We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Economic illiteracy of the day “It’s not lack of choice that stops people getting a good education – it’s lack of schools and teachers. To say otherwise is pure ideology… Diverting scarce resources into providing voucher systems in a world where 18 million more teachers have to be trained if all children are to get the education they need is simply the wrong answer to the problems that poor people face.”
– Claire Melamed, Head of Policy, ActionAid
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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It’s not lack of choice that stops people getting a good education, but it is lack of choice that allows producer capture of education and allows the producers to get away with providing a broken product.
I’m out of the closet now as entirely opposed to schooling, so as far as I’m concerned the major impediment to good education is too many schools and teachers.
The supposedly “left-wing” film director Pier Paolo Pasolini also proposed the abolishing of compulsory secondary education in his collection of writings known as “Lettere Luterane (Lutheran Letters)” for the simple reason that compulsory schooling led to the imposition of petit-bourgeis materialist values which inevitably led to violence and drug abuse. He might have had a point. Are schools and teachers necessarily a good thing for young people?
It depends on the schools and the teachers, but mostly on the young people in question. Which leads me to the conclusion that it’s the ‘compulsory’ part that is the problem. If someone wants to send their kids to school, I have to assume that they know what’s best for them. So they should be free do so, as long as they don’t force me to send mine or to pay for theirs.
Personally I think those parents who want their kids to attend schools are basically wrong, though I would not of course stop them. I’d certainly like to win the argument against schooling though.
That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to places of education which people choose to attend, but “schools” on the current system- the institutional general education on a factory model thing- is, I believe, a fundamentally broken and destructive paradigm.
I think there are basically only two types of children. Those who are too young to attend school, and those who are too old.
I agree about the schools of the current system, but I think that if we take the compulsory element out, the schools themselves will change. I still think that school as a concept is not necessarily a bad idea: I liked school very much (which is by no means to say that I did well there – two different things). You have to keep in mind that there will always be kids who just cannot get at home whatever it is they need, in particular education and socializing. So while school may not ever be the best alternative, in some cases it can certainly be better than nothing.
“You have to keep in mind that there will always be kids who just cannot get at home whatever it is they need, in particular education and socializing”
If they aren’t being socialised at home, then it is vanishly unlikely that it is going to happen at school. Indeed, the school will have an uphill battle because it will be trying to get the child to do something it generally does want to do and will not have the support of the parents in trying either.
Worse, the process of doing so should not be done anywhere near any child that does not also need it done to them.
Following up Cleanthes’s comment, I don’t believe personally that learning to operate in the bizarre institutional social environment of the factory school- locked in with a mass of other children, segregated by age, should be counted as “socialisation” in any normal sense at all, as I think I said in my post at Counting Cats. People in prisons get to “socialise” a lot too, but I doubt that’s a very positive effect either.
Cleanthes:
It worked for me. I grew up without any family but my grandmother. School was a godsend for me socially (the less said about academics the sooner mended, except for math and science). But even if you are right and schools can be of no benefit to anyone, then in a non-compulsory system free market would do its thing, and schools would cease to exist – problem solved.
I don’t think Alisa means socializing in the same way you do cleanthes.
Socialzing involves the child interacting with other children, not just with adults. Humans are pack animals and in a family the hierarchy is already set, usually with the child at the bottom of the heap in terms of how much control they have over their interactions.
Socializing outside the family group allows the child to develope the skills necessary for them to create their own hierarchies and find out how to ‘fit in’ in a social group that is not their family. A child who does not get this kind of interaction with other children outside the family group, is quite likely to have problems later on. Its not called ‘anti-social behaviour’ for nothing, (I can see people rolling theri eyes from here but the term has been corrupted and abused by our current political masters and has been turned into a catch all term for behaviour that doesn’t fit with their view of how people should behave).
A child who is not socialised, will find it very difficult to learn how to later, its all to do with the plasticity of the brain and how alot of the wiring for social interaction language are built during childhood.
I get the feeling that you’re reading a different meaning into ‘socialized’, one that probably correlates more with ‘societized’ which if there is such a word would mean teaching a child to conform to the norms of the prevailing culture and society of whatever time and place they live in. This is what is bad about state education. No child should be indoctrinated, but learning how to interact in a group is important and is something you can only really learn by doing it.
Yes mandrill. Mind you, none of this means that school is the only way to get kids to socialize with other kids, as can be seen with many home-schooling families in the US who set up play groups of various kinds with like-minded families precisely for this purpose. It’s just that these other options are not always available/desirable for various reasons. All I am saying is: leave all options open and voluntary, and let the market sort it out.
The reason a child at home cannot socialise with other children is that they are all at school!
Yes, that’s true:-)
I don’t read this site regularly, so forgive me if someone already said this, but I think school structure is perhaps more guilty than anything else at instilling a collectivist mindset in the citizenry. In a typical school, you have no rights, you are blocked completely from positions of true power, and the entire experience is built to break you of any individual will. How is it that, in such a regimented environment, bullying runs as mysteriously rampant as it does? Self defense is always frowned upon, yet teachers never seem to really deal with students that prey on others. My belief is that bullying serves the school’s agenda. It tells the other students that their dignity is worthless, and that they should be prepared for a lifetime of further indignities and powerlessness.
College is an Expensive IQ Test
This is informative, and there is more at the link. this is for the US. Maybe the UK is better.
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James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal: [edited]
Most professional jobs require basic intellectual aptitude. Since the 1970s the Court has developed a body of law that prevents employers from directly screening for aptitude.
In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) a black coal miner claimed discrimination because his employer required a high-school diploma and an intelligence test as prerequisites for promotion. The court ruled 8-0 in the miner’s favor. “Good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as ‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote.
This became known as the “disparate impact” test, and it applies only in employment law. Colleges and universities may use aptitude tests. Elite institutions lean heavily on exams such as the SAT in deciding whom to admit.
For a prospective employee, a college degree is a very expensive way of showing that he has, in effect, passed an IQ test.
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Seeing as the alternative would be illiterate and ignorant unemployables entering the jobs market, I think that we may be stuck with schools for the time being. Until someone suggests a better alternative that is. Personally I didn’t mind school apart from compulsory field sports, I loathed them then and have loathed them ever since.
Chris, that assumption is absolutely unsubstantiated, not to mention that schools already produce large numbers of illiterate ignoramuses. The fact that the system makes it possible for them to find employment only adds insult to injury.
Well maybe the fundamentalists like Ian B or Brian Micklethwaite are right, but as a moderate in all things, I do think that education vouchers are vastly preferable to state-provided education. I’m not sure where the journey would end, but it must be a step in the right direction.
In the same way as walking away from an unexploded bomb is always in the right direction.
Vouchers *are* state education, mate. Anything provided with state money becomes political.
Worse than that, vouchers would entrench state education. If our argument is difficult now, imagine how much more difficult it is when the state is directly handing thousands of groats to everybody with a sprog every year.
Additionally, any hope of a vestige of “private” education would disappear; the voucher receiving schools would entirely become creatures of the state competing for public monies and subject to its arbitrary control. We should all be aware by now that the danger of the Progressive State, as opposed to the Marxist State, isn’t nationalisation, it’s corporatisation, which is far more pernicious as it nationalises control while leaving blame in private hands.
No, vouchers are a terrible idea. Let the edifice of state education rot in public view, let us watch its shambling corpse stumble on dropping bits of foetid flesh in its wake, and put all our efforts into freeing the children from that terrible thing. A terrible nationalised system does far more for libertarian progress than a slightly better-looking corporatised one, which will be virtually unassailable. More and more parents are questioning the very idea of schooling. That’s the mind virus we must help to spread.
Shall we stick that in the next manifesto? Better might be “vote for us and your children, and your children’s children will be educated in neo-apocalyptic hellholes … but your children’s, children’s children will be AOK, maybe”.
Anyway, it’s simply not true to say that every state run or funded education system must be as bad as ours. Before Labour trashed ours it was much better. The parts of the country that still have grammar schools are much better than those that don’t. Fact. But “choice” is not the answer. Indeed the idea that it might be seems to me a part of the general cultural collpase that so impairs our ability to educate. To sum up what I mean, would you choose to get beaten because you couldn’t remember your third declension? No? Me neither.
For a classic example of what I mean by culutural collapse:
How else do you think they learn decency? Osmosis? Folklore? MTV? Yeesh.
However, it is obviously true that most people spend far too much time in school, both in terms of hours out of the day and proportion of lifespan. People might realise how bizarre a situation this is if they knew some bloody history, but for that we’d need a better education system. Hmm.
You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Young children are easily led (in general) so compulsory primary education works (how well depends on how it is done), but teenagers frequently are not. It is difficult enough to compel a sixteen year old to put in an appearance if he doesn’t want to- and impossible to make one learn anything.
It should also be remembered that a large proportion of the country make their living as shop assistants, burger flippers, dustmen etc. where basic reading and arithmatic are all that is required- it is manifestly wasteful to force people to sit through lessons they don’t want, don’t understand and will not use. And do we really want to live in a world without these people? Do we really think that this is possible?
It shouldn’t need saying- but sadly does- that parents spend every evening and every weekend with their children, and every day of the holidays, from birth until they leave home. They therefor know their own children far better than a teacher who has them as one of thirty plus pupils for at most a few hours a week for maybe thirty weeks of one year- even if the teacher is very perceptive, the time limits ensure this. And despite the odd exception parents have more interest- emotional and financial-in their offspring’s well being.
The sensible system would seem to me to be one where the state finances education up to a certain age for those whose parents wish them to attend- at the particular school they wish them to attend. That is essentially a voucher scheme. It would have the benefit of getting schools to teach what the parents want their children to learn, rather than what some politician would like them to know, and those few parents who didn’t want their children taught anything would have to make their own arrangements for childcare.
If any element of compulsion were introduced (which would be bound to be on the grounds that some parents aren’t fit to have kids- at least according to government) then how about a school leaving exam- geared so that most sixteen year olds could pass if they made the effort- which could be taken at any age so a youngster who hated school would have an incentive to learn at least enough to leave school. Any unused vouchers could be left hanging for a time, so that the child could opt back in if it wanted to, and then returned to the pupil on his majority.
It would be an economic benefit if some means of price competition were also introduced- may be schools could be allowed to give cashback on vouchers, just as they could be allowed to ask for top-ups. At the moment we have no way of knowing whether we are paying too much or too little for education- its high time we stopped asking educationalists and tested it properly. We would soon be up in arms if we were forced to buy food from government controlled stores- and take the shopkeepers word for the value of the product.
For what its worth I think that education is, like housing, valuable: but it isn’t necessarily as valuable as those selling would like us to believe.
One of those things to remember is that incrementalism isn’t always the best tactic, and sometimes strategically one must move in another direction to get where one wants to be. Our enemy understand this very well- for instance they may relax the laws on something, just to then “prove” it leads to disaster, so as to then mount a more concerted attack based on this proof that freedom doesn’t work (e.g. the current business with alcohol and how “24 hour” drinking has supposedly brought mayhem, requiring tougher intervention).
There’s a park at the bottom of my garden. However, to get there by the direct route, I would have to climb through the living room window, tramp through a flower bed, fight my way through a thorny hedge and clamber over a wall. The correct route is out my front door and round onto the footpath; I start off going in apparently the wrong direction to reach my ultimate objective. This is always worth bearing in mind.
I agree with Ian on vouchers. Mark, you walk away from the bomb only to reach a much bigger one, with a delay mechanism.
I’m against schooling but not because of the teachers. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him.
How politically realistic a goal do you all believe the abolition of compulsory schooling within the natural lifespan of current Samizdata posters to be?
I would have to say that the answer is staggeringly unlikely.
I don’t expect us to be able to overturn all cultural norms.
However I do believe that a voucher system would be manifestly superior to what is currently on offer in the state system.
The superiority of the public schools (in the UK sense ie private) to state schools is due to a range of factors but a powerful one is that the education providers are incentivised correctly.
The trick is to find a way of ensuring the ‘choice’ of voucher school is not a choice akin to which branch of Mcdonalds I decide to have lunch in.
Ensuring diversity (in the classical rather than the ‘progresssive’ sense of the word) among voucher schools is likely to be a terrific battle in and of itself. The left will not give up its ideological stranglehold on the education of state educated children.
I would far rather fight that battle however, than one in which would virtually the entire adult population of the country would regard us as not just mistaken but irresponsible and evil.
By and large parents do have a far more grounded sense of what their children should study in school than the leftist educational establishment.
Ask most parents what their kids should learn at school and reading, writing and arithmetic will top the list. Eco nuttery, identity politics, and the other sacred cows of the Guardian Weltanschauung will be pretty far down the list.
When parents have the financial means to choose a school for their children they express a very different set of priorities to the leftist educators of the state system leading to vastly better outcomes. Why should it be different for parents who choose their children’s school through a voucher system?
Not that he needs my help, but I’m with Mark on vouchers. Of course, the devil is always in the details, and a voucher system could be corrupted just as has the current public education system. But if it were started correctly, I think there’s a reasonable chance that it would quickly develop enough of a constituency to make perverting it very difficult.
By “starting it correctly” I mean that vouchers would be issued to parents of school-age children and usable in any school of their choosing, including to defray the costs of home-schooling. No restrictions on where they could be used: religious schools are perfectly OK. The educrats will argue that there need to be curriculum standards, teacher qualifications, etc., to which I reply that the market will clear: consumers (i.e., parents) will decide what is important to them and what is not, and the schools (private as well as public) will adapt.
Face it; we’re not getting away from taxpayer funding of schools any time soon. Vouchers are a means of injecting competition into a monopolistic system, which cannot be a bad thing. And even if it should ultimately fail, Ian, we’ll get where you want to be anyway (the visible collapse of the education system) so it shouldn’t bother you to try something along the way which just might work.
Jay Thomas-
Very likely. Schooling isn’t compulsory in (most of?) the USA, or in Britain. Home/unschooling are on a roll. Schooling is state provided, and still the default, but that can be changed. Difficult, but not impossible. Right now the job for persons of liberty is to protect the right to home/unschool. Again, there is going to be a fight (in Britain at least) but it is winnable. The homeschoolers appear to be a tenacious bunch.
Laird-
A difficult argument to win against the progressive steamroller. If parents or private schools are getting state money, the argument for state “supervision” is overwhelming. They will play on the ignorance and jealousy of other parents in the general population to gain that “public support” thing.
The rule of operating in the corporate state needs to be, and this is another thing we need to get understood; do not take a penny from the State. Do not let it do you any “favours” at all. If you do, it will consume you.
Any voucher system draws alternative educational strategies straight into Leviathan’s jaws. It may look like a step closer to the park, but the thorny hedge awaits instead.
Thing is, I was trying to make two points in my post over at Counting Cats that I linked above. The first was that schooling should be ended on its own merits- schooling is fundamentally harmful to the young, and that is enough reason alone to do away with it.
The second point was a libertarian strategy point. The enemy need the education system, because they cannot maintain their system without it. They need it for the same reason there are church schools and madrassas- all such systems need to be able to mould young minds while they are still plastic. Whoever educates the children will have the society. But as such it is also their greatest vulnerability, because although while they control the schools we cannot win, if we can take the schools away from them they cannot survive.
There are no other weaknesses in their fortress. Taking the schools away will surely be a great battle, but it is probably the only one worth fighting, and it can be won. We will never succeed in converting enough people as adults when the damage has already been done to them. We will convert some, but never enough. We must try to hold the line elsewhere where we can, but a victory can only be had by freeing the children.
One thing to consider Ian.. Given the economic necessity of two fulltime incomes in most households, homeschooling will remain an unfeasible for the vast majority. Remember, in addition to their role as learning facilities/indoctrination camps, schools also function as glorified day care centers.
As such, expecting the majority of the population to care about a right (homeschooling/unschooling) they will never have the opportunity to exercise even if they wanted to strikes me as unlikely.
Yes homeschooling currently is legal but ‘unschooling’ isn’t. Even under present circumstances many people regard homeschooling pretty alien and the choice of weirdos and neurotics.
A government that wanted to stamp on homeschooling wouldn’t meet as much resistance from the general population as you’d think.
Jay, I don’t think there’ll be a mass outcry at persecution of homeschoolers. But I do think that homeschoolers and their fellow travellers can mount a reasonable resistance. They have the advantage for instance of being quite appealing people- mothers who love their children, rather than other persecuted groups (smokers, drinkers, fat people etc).
The childminding issue regarding schools is an important one. It is effectively their primary function and the only thing of use that they do. It would be far better to have childminding centres full of XBoxes than full of educrats.
But ultimately there is an argument to be won here, and I think my point of view increasingly is that libertarians can more profitably argue this case than the obscure debates about fractional reserve banking and so on for which we are reknowned. We’re never going to win on the Federal Reserve or the Gold Standard. But on this issue, we just may be able to score a palpable hit.
Interestingly it has always struck me that in people of my own generation (I am 32) it is the teachers themselves along with social workers, council workers, BBC employees and labour party activists, who have been most perfectly socialized into the state school value system. When I meet people of my own age who are active in these professions I realize that they sincerely believe the very same stuff I was forcefed and rejected as a kid. They are who the system intended me to be. Its a frightening thing to contemplate really.
Ian B: On this issue I am more pessimistic than yourself! (a first for me)
I think Home Schoolers are all too easily caricatured as Toffs and/or weirdos.
Yes, many of them are attractive personable people but from the point of view of the majority they are making a fundamentally weird and expensive choice. Its also a basically anti-social choice in that it explicitly rejects the role of the demos in the education of the young.
I am not convinced this is a winnable battle. Remember the current generation of parents are people of my own age and I can assure you that the ideological indoctrination system was soundly in place during my own school days. Most people reject elements of it but in my wholesale contempt for the whole thing I find myself to be highly untypical.
Well I think the ideological indocrination system has been in place for over a century. Its focus has changed to the latest social greenism stuff, but as I argued in the article at CC, the purpose of mass schooling has always been indoctrination. It was always intended to create “model citizens” and nothing else. All that has changed over time is the definition of what a model citizen is. We can’t take the schools back, because we never had them.
I’m not trying to suggest this is an easy battle. But none of our battles are easy. In fact they all appear to be unwinnable. But I think this is the keystone battle; if we can win this one, the way is open to us. If we cannot, the way is surely closed. Either we get the kids out of the schools, or we’re damned.
The original quote is almost fractally infuriating. You can look at the whole, or at any piece, of her “argument”, and get the same bang-your-head-against-the-wall feeling.
Scott Ganz: You’re on to something there. But it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Jailers also fail, sometimes quite systematically, to control their “bullies” because they can be useful in keeping the rest of the prison population in line. On an even grander scale, emboldening thugs and criminals was a matter of state policy in the Gulags of the USSR, for the same purpose: controlling the innocent (read Solzhenitsyn for more on this).
Just a thought: it occurs to me that the jump from “school” to “jail” to “concentration camp” was rather easy for me to make right there — and that it doesn’t appear out of place in these comments. Do all libertarians have a deep-seated hostility to compulsory and mechanized education? If so, is it because we were always inclined to think the way we do and school was simply the first place we rubbed up against immovable Authority?
Eiki Martinson: I think you are definitely onto something with libetarianism being rooted in personal temperament at least in my case.
I was in constant uniform related trouble at school, so much so that I was called into the heads office. To be fair he actually tried to rationalize uniforms to me, comparing them to workplace dress codes. When I told him that the comparison didn’t hold water as I was free to choose my place of employment but not my school he reverted to the age old ‘you will wear it because we say so.’
In other words
‘We will force you to pretend that you endorse our ‘community’ our values and what we stand for, despite the fact that we can’t convince you of their correctness using reason and logic’
To this day I have no problem with wearing a suit to work every day but despise school uniforms and all they stand for.
I am reminded by this conversation of the bit in ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ where the parents come round to complain, and then the headmistress explains how a private school actually works.
“…a large proportion of the country make their living as shop assistants, burger flippers, dustmen etc. where basic reading and arithmatic are all that is required…”
Of course. And when they teach their children, that’s all they will be able to teach, because that’s all they know and all they value. That’s the way it used to be.
People today can teach their own kids well because somebody, at some time, was taught a load of stuff their parents didn’t know and weren’t interested in.
If your child shows a talent for and interest in maths, but you are the sort of parent to barely know “arithmatic”, where do you go? Assuming you don’t tell them to shut up and get on with a useful trade, like burger-flipping, and assuming not everyone has a mathematician in their circle of friends, the market will of course provide what you want: professional teachers. And assuming there is enough demand, and little enough supply, there will be pressure for efficiency, to teach multiple children at once. A private tutor costs thirty times more per child than a classroom teacher. They’re also better, of course, but thirty times better?
They might be done differently in Utopia, but I’m afraid schools are likely to be a natural market outcome.
Alisa, ‘ignoramus’ is a plural verb, meaning ‘we ignore’. Maybe you could use ‘ignorers’, or try out the form ‘ignorami’, since ‘-us’ endings take ‘-i’ as the plural form, in Latin. Back to school for you, young lady!
I think that Home schooling, via Internet lessons, will be the way to go, in the future. Whenever you think you’re ready, you down load the company’s test requirements, and see if you have the knowledge that the company is looking for. Whenever you want some specialised knowledge, you either look it up on the net, or look up the person to interview over the net.
The sole function of the government might be to provide minimum standards, and minimum home school courses for all.
Just out of curiosity…How will this home schooling revolution occur while both parents have to work?
Yes Nuke, I almost typed ‘ignorami’, but then I didn’t want to come across as a pompous buffoon:-) You may have not noticed, but my comment was written in English, not Latin – makes all the difference.
Depends on the workplace. I had a colleague who was a single mother who brought her young teen daughter to work with her and home schooled her. Granted, we are a college, so there is great flexibility in our workplace. I think the young lady got a great experience. She had access to a library and computers and college professor tutors in all subjects, and her mother taught math. I had many conversations with her as she was figuring out some things about the world and her place in it. (I’m a counselor, I’m good at those sorts of conversations.)
I don’t have children but if I did, I would give home schooling some serious thought. Just because I know teachers well and I don’t really want them teaching those values to my kids. What really offends me is our high schools insist on reserving the right to random drug test your kids if they’re involved in sports or even want to drive their own car to school. This teaches kids to be compliant as a government representative asserts control over their very body with no grounds of suspicion whatsoever. I don’t want youth trained to be so sheepy in the face of serious government intrusion. I think such testing wouldn’t stand up to a court challenge on constitutional grounds (4th amendment search and seizure). I’m not a lawyer and I don’t even play one on TV.
I think I would just skip high school altogether, have a couple of years of self-paced study, take the GED, and go straight to college or vocational training or whatever it is the kid wanted to get on with life and do. I believe in unleashing talent, not manufacturing cogs.
I think it would be great to design some studies and travels and shadowing/observation experiences around chosen topics of interest. I would love to do a Civil War history study tour while I’m in the southeast. Some interesting space things within a day’s drive. Locally, musicology is interesting.
“It’s not lack of choice that stops people getting a good education – it’s lack of schools and teachers.”
It’s not lack of choice that stops people getting a good bureaucracy – it’s lack of bureaucrats.
Perry, Sorry to say your wrong on this one, at least here in the U.S. Any parent who sends his child to a private or parochial school has to pay for the tuition out of pocket ON TOP OF property taxes to the local school system. In effect, they are paying for a “service” the state provides whether they use it or not. Vouchers in this sense are a remittance from the state to the parent who has chosen to send their child to a different school.
P.S. A remittance of TAX DOLLARS to the parent.
Alisa, if you wrote it in Latin, you would sound pompous AND educated!
Jay, home-schooling would be supervised by the house-robot, whom the parents would have programmed to administer corporal punishment to the kids, even if they hadn’t done anything to deserve it. And it would be up to the parents to make sure that the robot did NOT come with any dildo attachments! We wouldn’t want any home-school sex scandals, would we? (Since I didn’t get any sex at school, nobody else should, either!)
As Prof James Tooley has shown, vouchers are not needed. Even the inhabitants of the slums of India can cooperate to use their own resources (although they have so little) to educate their children much better than the state schools can.
What is needed it for people to stop saying “the state should do a better job educating our children” and start making the effort themselves. Even illiterate parents can (as has been shown) get the job done better than the government does.
The above should not be held to mean that I hold that all government education system are equally bad – the facts show that this is not true. For example schooling in Bavaria is wildly better than schooling in England or the United States.
But to say “we want Bavarian style education here, Latin and all” is wildly unrealistic (it does not grasp how state intervention develops over time). Bavarian government schools may (and most likely will) become like government schools in this country and the United States – but the reverse will not occur.
Sorry Valerie but it is you who are mistaken… let me explain why 🙂
What using a state provided voucher means is that the state is now an “interested party” in the education of your children… you are getting your hands on “tax money” (the voucher) and that means anything that voucher touches becomes political (because tax *is* money gathered via the collective means of coercion that we called ‘politics’).
And as you are spending tax money, what you spend it on will be subject to all manner of state regulation above and beyond all the usual regulatory kack imposed on what people do.
The moment a nominally private school accepts your voucher, they stop being private and become a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation that soon enough is just sub-contracted state education.
If you actually want independent education, you cannot let any “public” money anywhere near it or it quickly becomes “public” (i.e. state) education. Not a single penny. That is not (just) my ‘ideology’ speaking, it is just an empirical observation that state money leads to state oversight which very soon means state control.
Vouchers do not make you free from state education, they in fact make you the plague carrier of political control into the private sector.