Should We Abolish Public Schools?

Calls to rely on private schooling fail to recognize the fundamental purpose of offering free, government-funded education.

Ron Paul

As concerns about the quality of the American system of public education have grown, some have advocated abolishing it completely. The arguments for this proposal come from a number of angles, but they are all seriously misguided.

One approach is articulated by Libertarian Ron Paul. who sees the government involvement in education as the worst kind of meddling in the private lives of citizens. Only in schools, he seems to think, are kids exposed to drugs and pressures to conform. Schools, as they exist now, he thinks, only stunt our children's ability to think for themselves and forge an identity of their own.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it idealizes the alternatives. Does Paul imagine that all 1.1 million students in New York City public schools can be educated by their parents or the friends of their parents? And if they are, won't they be exposed to an even narrower point of view than in public schools? Does he figure that conformity comes only from the public sector?

Another is the "pure capitalist" or free market approach. By funding public schools, this line goes, we remove them from the pressures of the market, which would force them to meet the needs (or at least the desires) of parents. For-profit ventures -- or at least private ones -- would allow people to make freer choices, in the same way that markets allow more choice than centralized economies.

To an extent, this idea has some merit. It is the foundation of the independent school world's argument that state regulators should leave them alone. For example, the New York State Association of Independent Schools, to which my employer belongs, accredits its member institutions based on standards derived from the goals of the schools' own missions. In other words, the school is expected to announce what it intends, sell that product to families willing to pay between $25,000 and $50,000 a year, and then show how it delivers the product it sells. It mostly relies on the market to decide whether the product itself is worthy.

But the families in independent schools have leverage most people do not have. The very fact that they can pay such outrageously high tuition indicates the degree of social and economic leverage they already have. Not all families have that kind of negotiating power, and if they did they would not have the knowledge or experience necessary to apply it.

Not only that, but schooling provides a social good to people other than those directly involved in its purchase. The childless people in a school district, and those whose children have already passed through the schools, and whose children go to independent schools all benefit from a generally well-educated population. Employees who cannot read or reason or less effective; voters who cannot sort through the BS of a candidate's campaign may harm us all. Like roads, sewers, bridges, and other infrastructure, schools represent a societal investment in the functioning of the group. Free markets don't take such good into account.

Jefferson's vision for America included an informed, engaged electorate, and he assumed that such a thing required a certain level of education. He himself was a remarkable autodidact, who read voraciously and did more than dabble in everything from moral philosophy to botany. Jefferson certainly did not imagine that everyone would reach his levels of expertise in most things -- he was not an especially humble man -- but it seems that he did assume that anyone taught to read and count would then use those tools to expand their abilities more broadly. What he wanted, in the end, was a certain level of individual autonomy.

The question is how we can achieve that kind of autonomy for the greatest number of people.