Towards
a Private Learning
Paper
delivered to the Society for Applied Philosophy’s 2002 Annual Conference on
Education,
Mansfield
College, Oxford.
Dr
Alexander Moseley©2003
Preliminary: - paper is more in the form of a speech than an academic paper; my interest – free market economist with teaching experience in UK universities, US private university, tutorial agency, supply agency, and private tutor and now director of Classical Foundations.
It is not a historical necessity that the state
takes over education, or that man’s highest achievement is gained through the
advancement of bureaucracy. It should not, therefore, be considered a symptom
of progress that education has fallen into the political realm of central
control, manipulated by civil servants, its revenues exacted from productive
citizens to benefit a host of producers, pressure groups, and unions. Once a
critical eye is opened to the present state-controlled educational system, and
one considers that the state mandates the attendance of young and highly
impressionable minds at its own institutions, to be taught by civil servants
qualified according to the state’s criteria, teaching subjects of the state’s own
choosing, and that it penalises, fines, and even imprisons parents who fail to
comply with its monopolistic and indeed brutally, police-enforced claim on the
young of our nation, then we cannot but see that Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles”
are the certain result, and those who support freedom cannot be but astonished
and shocked.
For over a century, governments have increasingly
intruded into the private lives of British civilians – into areas that would
have been unconscionable before the Second World War. Today, after dozens of generations have passed through its
educational system, the culture of the nation has become inured to being
documented, stamped, licensed, forbidden, registered, watched, coded, and of course
taxed to the hilt to pay for the snoops, regulators, quangos, committees,
ministries, and civil servants. Once a
comparative eye is opened to consider the quality and performance of the
educational industry, one cannot be but horrified and bemused: by the 1970s, it
was recognised that the nationalised industries were an abysmal failure –
economic theory explains why they could not succeed, but political processes
prefer to consider themselves immune to the laws of social interaction. Yet the
same criticism and policy prescriptions that were levelled against the likes of
British Leyland and the Coal Board were not
levelled against health and education. But the same results – the
product of the same principles – are certain. Only a refusal to look at the
results from afar and impartially blinds the majority of this nation’s
commentators to the political, economic, and moral realities of a compulsory
and monopolistic service.
This paper shall outline several considerations
toward a private learning – emphasising the moral identity of the child, before
going onto the philosophical foundations of state intervention, and finally the
prognosis for a 100% private and liberalised educational system.
The only relevant political and moral agent is the
individual human being. The individual self is the subject of all our
man-centred philosophising, regardless whether we are interested in denying it,
limiting it, or eulogizing the self. All action too is predicated on the
individual – only individuals act, and hence, only individuals learn. Except in
purely a descriptive sense, there is no such thing as group learning, just as
there is no such thing as group action.
The child is also a maturing moral entity, a
distinct self that requires supervision and guidance for its own benefit, and
the child cannot survive or properly develop without attention: but the
pertinent question is attention from whom? From those who brought it into the
world, or from the officers of the state?
The answer can only stem from the moral identity of
the child as his parent’s offspring. As moral guardians, only they can be in a
position to identify the child’s needs and determine the nature and course of
his formal instruction.
This is a simple proposition, but one that has
great ramifications both for examining the present educational system as well
as prescribing what it should be like. It is extraordinary, nonetheless, how
frequently the assumption is that the child does not belong to the parent but
to the state; just two weeks ago, the news reported 12,500 truancy cases across
the UK in a clamp down on this supposed immoral activity – some of the children
were even with their parents.[1]
Goodness!
That the child belongs to his parents
means that it is their responsibility to educate him.[2]
It is not the responsibility, for example, of the childless couple next door,
never mind the retired couple living four hundred miles away: it is the
parent’s prerogative alone. On the other hand, when that education is the
charge of the state, then the child’s moral development is taken from
him and his parents and given to a Minister of Education and his or her
servants – the child’s education is, in other words, bureaucratised and
politicised – in effect his moral identity is violated.
The situation today is that the child
is assumed, or increasingly assumed, to belong to the state rather than his
parents.[3]
How we got to this state of affairs in which the state arrests mothers for
their children’s attempt at breaking out of what can only be described as
enforced imprisonment, in which temporary political executives impose their
educational ideals on other peoples children, in which civil servants (aka
state teachers) take children from a young age and educate them politically
chosen subjects (after all, wherever there is a contentious issue in a subject,
the state would have to provide guidelines on how that debate ought to be
taught); the state in effect numbers them, files them, documents them, then
tests them according to their own criteria – how, indeed we got to this system
(which when you begin to look at it from this perspective is rather incredible)
is because of an adherence to the political philosophy collectivism, statism,
and welfarism. I shall briefly look at each of these in turn before moving on
to assessing how 21st Century education can develop if it were
completely free.
Collectivism
Collectivism is the theory that the moral and
political agent is the group rather than the individual. It comes in a variety
of forms in which the collective is defined as tribe, township, nation, race, people, or humanity. Collectivism denies
the individual any identity relative to the superiority of the group.
Accordingly, the individual must subject himself to the needs and requirements
of the group, and a newly born child is a member (to some extent or other) of
the collective. Implicitly, the choice of the parents to have a child is
secondary to the maintenance and propagation of the group, so immortally
captured by the phrase, ‘lie back and think of England’ and the strictures of
various cultures and religions on human propagation[AM1].
From an economic perspective, which sometimes
presents a useful angle from which to examine social issues, collectivism is
contiguous with a low level of the division and specialisation of labour: this principle is crucial for us to consider, for
it elucidates how destructive comprehensive education systems are.
In primitive societies, by which I mean those
societies in which the division and specialisation of labour is rudimentary,
the purpose of education is to condition the individual to act for the group.[4]
The emphasis is on making a good citizen – i.e., obedient member of the group.[5]
There is a good economic reason for such collectivism in man’s early
development or in small societies, in that[6]
the rules and traditions of the group accordingly evolve to sustain its
existence.
The rational for collectivist educational methods
in which the individual is held subservient – indeed peripheral or even
superfluous – begins to dissolve once the population grows, the division of
labour expands, and property rights become more defined. At this theoretical
juncture, the status of the individual becomes increasingly identifiable – he
strains for release from the mandates of the madding crowd.
The advancement of the division of labour
challenges the supremacy of the group; individuals specialising according to
their own talents and aptitude, can produce more than the group acting in
concert on singular tasks. Thus the simultaneous individuation of a people and
the concurrent expansion of the division of labour generates a remarkable
extension to the group’s wealth; yet that individuation can only take place at
the cost of the status of the collective. That is, as the individual gains
control over his own destiny, his connection with the limiting and restraining
demands of the group dwindle;[7]
accordingly, his education into the traditions and mores of the group decline
in relative importance to the skills he needs for the economic niche that he
believes appropriate.
Collectivists, those who exalt the tribal or ethnic
identity of the group, lament such developments. For them, the individual
exists not for his own sake but for the sake of the group, and it is the
group’s traditions and identity that must be sustained for their own sake.
Accordingly, they propose that children’s education be geared to supporting and
maintaining the group’s key facets, rather than permitting a more individualist
or pluralist approach.[8]
What constitutes the group’s interests in a small scale, limited
division-of-labour-society is defined by cultural conventions traditions that
have evolved over long periods of time; what constitutes the group’s interests
in a large scale, broad division-of-labour-society, are defined by political
processes in which some impose their conception of the collective order on
others; and of course, each collectivist will present a particular conception
of that order that differs from the next man’s. Hence, the attempt to reinforce
the cultural rules of an earlier and more primitive division-of-labour-society
on a more advanced society is a demand to regress: it is a demand to substitute
uniformity for plurality, equality for inequality, and control for
independence. In terms of education, comprehensive, egalitarian education
undermines the child’s ability to properly mature into a complex, evolving,
non-egalitarian society.[9]
Individuals
differ from each other vastly – people of the same age possess different
abilities as well as potentials, different energy and mental levels, as well as
differences in physique and intellectual capacity. Even the rudest of societies
acknowledge the existence of that individuality and try to harness relevant
specialities for the good of the group. At its most effective, formal
instruction should be one-on-one; cost-effectiveness, however, means that most
children will be sent so schools, but to impose equality and uniformity on
individuals in a highly advanced division-of-labour-society can only entail the
most brutal results: as the present hordes of semi-literate, uncultured,
self-defacing adolescents indicate. To produce equality – especially age-based
equality existing in our schools – is
to restrict individual development and initiative, which in turn entails
the restriction of the individual’s proper education – i.e., individual
thought, self-development, pride, and esteem. Suffice it to say that the individual is deemed
insignificant, except as how he may benefit the group (and of course, who is to
say how he should or does benefit the group depends on political – i.e.,
extra-subjective – processes). As the economy expands the imposition of a
comprehensive national curriculum on our youth only acts to retard their
potential – and while collectivist notions are often at the heart of universal
educational systems, the adulation of the state is a powerful complement.
Statism
The next theory from which to consider
the prevailing educational system is from the political economy of statism.
When the choice is present as to whether parents ought to raise and educate
their children or whether it should be the state, we must once again take stock
of what is being presented. The state is an institution whose “very being rests
on violence and compulsion,”[10]
and one can hardly expect the individual mind to learn anything under
compulsion except obedience. Nonetheless, statism has been the preferred
political model of the west for more than a century.
Statism is defined as the adulation of the state
and/or the theory that the state ought to be the main or sole provider of
economic resources and services. Its characteristics, in this instance, are the
bureaucratic control of educational resources. Bureaucracy is the opposite to
freedom and innovation.[11]
The adulator of the state sincerely believes that in the absence of state
control and direction, the market would either be chaotic or not exist in
sufficient quantities for his ethical palate[AM2].
The statist demands nothing less than the full nationalisation of education, supplanting church and privately endowed schools and foisting upon them its own criteria of quality and achievement. The ultimate goal is of course uniformity in teaching and delivery, so that a Minister of Education can proudly acclaim that he knows what is taught at a certain hour of day in all the schools in the country – that is the driving force behind the national curriculum. The previous section examined the detrimental nature of a uniform policy in an expanding division-of-labour-society; when we consider educational policy from the heights of the state, the nuances of price-signals and local choices made by parents, mean nothing compared to the aggregate statistics of attendance, literacy, numeracy: again, the individual counts for nothing in the aggregation of statistics. Tests and examinations proliferate allegedly to chart the child’s development according to nationally set criteria and parents are left to fret over their child’s progress – but the standards mean nothing: they are set by government officials and politicians and pedagogically are useless, and honest teachers recognise their worthlessness; others merely obey the guidelines of the teaching handbook.
To regain the economic perspective for a moment,
consider that the central control of resources by the state stands in
opposition to the individual direction and deployment of resources by
individuals voluntarily interacting on the market place. And because we are
assuming that parents should have control over their children, they are the
appropriate agents in the market place for education. Parents demanding
education for their children are demanding a resource that others will seek to
supply – as the final part of this paper examines, the market for educational
resources is neither unvarying nor identical: the present market is vast and a
future liberalised market looks to be wonderfully broad and robust.
When the state partially takes over the
distribution of resources it impacts on other markets. Let us assume that the
state sets up a single school in a competitive market: who pays for the school?
Taxpayers: which are not an amorphous mass of fund-producing gods but
productive and consuming citizens seeking to fulfil their own values as they
see fit. When the state raises funds to pay for its school it is directly
taking resources from some people and hence their economic decisions to fund
its own school. But of course it funds it through compulsorily levied taxes.
Some individuals in the community will no longer be able to afford the private
tuition fees they were paying; some fee-paying schools may go out of business,
not just because pupils flock to the new state school (and the private schools
will have to offer marginal benefits higher than the tuition fees covered
relative to free education), but because they have to pay higher taxes to the
government. But what if the school does not attract the numbers required to
sustain its existence politically – why mandate the attendance of local
children of course: force parents to send their children and thereby consume
resources that, from an economic view, normally would not be consumed. The next
section deals with the justifications of such a policy, but suffice it here to
note that the state’s intervention in the education markets has effects even
before it begins to mandate attendance at its institutions.[12]
Welfarism
Welfarism is the political and moral
doctrine that the individual’s welfare is a matter of public or state concern.
In a benign, weak form it is characterised by private acts of charity and
assistance; in its strongest, totalitarian form it is characterised by ‘cradle
to the grave’ social and welfare engineering on the part of the state and the
absence of any private initiatives.
The moral assumption of welfarism is
that individuals are not the most appropriate evaluators of their own
existence. Politically, the assumption entails that other people, officers of
the state, are better evaluators. Merging the two principles, the conclusion
forms that state officers are, by virtue of some mysterious process, better at
evaluating and prescribing the private individual’s life than the individual
himself.[13] In terms of education, it follows that
parents are not the best arbiters in choosing the nature and extent of their
children’s education, but that third party officials are. Accordingly, when the
welfare principle is attached to statism, it follows that the state accedes to
the position of determining the education of the ‘nation’s children’, i.e., of
your sons and daughters, whom you brought into the world. In that sense, the
state reaches past the parents’ decision to bring up a child, assumes them
incapable of educating them or sorting out an education for them, and
intervenes into the private sphere with the use of various threats and punishments
both for the parents and children alike.
Some of the intellectual roots of
compulsory education on grounds of welfare can be found in J.S.Mill’s On
Liberty. “It is not almost a self-evident axiom, that the state should
require and compel the education, up to a certain standard, of every human
being who is born its citizen?”[14]
That the state gives birth to children is an absurdity, yet one so readily
accepted in the guise of children being the rightful moral dependents of the
state – but, if the state owns the child, the state can take the child and
deploy his time where it sees fit.
The abrogation of moral responsibility
towards the child on the part of the state resounds with collectivist and
utopian ideology. The effects are thoroughly detrimental to the evolving
morality that an expanding division-of-labour-society requires. All societies
require strict codes of conduct to ensure the smoothness of life within the
group; but as an economy develops a greater emphasis on individual
responsibility is required – welfare policies undermine and retard that moral
development, leaving individuals dependent on political solutions to their
problems rather than seeking their own solutions. Human reproduction is
subsidised by the free provision of day-care and education from 4-16;
similarly, families can avoid the responsibility of providing a good
educational environment for their children, because the state has told them it
will take care of those needs; but in turn, teachers are absolved from
innovating and adapting, for the state will tell them what to teach and how.
The welfare policy of compulsory
education alters the moral identity of the child and removes his care from the
parent to the state – it therefore complements both collectivism and statism.
In the final section, I shall present an overview of a private system of
education.
The
first criticism that is levelled against proposals for the full and thorough
privatisation and liberalisation of education is that some will go without
education. This is an economic argument
that deserves an economic analysis, something which most educational
commentators prefer to avoid.
Nonetheless, a slight familiarity with economics
often emboldens people to claim that the poor would not be able to afford an
education for their offspring, even if they wanted to. Indubitably, some would
not purchase a service that is not free, but that is not the same as saying
that children would go uneducated, for they are learning all of the time; nor
is it to discount that those with the means would prefer not to send their
children to school institutions – home education is growing both over in
America and here.
But critics who claim that the market would not
provide in sufficient numbers do not consider analogous cases of food
production in which all can purchase food but of varying qualities and
quantities; for their criticism, they rely on a simple demand and supply
diagrams to elucidate the point that the equilibrium price and quantity
produced through the voluntary interactions of the market place generate a
quantity of education consumed that is less than universal. Here I enter
into an economic analysis, using the so-called public good approach, but I’m
skipping that for the talk.
Morally there is no reason for the anonymous
offices of the state to direct or produce educational services. One’s education
never stops of course, but what is debated is the nature and extent of formal
instruction. All forms of formal instruction are economic services; they involve
the deployment of factors of production and time to the satisfaction of
consumers’ needs. With every service, the question is always what is the best
system to distribute resources most efficiently – bureaucratic distribution or
the price signal?
The market system provides the best method of
distributing resources to where customers want them, and in this case it is
parents who decide the quantity and the quality of educational resources for
their children. Since children are individuals, the best form of tuition is
one-to-one, but of course most parents would prefer to send their children to
some form of school that they believe best suits the child’s needs and their
own personal circumstances.
What exists as private education today can only
give a glimmering of what it could be like if the government pulled out as a
monopolistic producer and monopsonistic purchaser of educational services. The
very existence of free state funded education skews the market, but we can
conjecture what kinds of educational institutions and services would arise: the
day-care business is already booming as parents pay for services while they
work. After the nursery stage, one could imagine a variety of schools emerging
that would offer different methods to early education; none would be restrained
by any artificially imposed criteria and standards – they would be free to set
their own, and as with all competitive markets, parents will vote with their
money and those schools offering better methods and environments will do better
than those that do not. Today we see aspects of some of the variety that could
flourish under free conditions, but once the fetters are removed much more
educational services are likely to be offered. At the present secondary level,
one could imagine companies and schooling institutions working more closely for
those parents who think their children would do better in a working
environment, where they could see the material benefits of learning.
But not all schooling would be done through
competitive institutions – more flexible services are likely to appeal to
parents who work non-standard hours, such as private tutoring and on-line
educational programs for home education. Examinations would probably still
occur, but removed from the politicisation of government bureaucracy and
subject to inevitable shifting of the goal posts by governments keen to prove
that state schools offer value for money, examination boards will be thrown
into a competitive market, with the more consistent and respected ones gaining
customers.
Economics can offer an analysis of the gainers and
losers of privatising and liberalising education. On the production side, the
gainers will be those teachers who are presently undervalued in terms of salary
and pedagogical freedom compared to those who are not good teachers on high pay
scales. Schools that do not offer what parents desire of them – and for some
that may mean purely day-care facilities for all age ranges while the parents
work (e.g., sports centres) – will have to adapt or fail. On the consumption
side, those parents who free-ride on other tax payers will of course have to
pay for their children’s education now: to some extent, that cost will be
offset by the reduction in taxation to the tune of £600 per head per annum.
The problem is that education as been massively
subsidised by the government and has deluded potential parents on the cost of
rearing a child. Liberalisation could not come overnight – a courageous
government would have to warn parents that they will have to begin paying an
increasing percentage towards their school bills from a given time onwards.
Presently, many parents are not-concerned with their children; but that is to
be expected when other people have to pay for their care and education – faced
with real bills for their children, they would wake up both to their own
responsibilities and to the nature of the children’s education – as such,
morality, culture, and the economy are all likely to benefit.
Statistics:
1999-2000: £40.9bn spent on education and training
£2.1bn on under fives
£25.4bn on schools
£4.6bn on further education
£5.3bn on higher education
£13bn by central govt – doing what?
- £608 per head of population.
- Interestingly, GDP expenditure has
fallen from 4.9 to 4.5 under Labour from 1995-2000.
Number of
pupils: 10.1m pupils
Attending
34,700 schools
502,000 full
time ‘qualified’ teachers.
[1] BBC news on-line, Tuesday 18th
June, 2002. “One of the most alarming aspects about these figures is the number
of children stopped with a parent or responsible adult,” said the newly
appointed Minister for Young People, Stephen Twig.
[2] At this point we entertain no moral
judgements of parents regarding the kind of education that they offer: after
all, it is their child and we outsiders should have no jurisdiction over their
choice of subjects except our own exhortations and discussions with them) but
merely point out that being their offspring (or step/foster children, etc.) the
child’s education is morally their authority.
[3] The parents are legally culpable if
their child chooses not to go to school; the child is mandated to attend
educational institutions and forced by the law to take subjects that he may not
wish to take, or which his parents may not wish him to take; the child is
forced to mix with other pupils the parents may prefer him not to; people who
do not have children are forced to pay for the education of other people’s
children; and people with the means to educate their own children are exempt
from the responsibility of paying for their education.
[4]“ The purpose
of primitive education is thus to guide children to becoming good members of
their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship,
because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as
tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during
passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.” Britannica, 2000.
[5] Note the irony of present governments’
policies that in tribal lore, ‘citizenship classes’ begin at a young age.
[6] The narrowness of the division and
specialisation of labour – a result of either a low population or improperly
defined or non-existent property rights – conditions the group to act according
to the group’s survival requirements.
[7] It is rekindled, however, by ideological
causes that demand the renunciation of the self to the group: the economic
analysis is not rejected if we consider ideational motivations – man acts upon
ideas, and if his ideology demands he lives a subservient existence so his
choices will his thinking.
[8] Recall that for collectivism, the
individual’s identity depends on the group rather than his own self and the
child is born to the group rather than to his parents.
[9] “In earlier periods of our history, we
were born into societies where all these choices were, figuratively, made for
us by custom and tradition – that is, by people who lived before us. But that
time is gone and will not come again. Today we are exposed to an unprecedented
amount of information and an unprecedented number of options. We are thrown on
our own resources as never before. And we have nothing to protect us but the
clarity of our thinking.” Nathaniel Branden, The Art of Living Consciously,
Simon & Schuster: New York, 1999.
[10] Rothbard, Education: Free and
Compulsory, Mises Institute: Auburn, AL: 1999 [1971], p. 10.
[11] Cue Mises, Bureaucracy, …
[12] Even though JS Mill argued in favour of
compulsory school attendance on welfare lines,
he also noted the dangers of the state producing educational services: “A
general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly
like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases
the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a
priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the population.” J.S.Mill, On
Liberty, Longmans, Green & Co.: London, 1884, p.63. Nonetheless, Mill
underwrites the government’s moral claim to regulate teaching: “persons
qualified to provide education under government auspices…”
[13] Cf. Vilfredo Pareto.
[14] J.S.Mill, On Liberty, Longmans,
Green & Co.: London, 1884, p.62. Mill goes on to define having children
that one cannot educate properly as a moral crime, but, still possessing
attachments to Victorian classical liberalism, he argues that, although the state
should take over the child’s education, it should charge the parents as best as
possible. Mill goes on to reject the