The Socialism of Public Schooling

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

I participated in the October 6, 2015 “Libertarian Angle,” webinar sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation, with the Foundation’s president, Jacob G. Hornberger, on the topic of “The Socialism of Public Schooling.”

We discuss two fundamental problems with public education in America:

First, in too many communities public schools have left young men and women functionally illiterate, and unprepared for entering the adult world of work and social participation. The government schooling system lacks real, market-based competition that would serve as the vehicle to introduce innovations in curriculum, teaching techniques, and motivation of young people to desire to learn.

Second, as a government mandated institution that young people are required to attend under the threat of legal action against the parents, public schooling becomes a battleground over whose “politically correct” curriculum and its content shall be imposed on all children in the classroom.

In the marketplace there is consumer-based pluralism under which a diversity of views, values, beliefs and desires are simultaneous satisfied that diffuses conflicts about whose wants and desires will be fulfilled compared to someone else’s.

The educational goal and ideal in the truly free society, therefore, should be the full privatization of the educational process, the separating of schooling and the state. The outcome of which will be not only greater freedom of choice in the education opportunities of young people and their parents, an end to the use of the system as an indoctrination device for one political and ideological agenda or another as too frequently is the situation now.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-libertarian-angle-the-socialism-of-public-schooling/

Best,
Richard