In yesterday’s piece, I suggested that we should get off the Mishnory Road when it comes to the education of our young. Most “educational reformers” concentrate on curricula, discipline, and the purging of teachers who indoctrinate rather than teach. They seldom contemplate the truly dramatic step I have in mind.
Government-run schools are a total disaster just about everywhere in this country. They produce the lowest-quality graduates in American history: not merely ignorant, but functionally illiterate, innumerate, and uninquisitive. The parents of school-age children agree on this by an overwhelming margin. Yet the system continues. It acquires more “responsibilities” with every passing year. The amounts of money being poured into the schools, already torrential, are regularly criticized as “not enough.”
Clearly someone must be benefiting from all this. Or perhaps we’ve wedged ourselves into a metastable state, such that even small changes could topple the whole edifice. So for a first step, let’s retreat to a comfortable distance. Perhaps the change in perspective will improve our understanding of what we see.
Schooling is one of the largest “industries” in America. It employs millions of teachers, aides, counselors, administrators, and maintenance staff. It requires tens of thousands of buildings and a proportional number of acres of land. It expends nearly a trillion dollars per year to do... whatever it is that it does.
So the system provides a great many jobs. The people who hold those jobs would be as unhappy about losing them as you or I would be about losing ours. And of course, they want their incomes to increase over time. They constitute a formidable political force – so formidable that when he campaigned for the presidency, Jimmy Carter had to sway them to his side by promising them a federal Department of Education.
Now let’s look at the “customers” of the public-schooling “industry:” the school-age children and their parents or guardians. Ultimately, the system must satisfy them to some extent; the public schools are funded mainly at the state and local levels, where they can be (partially) defunded by community votes. So what are those customers getting from the system?
Parents are getting a reduction of their responsibilities. Schoolchildren get access to facilities and activities they might not have otherwise. The kids don’t feel the direct impact of the system’s cost. The parents certainly do. Many families wouldn’t need a second income, were school taxes and other schooling-related expenses to vanish.
Schoolchildren pay a kind of price for the system, too. They pay through their enforced endurance of things they could otherwise avoid. Indoctrination. Hostility. Violence.
No overview would be complete without taking note of the third parties that benefit from the schooling system: labor unions, bureaucrats, and the vendors of “educational materials.” With nearly a trillion dollars per year being spent on the schools, they have a powerful incentive to keep it going – and growing.
Taxpayers routinely find themselves outmaneuvered politically by the system’s beneficiaries. At any rate, the costs keep increasing. Teachers, aides, and administrators want more money. Special interests clamor for the schools to take on new activities. Sometimes school districts float bonds to fund the mounting costs, which only increases them. The special interests, of course, will always push for more.
At the center of it all is the public school: a building, or a cluster of buildings, perched somewhere near the center of the district. Each day ten months of the year, hundreds of individuals of all ages trudge in at an early hour and trudge out at a later one. And the system rolls merrily along.
Now imagine that a hand reaches down from the clouds, plucks the public schools out of our reality, and removes them to some unknown realm. It may be the hand of God. Or perhaps it’s the collapse in birthrates. In either case, what would come next?
First, school taxes would vanish. As they constitute one of the largest expenses families face, the economic relief would be considerable. Mandatory-schooling statutes would lose force, and would probably be repealed.
Some parents would seek a private school for their kids. Without the school tax burden, that would become much more affordable. In response to the demand, private schools would increase in number. Whether their quality would improve is debatable, though the market incentives would favor it.
But some parents would homeschool.
Many working mothers are unhappy with the demands of the working world. They’d rather be with their kids while the kids are young. Once the school taxes are gone, a good percentage of them would calculate that they could leave their jobs without depriving the family of what it needs. These would take the responsibility for their children’s educations onto themselves, whether alone or in combination with some of their neighbors. Home education has proved superior to schooling in nearly every known instance.
Not all mothers would opt to do that, of course. But the sense that American women are made unhappy by the combination of child-rearing and contributing to the family income suggests that many would find it an attractive course.
There would be negative effects as well. A great many persons whose incomes depend on the public schools would need new jobs. The educational labor unions would lose many members. Vendors who sell to the public schools would need to find new markets. Other interest groups would shrink as their participants decreased. Bureaucrats, no longer charged with responsibility for overseeing American education would... well, honestly, who cares what would happen to bureaucrats?
With parental choice in education restored, the homeschoolers would be in direct competition with the private schools. Over time, the more successful model would be revealed. The less successful one would diminish, though probably not to zero.
And that’s just the view from thirty thousand feet.
It won’t happen, of course. “Too many rice bowls,” and so forth. But it’s a very appealing scenario. Among its most attractive aspects would be the diminution of opportunities for political and social indoctrinators to work their wills on our kids. Parental choice would put a severe clamp on such things.
While the public schools are the worst in that regard, private schools are affected by it as well. The parents of privately-schooled children can be as contentious as those of public schoolers. Many political or social axes to grind. Schools, being inherently collectivizing institutions, are always attractive to persons with that agenda.
I suppose that’s enough fantasizing for a Saturday morning. Please add your thoughts in the comments section. And do have a nice day.
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