School choice isn't enough?: conceptualizing worthwhile education in the free market
Raphael: The School of Athens, 1509-1511. Image in Public Domain
While politicians continue to differ on school choice, First Freedom Foundation's Michael D. Dean, Esq., reminds that a “free market education system” is inevitably riven by a conflict between claims of state and parental sovereignty. Who gets to influence the influencers? And though neither group is truly ideologically "neutral," can we still visualize a system that's critical, wise, and informed by shared values (not someone else's forced, top-down agenda)?
Education policy is like any other policy. The only question that really matters is, “Who gets the money?” Because whoever has the money will decide where and how children will be educated. “School choice” is the policy that parents—not the state—control the money allotted to educate their children.2
School choice has many justifications. Educationally, it produces a better product. Economically, it costs less. Socially, it reinforces family and non-political “mediating” structures. Morally, it permits assertion of fixed standards of conduct. Spiritually, it permits escape from the intellectual schizophrenia that divides the world into six days under one set of rules and a seventh day under another.
These arguments have merit. This article, however, examines school choice as a matter of political philosophy. …
Two fundamental questions confront every society. First, how does society determine what its values and goals will be? That is, what should society be and do? Second, once the first question is settled, how are citizens convinced to act in accordance with that decision?
Education, even more than politics, is the primary forum in which America addresses these questions. According to “common school” mythology, public education is the democratic process by which students both synthesize and assimilate the answers to society’s great questions. Public schools provide a “market place” free from “private” dogmas where all students participate equally in the give and take of ideas. …
Despite our reverence for the “free market of ideas,” there are fundamental problems with the myth. A free intellectual market between students and teachers is no less absurd than a free economic market between adults and children.
In economics, we have the good sense to prohibit such “bargains.” In education, however, such arrangements are unavoidable, and the values, beliefs and presuppositions projected by teachers are by far the most influential at the exact times when students are least capable of “informed consent” about what they are being taught. Thus the question is not whether children will be influenced, but rather who will do the influencing. The American political system has developed two possible answers to this question of “sovereignty”—either the state or the parents will control.
Government educationists argue that, as a general rule, the state must be sovereign. Parents simply cannot be trusted to do what is best for society. Left to their own ways, they will choose individualistic educations for their children, which perpetuate their own bigotries at the expense of the common good. Private schools are undemocratic by their very nature, selectively discriminating against both people and ideas.3 Common schools, on the other hand, if appropriately managed, ensure that children learn to value equality, tolerance, and the general interests of the collective. Social stability simply cannot exist unless a substantial majority of citizens participate in the unifying, democratizing experience of the “common school.” …
The union of government and school, however, contains an inherent conflict. The essence of government is compulsion—a fact at odds with the ideal of self-determination and free thought which is the essence of free society. …
In contrast, school choice recognizes that, historically, parents have been primarily responsible for socialization. Politically, school choice also recognizes that individual freedom must predominate over the collective—that the “melding experience” of America is freedom itself, not conformity perpetuated under the illusion of autonomy.
Since the family is the most decentralized unit of authority capable of socialization, it is far more likely than the state to perpetuate traditions of individual freedom. …
School choice, however, faces the same social problems as state education. Individuals coexist without compulsion only so long as they share common values and beliefs. Early in America’s development, that cohesion was produced by a fairly universal conception of social arrangements referred to broadly as “Judeo-Christianity” or, occasionally, as “pan-Protestantism.”
Government education advocates respond that not only do we no longer have such a dominant worldview within our social and political institutions, it is unconstitutional and repressive to impose such a view upon minority segments of society.6 More extreme advocates even argue that children have a right to be educated “free” from such narrow and oppressive beliefs. (Of course, the problem remains that children not educated according to their parents’ views will nevertheless be educated according to someone else’s.)
In the last half century, the loss of this pervasive worldview threatens the tribalization of American society unless some other unifying factor takes its place. We must therefore obtain cohesion in some other way, and that way is the democratizing experience of public education. …
[I]ntellectual markets guarantee neither moral nor intellectual progress. They merely reflect the morality, intelligence, character and acumen of those able and permitted to participate in them. As with economic progress, some cultures have achieved intellectual progress, some have not.
Thus, an intellectual market provides no inherent guarantee that the ideas which prevail are better or truer or more useful than ideas which fail. Unquestioning faith in the “market of ideas” is merely an implicit, self-laudatory assessment that its participants are wise, capable and honest seekers, unburdened with anti-intellectual concerns about votes, egos, biases, profits, reputations, pensions, or book royalties. …
[Worldview] conceptions are based on intuitions about the nature of things: how to tell right from wrong, what is “true,” how things “ought” to be, and so on. These fundamental intuitions I will call “felt presuppositions” because every belief system is ultimately based on “self-evident” presuppositions which are assumed and not proven. Such intuitions are articles of quasi-religious faith, in some respects insusceptible to reason and experience, the customary means of proof.10
For example, no beliefs are more fundamental to western civilization than the notions that all men are “created” equal, that all possess inalienable rights, and that such rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet despite the indispensability of these notions, some of the most brilliant minds in history claimed only “self-evidence” in their support.
In sum, though felt presuppositions are ultimately insusceptible to “absolute” proof, they are nevertheless vital because they govern the approaches we take and the conclusions we make when confronted with social problems. …
Through this process, children intuitively come to “know” certain felt presuppositions when they are young and least able to understand what is being done to them. Transmission of a worldview is almost always implicit. Only rarely is a teacher aware of what he is doing, and even more rarely is he honest enough to state explicitly the presuppositions he is attempting to teach.
Consider the familiar issue of “religion and state.” When authority figures in government schools consider all matters of human significance without reference to God, students cannot help but conclude intuitively that government considers theistic beliefs irrelevant. Thus the subconscious predispositions of generations of students have been imbued with the state’s operational assumptions that neither the probability nor the consequences of God’s existence are of sufficient magnitude to factor into their behavioral calculations.
I am unconcerned here with whether it is rational, ethical or constitutional to include theological concerns in public education or public policy decisions. I only point out that one set of predispositions is being advanced and another rejected under a fundamentally dishonest guise of “neutrality.”
Read the whole thing here.
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