A Call to Privatize
by Pauline Eby

To anyone who thinks that charter schools and tuition vouchers are among the better options for improving America's public education system, Sheldon Richman's proposals in Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families may come as a shock. For Richman, the concept of public education ("government schools," as he calls them) itself is the problem. Given this view, the "future of education, and of America as a free society, depends on the liberation of the American family from the grip of the public school."

According to Richman, past and present attempts at reforming education have fallen short because reformers missed the forest for the trees; they failed to see the really fundamental problem. So, what is needed now is a "frontal assault on the current system, a philosophical challenge to the premises of state education." Richman wants us to reexamine the fundamental ideas of public education. He asks the reader to "consider what government-sponsored schools are by virtue of that sponsorship."

Lest we forget our disenchantment with public education, Richman reminds us : that:

Schools are boring our kids to death - when they are not otherwise humiliating them, drugging them, or subjecting them to violence. They are teaching them that learning is to be equated with tedium, senseless tasks, arbitrary directives, a mindless competition for favor, and the stifling of curiosity. The public school system is an authoritarian, procrustean bureaucracy to which every child is expected to adjust himself.

· If a child does not meet expectations, the system assumes there is something wrong with him, not the school. Naturally, most students, if not humiliated and terrified, are bored. ·

Why do [homeschoolers] reject school? Because they believe that school is inimical to real learning. · Bursting with curiosity about the world around them, including their fellow pupils, [children] are ordered to sit still, keep quiet, and don't touch. That is called "socialization." If they cannot follow orders, they may be disgnosed as having attention deficit disorder and drugged or may be declared "learning disabled". · [T]here are so many rules. You cannot talk without permission. You cannot get up or get a drink of water, or go the bathroom without permission. If you miss a class or a day, you must have a "good" excuse. It sounds like a totalitarian state.

After noting the problems and asking us to consider why we haven't been able to change anything about them, Richman suggests that we are blind to the more fundamental problems with American public education: that (a) it is compulsory (in terms of financing as well as attendance) and (b) it is government controlled. The ills of public education cannot and will not be resolved as long as education remains in the domain of the state.

Compulsory attendance

Richman's basic premise is that the individual family should be completely free to decide what type of nurturing and education its offspring receive. However, even if we were allowed to choose among existing options, state-controlled education, despite wishful thinking, would always preclude genuine choice. In the realm of goods and services, "freedom" works best.

Facilitating education involves the provision of products and services. · [N]othing can outperform the private economy in the delivery of goods and services. Governments consistently fail in that endeavor because politicians and bureaucrats do not face the same incentives that private business people face. Private enterprise is activity that must attract and please willing customers. Government is force. · The choice in education · is between a system that respects people and one that does not.

Thus, education should be privatized and free-market principles out to be allowed to operate. "The market is the most flexible arrangement for satisfying consumers that can be imagined," so it should be allowed to operate in education. Monolithic education systems by their very nature cannot offer individually tailored or genuinely diverse choices. Bureaucracies do not invite change, nor do they easily incorporate new ideas, products or services. Bureaucracies - including local school boards - have an inertia that makes them unresponsive to impetus for change. And individual citizens' voices or votes have virtually no impact. "In the end, school policy will be inordinately influenced by a small group of activists, not by the mass of taxpayers or parents."

Another problem with state control of schools is that governments thereby have a monopoly on indoctrination: "Government schools have always been an instrument of political policy - which means they have long been used to deprive a segment of the population its culture or even its language."

Governments use schools to implement their agendas, to impose governmental-approved cultures, values, and languages. Moreover, interest groups vie with each other to have their values (and texts and programs) adopted as the ones to be propagated in the schools.

Richman's analysis of the coercive aspects of public education includes the observation that compulsory attendance laws are an insult to freedom and to the intelligence of the individual. Furthermore, Richman asserts that several problems experienced in the public schools are the result of compulsory attendance. Forcing disinterested children and teenagers to attend school will result in violent and disruptive behavior. Compulsory education makes the public schools seem like jails and the teachers like jailers.

By virtue of the state's monopoly of indoctrination, and because of the compulsory aspect of schooling, public education constitutes an "insidious assault" on the family. The state decides which schools one's child attends, and what type of environment (physical, moral, and intellectual) and whose values will impact the child. Richman cautions the reader that:

Values permeate education. · Value-free education is a chimera. ·

Despite the claim of moral neutrality, public education is linked to a particular set of values. · Those values include moral agnosticism (erroneously called tolerance), government activism, egalitarianism, "welfare rights" to taxpayer largess, collectivism, and a watered-down version of socialism. ·

As the government, through its schools, has taken on more and more of the family's traditional functions, and moved those functions further away, the family to some extent has been drained of its vitality and reason for being. · All of that adds up to a dilution of the moral authority and functions of the family.

If we wish to improve education, Richman boldly asserts, we must abolish compulsory attendance laws. In addition to being undesirably coercive, compulsory attendance laws result, Richman claims, in the state's defining what school is. In this way the state controls internal elements of education like accreditation, teacher certification, academic standards, and curricula. Repeal of compulsory attendance laws would remove grounds for the state's involving itself in defining education.

Dependence on taxation

An additional fundamental aspect of public schooling is taxation. Richman believes that "public education's dependence on taxation is · the key characteristic of the system" and that is should be eliminated altogether. For one thing, compulsory funding of schools, which guarantees income to the institution and to its administrators without regard to the quality of service provided, does not foster responsiveness of administrators to the "consumers." Because the compulsory funding issue is fundamental to the nature of public schools, Richman insists that effective reform must begin with abolishing school taxes.

Richman insists that the current plethora of education reformers are en masse ignoring the essence of the problem, that is, that the very concept of the public school is flawed. Reforms that overlook this basic "fact" will not go far. Richman cites as an example the movement for charter schools (independent schools run on a local level), saying that it will have only limited success because these schools, whatever they are called, are still public schools and:

An autonomous public school is a contradiction in terms. · an oxymoron. · No school can be autonomous as long as it is financed by taxation, filled by students compelled to be there, and subject to union, civil rights, and other regulations imposed by the state and federal governments. No school can be autonomous if it can't go out of business. And no one is proposing that for the public schools.

Another futile reform measure according to Richman, is tuition vouchers. Tuition vouchers will indeed give parents and children a greater degree of choice but, in and of themselves, will not be able to elicit significant progress in the private education industry. Government will still be controlling and defining "school" because government money (the vouchers) will always come with stipulations as to how it can be spent.

Along with his critical appraisal of specific reform proposals, Richman attacks the perennial notion that increased spending will improve education. He reminds us of what we have already discovered: "There is no known correlation between spending and improvement in educational quality in the public schools. · Most of the increase has gone into bureaucracy. The public schools do not use money well."

Urging us to step boldly into a new order of existence, Richman unequivocally advocates removing all obstacles to a new and improved way of educating our children:

With school taxes and compulsory attendance laws out of the way, education entrepreneurs would have free rein to offer alternatives. Anyone could open a school. There should be no regulation regarding curriculum or teacher qualification, which are impediments to entrepreneurial discovery. · The public war over values would finally be over, because no one would be compelled to support beliefs he did not hold. Parents would be free to bring their children up in their own philosophy or religion - and choose their schools accordingly.

More advocacy than scholarship

Although appealing, Separating School and State is an exercise more in advocacy than in scholarship. Although the author presents theoretical arguments and supports them with citations from political philosophy, some of the arguments are sketchy and fail to mention credible counter objections. Calls for revolution should be accompanied by more discussion that Richman allows for in this book.

The author's confident recommendation that we abolish compulsory attendance laws is an example that comes to mind. Richman's argument against compulsory attendance laws fails to mention the social good that such laws have historically effected. As recently noted by Myron Weiner ["Children in Labor: How Sociocultural Values Support Child Labor," THE WORLD & I, February 1995, p. 371], compulsory attendance laws were instituted by many developing nations in part a way to ameliorate the lives of children who would otherwise be exploited. While it might be wise to advocate that we reconsider the utility of such laws at this particular time, Richman's sweeping condemnation of compulsory attendance laws seems a bit extreme.

For those who, despite misgivings, might like to see Richman's proposal s put to the test, there are still some important questions that the author has not considered. Richman's libertarian, antigovernment stance seems to prevent him from considering what benefit government might be to education and how such benefits might be abridged or lost in a world of completely private education. One aim of public education, past and present, for example has been to guarantee education for the poor (regardless of whether this was part of an attempt at social manipulation). Richman does not suggest how, with completely privatized education, the poor would have access to education. Another important issue is "special education." Richman neglects to mention how special education needs will be met if government does not help fund education. But comprehensive answers to these and similar questions need to be offered if Richman is to convince anyone to join his revolution.

Finally, the author's reluctance (it is an admittedly theoretical book) to provide hard figures, facts, and calculations to demonstrate the practicality of his suggestions is an impediment to eliciting conviction. Richman's claim, for example, that "most people" could pay for their own children's education if they could just keep their tax money is oversimplified. Abolishing or reducing taxes would indeed leave more money in people's pockets, but the amount will vary according to income. For many, that amount will not equal the cost of educating one or more children.

Richman's general thesis, nevertheless, remains attractive and is certainly worth considering. Perhaps it is time for a thorough overhaul of the U.S. educational system. Although the underpinnings of public education might not, after all, be as evil as Richman would have us believe, perhaps they have fulfilled their original purpose and outlived their usefulness.

Congressmen (such as Sen. Phil Gramm) are admitting that federal involvement in education has exacerbated problems rather than helped. The secretary of the Department of Education, Richard Riley, and his predecessors William Bennett and Lamar Alexander, are all on record as favoring abolishing the Department of Education. This is certainly a start in the direction that Richman is indicating and, given this general atmosphere, Richman should be guaranteed a receptive audience.