parents send their kids to private and parochial schools, which tends to exacerbate “elitism” and class distinctions, which in turn sends liberals into a tizzy (even though they send their kids to private schools).

Friedman argues that these distinctions and stratifications would be reduced if government got out of the way and allowed parents to send their kids to government schools of their choice. All the government would do is assure that schools met certain minimum standards. If parents are displeased with their child’s present school, they can withdraw the child and place him in a different school. As it stands now, says Friedman, if parents want to change schools, they typically have to change neighborhoods or go through a cumbersome bureaucratic and political process to eliminate unacceptable practices.

Friedman discusses a lot of things, including government’s role in vocational education. I picked out the issue I wanted to emphasize, so I encourage you to read the entire, long essay.

Seattle Public Schools: Symptom of the Disease

Incidentally, I intended to focus on an op-ed written by a libertarian about Seattle Public Schools called Planning ahead is considered racist?. But I got carried away blogging about what exactly the libertarian position on education was.

Last week I read that the school district posted on its web site a definition or statement about racism that implied only whites could be racist. News Busters has the details. I thought about it again when I read Cato Institute’s Andrew J. Coulson’s piece.

[Note: Coulson drops in for a visit. Make him feel welcome. :) ]

It seems the school district implied, on its web site, that long-term planning is a “white” value and, therefore, racist. Don’t ask me why they did it. My answer wouldn’t be appropriate for mixed company.

[Seattle removed the dumb statements, but Coulson links to the Google cache copy from Cato's blog. Seattle replaced the previous drivel with new drivel.]

Coulson mentions both idiotic statements but focuses on the larger issue: the lack of school choice allows government schools to push ill-informed, illiterate, and politically-bent ideology on parents, whose complaints don’t really matter. He writes:

Under such a choice-based system, those wanting to promote their own cultural and political philosophies could hang out a shingle and offer their services to any and all interested families. But they would lack the power, used and abused in Seattle, to impose their ideologies.

Race!

I bet you thought I wouldn’t mention race, right? Wrong. I believe the libertarian/school choice/less government involvement approach would be particularly beneficial to black students. Nursed on government-as-savior pabulum, blacks typically oppose school choice as something foreign. Yes, it requires a lot of parental involvement and responsibility in the child’s education, but living in a free society requires it.

With the expansion of government in every part of our lives from cradle to grave, many people have forgotten what individual responsibility looks and feels like. Liberals don’t want you to know, and conservatives used to insist that you know. But liberals and conservatives [A commenter corrects the record; yes, I meant the political parties.] Democrats and Republicans are increasingly indistinguishable when it comes to Big Government.

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