Australian bloggers Andrew Norton and Andrew Leigh will debate public education in a series of posts. Judging by Andrew Norton’s first missive it will be a good debate.
People are used to the idea of state schools, so they don’t think about how
uneasily government-controlled education fits with liberal democracy. If someone
said that Australia’s media should be owned by the state, with journalists told
by the state what they should say, with media audiences examined to make sure
they had absorbed the official line, there would be predictable and justifiable
outrage.Yet public education means essentially that for Australia’s young people. The
government owns most schools, employs most teachers, tells them what to teach
through state-set curricula, and examines students to make sure they have it
right–even kids escaping to private schools can’t avoid these last two aspects
of state-run education. And unlike state-owned media, there are severe
consequences for ignoring state education….
Hat tip to New Economist.
Addendum: Andrew Leigh’s first reply is here.
I see the exactly same system in India including the private school blurb. I wonder if British raj would have any thing to do with it…
This was viewed as a feature, not a bug, by the designers of the public education system here in the states. they were explicitly attempting to take a nation of different nationalities and make them “Americans”.
I like the above first volley in the debate because it shows an inconsistency.
If you discuss the teaching of creationism in schools, democrats will insist that it not be taught in government funded schools no matter what the parents want on grounds that it is unscientific but I am sure that they would against banning creationism from TV and Radio. That seems a little inconsistent to me. Young minds are considered more subject to indoctrination maybe it is fortunate that this seems not to be true.
…and what a terrific job the private media is doing. USA Today is a terrific model for education. Fantabulous. Kwality with a captial K.
Anyhoo, I’m underwhelmed by this “gotcha” moment about public v. private media and its baseline for an an argument for privatizing education.
There’s indoctrination and indoctrination. I would suspect a fully private system would slide quickly down the slippery slope to McHighschool with your gym class sponsored by Pepsi, and economics classes brought to you by the NAR (“its always a good time to buy or sell real estate!”).
Fearless prediction number 1: the pro government crowd will provide no substantiative arguments as to why public education is a good thing or why it is superior to the private alternative.
Fearless prediction number 2: the pro government crowd will make draconian pronouncements about how privatized schools will be nothing more than creepy, corporatized wastelands.
I will stand back and watch. In the meantime, public schools throughout the nation will continue to pump out kids incapable of learning beyond a very basic level.
Josh–
Yes, I’m sorry, I meant to write “dismantling public education”.
John Pertz–
I am predicting that privatized schools without strict protections against public funding of religions will result in privatized schools that are an orthodox religious wasteland. I know that some Catholic schools are quite good, but they already exist. A large part of this drive toward dismantling public education comes from fundamentalist Christians who want to indoctrinate children with a non-secular world view. If self-identifying libertarians want to convince secular non-dogmatic libertarians, they need to address this concern, rather than bitterly deriding their position as unworthy of respect.
I believe a particularly effective compromise has been reached elsewhere (particularly India) based on the following model:
(1) There are government run schools as well as private enterprenoural ventures. Competition is ensured but with the government as one player. (remniscent of the US University system?)
(2) The private schools are allowed to solicit a “grant” from the government. This is on a pro-rated per-student basis.
(3) As a precondition to grant eligibility the government subjects schools to a minimum amout of “quality assuarance”
In this system parents woud be free to select schools that fit their flavor of indoctrination so long as it isn’t too rabid. (“quality-assuarance”)
Why doesn’t anyone ever mention that education in most fields and circumstances is in fact completely free, and has been for some time? The purpose of most schooling today is primarily day-care and a means to rate potential employees. I do not believe public education is at all efficient for either of those uses.
I’m a computer engineering student at the University of Florida. I only have to buy textbooks when the professor covers something very idiosyncratic which is only in a specific book. Likewise, going to class is completely optional in most cases as well. I (and the state of Florida) do not pay to learn, I pay to be graded and handed a diploma.
However, I do not believe the current system of “education” will be properly replaced by more efficient mechanisms as long as it is heavily subsidized by both government and charity.
The process would not sit with for-profit enterprises. The process would sit with the parents and children seeking education. They may choose to attend a for-profit school, or they may not. The market process, especially when parenting is concerned, is not biased towards enterprises concerned only with monetary gain; all gains are subjective.
Education is just an investment in oneself. Who is in the best position to judge how to make that investment?
Wow… I just read Andrew Leigh’s response, and its really quite terrible. He doesn’t really justify any of his positions with much rigor. His conclusion sums it up best,
Why is this indoctrination a good thing? How do we know when we’ve gotten too much “shared knowledge and values”? How does the government determine these things?
Why is this a good thing? Wouldn’t a better goal to be to guarantee access for all children who can and will benefit from a formal education? Why should we spend money to education the ineducable?
Why can’t the private sector take advantage of economies of scale? Are there anti-trust laws which prevent this? How does the state know how much “scale” is enough?
“The process would sit with the parents and children seeking education.”
I dunno. Have you eaten at a fast food restaurant? Did you feel like that process “sat” with you, that it was geared to the most positive nutritional experience for you, or that you were being pused through as quickly as possible so that the restaurant could make its money? Sure you could leave…and go to the next fast food restaurant. How much choice do you really feel you have in the marketplace? Everyone eats fast food, so there are a lot of fast food restaurants. If eveyone chose crap education, you’d see options evaporate pretty quickly.
I think one of the problems here is that we haven’t thought about what education is “for”. There was a semi-paranoid post on indoctrination above, which is actually close to the mark. Surely there is some aspect of citizenship that is a part of education, not merely skills training for employment. I suppose with this group though, any mention of a public realm in which we live and any sort of obligation we mght have to one another to comport ourselves in a way that advances the common good (not just by leaving eachother alone and choosing better products and services) smacks of hippy liberalism. But surely education IS as much for the public good as much for the good of the education “consumer”. I would be very leery of leaving that to for-profit entities. Think of what this nation would look like if students were pushed through a McHighschool, or learned history from Halliburton, or what have you. It boggles the mind. We are the most corporate programmed consumerist nation on earth. Personally, I think that’s a limiting thing. It’s as much about all of our culture as it is abut the simple purchase of a service.
G wrote:
Why doesn’t anyone ever mention that education in most fields and circumstances is in fact completely free, and has been for some time? The purpose of most schooling today is primarily day-care and a means to rate potential employees. I do not believe public education is at all efficient for either of those uses.
This seems so true to me. Home schoolers that I know are being very inovative and are way ahead of schools in this area.
Gondwana,
Certainly there is value in a bit of indoctrination, but does it take 12 years of “education”? Why not just have everyone who wishes apply for citizenship at age 18? To obtain citizenship one would have to pass a test, but the test would be based on easily available sources, and not require sitting through countless hours of pure boredom.
gondwana,
Yes, it was my choice to enter that restaurant. No one expects quality filet mignon at McDonalds, and no one expects an MIT education at ITT Technical Institute. A lot of people do choose a crap education. A lot of people don’t. A lot of people don’t need an education at all. If you believe the majority of people are going to make such poor choices about themselves, how is this majority going to democratically make better choices about other people?
GreatZamfir, the government is not whatever you can imagine it and want it to be. Sure we’d all like it to provide quality education. I’d also like it to provide me with a harem. But who is more likely to make decisions in the best interests of students: The students themselves and their parents, or the state?
So children don’t get any education outside of parents and government schooling? They get a “shared background” from things pretty far removed from parenting and school. Social interaction, for one.
Its all pretty irrelevant anyway. Children are going to learn using the Internet, which will make any indoctrination a lot less effective. Its hard to convince someone of a specific world-view when they’ve got all the information of the world at their fingertips, and can decide for themselves. Most kids I went to school with detested the crap they fed us, which is easy to do when you have other sources of information. That whole “say no to drugs” indoctrination hasn’t exactly been going so well.
I apologize for the double-comment, I’m not sure how that happened.
Great response Person… its about the property values baby.
Politically this is why expanding choice in education is so difficult. Affluent people exercise choice via opting out of the public system via the private and parochial schools or moving to ring counties. We have, in urban America, a system of educational Apartheid.
In a market the same is true, but the people who follow bad influences pay a price relative to those who do not
But it also weeds out those “crazy” ideas that might end up working extremely well.
It appears you want to apply very generic market vs. gov arguments on a very specific issue. Are you really advocating a sort of darwinistic approach to schooling, where children are going to ‘pay the price’ of their parents’ bad decisions, and where, if I follow your logic, education efficiency will increase because the people who made bad choices have to leave the system?
The same applies to your ‘crazy ideas’. If people want to subject their children to crazy ideas, this seems to me only more reason to make sure they also get a minimum amount of normal ideas.
Minimum is the important word here. I definitely do not believe that the government should determine all details of an education, or have a monopoly on schooling. But education is typically a field where caution and a dose of conservatism are healthy. And in this case I would say this means we expect all children to follow a (fairly extensive) set of standard subjects that worked in the past, and to let free choice and experiments work their magic in the remaining time.
I am applying a very general argument, because I think socialized education isn’t desirable for the same reasons other socialized institutions are not desirable. In education, people follow what works. They’ve noticed that doctoring and lawyering are more attractive professions than others, so kids are pressured to become doctors and lawyers (among other things).
How do people judge what the best colleges are today? They look at a lot of factors. Parents probably focus on average starting salaries, while kids like party schools and favorable gender ratios. The same goes for picking a private high school: if college is planned, high schools are chosen based on college admissions. Parents look at others who have (in their eyes) failed at life, and try to instruct their children differently.
Its unfortunate that kids pay the price of bad decisions made by their parents and the government, but thats life. They often aren’t capable of making informed decisions on their own, so someone else generally takes over that responsibility. Inevitably they must pay the price for bad choices made by others.
I’d point out that its very difficult to get through life without developing normal ideas. But, who decides what ideas are “normal”? How much “normal” is enough? How much “crazy” is too much? Without the aid of prices and other market incentives (average starting salaries, SAT schools, or some metric of educational performance) which coordinate the marketplace, how can democracies judge what should be taught and what shouldn’t be?
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