Many of the arguments concerning public education have to do with religious issues.
The following is the single best argument I have ever heard on the topic and it is offered by an atheist and it anything but religiously based.
I invite those of you who support the public education system, atheist or otherwise to respond to it.
PUBLIC EDUCATION
SHOULD EDUCATION BE COMPULSORY AND TAX-SUPPORTED, AS IT IS TODAY?
The answer to this question becomes evident if one makes the question more concrete and specific, as follows:
Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents' consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve? Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principle of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No.
There are no moral grounds whatever for the claim that education is the prerogative of the State—or for the claim that it is proper to expropriate the wealth of some men for the unearned benefit of others.
The doctrine that education should be controlled by the State is consistent with the Nazi or communist theory of government. It is not consistent with the American theory of government. The totalitarian implications of State education (preposterously described as "free education") have in part been obscured by the fact that in America, unlike Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, private schools
are legally tolerated. Such schools, however, exist not by right but only by permission.
Further, the facts remain that:
(a) most parents are effectively compelled to send their children to State schools, since they are taxed to support these schools and cannot afford to pay the additional fees required to send their children to private schools;
(b) the standards of education, controlling all schools,
are prescribed by the State;
(c) the growing trend in American education is for the government to exert wider and wider control over every aspect of education.
As an example of this last: when many parents, who objected to the pictographic method of teaching schoolchildren to read, undertook to teach their children at home by the phonetic method—a proposal was made legally to forbid parents to do so. What is the implication of this, if not that the child's mind belongs to the State?
When the State assumes financial control of education, it is logically appropriate that the State should progressively assume control of the content of education—since the State has the responsibility of judging whether or not its funds are being used "satisfactorily." But when a government enters the sphere of ideas, when it presumes to prescribe in issues concerning intellectual content, that is the death of a free society.
To quote Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine:
"Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language, and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, there will be a considerable variation in different schools; the parents must judge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum offered. Then each must strive for objective truth. . . . Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the "supremacy of the state" as a compulsory philosophy. But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the "will of the people" in "democracy." Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy."
The disgracefully low level of education in America today is the predictable result of a State-controlled school system. Schooling, to a marked extent, has become a status symbol and a ritual. More and more people are entering college— and fewer and fewer people are emerging properly educated. Our educational system is like a vast bureaucracy, a vast civil service, in which the trend is toward a policy of considering everything about a teacher's qualifications (such as the number of bis publications) except his teaching ability; and of considering everything about a student's qualifications (such as his "social adaptability") except his intellectual competence.
The solution is to bring the field of education into the marketplace.
There is an urgent economic need for education. When educational institutions have to compete with one another in the quality of the training they offer—when they have to compete for the value that will be attached to the diplomas they issue—educational standards will necessarily rise. When they have to compete for the services of the best teachers, the teachers who will attract the greatest number of students, then the caliber of teaching—and of teachers' salaries—will necessarily rise. (Today, the most talented teachers often abandon their profession and enter private industry, where they know their efforts will be better rewarded.) When the economic principles that have resulted in the superlative efficiency of American industry are permitted to operate in the field of education, the result will be a revolution, in the direction of unprecedented educational development and growth.
Education should be liberated from the control or intervention of government, and turned over to profit-making private enterprise, not because education is unimportant, but because education is so crucially important.
What must be challenged is the prevalent belief that education is some sort of "natural right"—in effect, a free gift of nature. There are no such free gifts. But it is in the interests of statism to foster this delusion—in order to throw a smokescreen over the issue of whose freedom must be sacrificed to pay for such "free gifts."
As a result of the fact that education has been tax-supported for such a long time, most people find it difficult to project an alternative. Yet there is nothing unique about education that distinguishes it from the many other human needs which are filled by private enterprise. If, for many years, the government had undertaken to provide all the citizens with shoes (on the grounds that shoes are an urgent necessity), and if someone were subsequently to propose that this field should be turned over to private enterprise, he would doubtless be told indignantly: "What! Do you want everyone except the rich to walk around barefoot?" But the shoe industry is doing its job with immeasurably greater competence than public education is
doing its job.
To quote Isabel Paterson once more:
"The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as "reactionary," at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
Ayn Rand - JUNE 1963.
