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November 14, 2007
The Failure of State-Sponsored Schooling
The common
argument in the libertarian movement against public schools is that
they fail to educate our children. Actually, according to this argument,
public schooling is like any monopolized business: expensive, inefficient,
and utterly unable to provide the services wanted and needed.
This is true,
public schooling doesn’t work. But the proof of this is not the
thousands of kids managing to go through nine or twelve years of
schooling without even learning how to read and write. The proof
of the failure of the whole schooling system, i.e. not only the
public schools but also the private schools operating in a government
controlled and licensed environment, is the small number of radicals
managing to escape the brainwashing of centralized school plans.
This argument
can much easier be dismissed by public school enthusiasts, but it
is nevertheless the more important. Yes, public and state-controlled
schools fail to educate our children and make them understand whatever
it is “we” want them to understand. But the state school
system is not solely intended to provide knowledge to the unknowing
and ignorant, it is to provide a certain set of values and beliefs
that benefit the ruling class.
The former
is obviously failing, but does not provide a real argument against
the political control of schooling and education. The problems and
shortcomings, at least according to average Joe logic, can be solved
and corrected through investing more tax money to increase the number
of teachers educating in our schools. The logic isn’t that bad,
even though it essentially disregards what we know of economic organization
and production. If the problem can be attributed to not having a
sufficient number of (fill in the blank) available, then more money
should obviously be able to correct this “shortage.”
It doesn’t
make sense to say that the solution to something not being fully
able to produce what we want, that there is a certain lack of resources
to fulfill the aims, is to abolish the whole system. People generally
don’t think this way--if something doesn’t work fully, then a little
more effort/a little more money/one more chance can make it work.
No one would take the car to the junkyard if it isn’t working--
we first try to fix it.
It is true
that this is what we have been doing with public schooling and the
public schooling system for quite a while, but it still
doesn’t work. But the system is not used by the same but different
people--the people seeing the problems now are not the same as
the ones who saw problems a decade ago. So we must be able to fix
the problems of schooling, it is argued, by simply investing a little
more money or provide yet another couple of laws. Just like a little
more money was the solution to the problem for people a decade ago.
The logic is not all that bad.
But look at
it in another way: what about the students who do learn what the
schools set out to teach them? Among those students it is safe to
say that many of them were different, that they had different thoughts
and values and experiences when they first went to school. Is that
true when they nine or twelve years later have been educated? Too
often the answer to this question is “no.”
Ask anyone
about democracy or rights or the state and it is obvious that something
has happened to these people. Most of them, as I have argued in
another article, blindly repeat the dogma of our era: democracy
is superior, democracy is the only good system in a society,
democracy works, democracy is every man and woman’s right. But what
is democracy? Most people are unable to answer this question--“it
has to do with voting.”
The heterogeneous
beliefs of kids going to school at the age of six or seven (or whatever)
are literally untraceable when the same kids nine or twelve years
later have been educated. Of course, there are differences in political
views; but those differences are simply a matter of “how much
more” state we “need,” never the opposite and the
question Why? is not asked and not even considered.
So the schooling
system has essentially worked--this should be fairly obvious. But
it hasn’t worked in full--there are some people who manage to go
through the seemingly endless years of “education” only
to end up almost the same except for having learned how to read
and write. They somehow manage to keep their thoughts and values,
and develop their own ideas on how the world should be without being
heavily influenced by the state school system.
This is the
true failure of the schooling system, and this failure is a reason
politicians want to make public schooling “better.” The
radicals, if you will, are not only proof that the schooling system
isn’t bulletproof; they are also, simply through existing, showing
the horrors of public schooling: that most kids end up essentially
the same when “educated.”
The latter
is the most important fact we can stress. “What about the radicals?”
How come there is no middle ground between the big chunk of mainstream
democracy hailers and the radicals? How come there isn’t more diversity
in values and opinions? Why are there so very few people asking
the so important question “Why”?
It is no doubt
true that public schooling, be it schools run directly or indirectly
by the state, throughout the western and other parts of the world
has failed. But the failure is not only evident in the few people
who do not want and do not need education, or in the few people
who need more help to understand that which most people seem to
think is “extremely important.” The real failure is evident
in the existence of radicals, and that existence is not only a threat
to government--it is also an efficient means to make the public
understand what government schools are all about.
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