On The Education Monopoly

No.102: April 8, 2022

Dear Friends,

The firestorm of controversy over teaching sex and gender identity in public schools is reaching absurd levels. On the one side are the progressive left, who insist that Florida’s recent law banning such instruction in grades K-3 is best described as a “Don’t Say Gay” law—that is, it is the brainchild of a bunch of repressive bigots. On the right, anyone who defends such instruction is being smeared as a “groomer”—motivated by personal perversion and desire to harm kids. It’s getting pretty ugly out there.

Let me start by saying that, ugly rhetorical excesses notwithstanding, this cultural battle is a necessary one. We do need to be informed and engaged on this front. We should care about the makeup of our local school boards, and we should support thoughtful legislation along these lines. Nothing in what I am about to say is intended to downplay any of that. But there is much, much more we should consider.

There will be no ultimate resolution on the far end of this particular cultural battle because at the end of the day none of it addresses a root structural issue. Arguing over whether to use gauze or a Band-Aid is of little use when the diagnosis is Stage-4 cancer. That is not to say that proximate battles are unnecessary; cancer patients need palliative care, and sometimes even a Band-Aid. But there is, to abruptly switch metaphors, a giant elephant in the room where we are arguing over the seating arrangements—not a cute little circus elephant; rather, think of the kind featured in the Battle of Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King. What is the elephant nobody wants to talk about?

Public Education.

I know I’m going to sound like a lunatic to some of you, but so be it. The entire notion that a country as richly diverse as ours must mandate a compulsory, universal, State-and-Federal-regulated, ready-made, one-size-fits-all system of education is profoundly mistaken. It was a mistake when first devised, and it remains a mistake to this day. This educational behemoth, this outright government monopoly, is what gives rise to this existential crisis: who decides? Who knows what’s best for the kids? Who gets to mandate the curriculum?

John Dewey and Company designed it long ago, of course—and conveniently—so that he decides. Part-and-parcel with the “Cult of the Expert” so common in early 20th century progressivism, which sought expert “from above” management of everything in the body politic (thanks a ton, Woodrow Wilson), the idea is that objectively “neutral” government-appointed or government-licensed “experts” decide these matters. The Philosopher-Kings have spoken! We all just go along with this, thinking that “experts” know everything and couldn’t possibly be wrong. They have the “best interests” of children at heart. If you’d like a riotously funny early assessment of Dewey’s educational philosophy, check out chapters two and three in To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout Finch thought it idiotic, and she wasn’t wrong.

As I was saying, we go along with all this until suddenly they are teaching our kids that each of them gets to decide whether they are boys or girls and the guidance counselors are helping girls secretly get testosterone injections. We put up with horribly substandard education—when was the last time you actually cracked a high-school textbook? It is generally appalling. The clear work of “committees,” designed, it seems, to strip away every last shred of interest and curiosity and wonder with which children are born. We put up with this. But there has to be a breaking point, and it seems it is upon us: critical race theory and gender identity.

And then, because we never, ever, ever question the propriety and/or legitimacy of the public school system itself, we are forced to engage in a giant wrestling match over who gets to be the new Philosopher-King. We play “King of the Hill” with the make-up of our school boards, and nobody ever wonders whether we ought to have a public school board at all. Let me put it simply: if it were not for the state monopoly on education, we would not be having these power struggles over curriculum. At least we wouldn’t at this kind of societal and cultural level.

So I am now going to lay my cards on the table, but please realize I am under no illusions that this is something actually plausible or actionable in our current environment or even in the near future.

We should dismantle the entire public school system.

I know that sounds radical and revolutionary, but it isn’t. Compulsory public schooling was the radical and revolutionary thing in the American context. And, further, the “school choice” movement is quite robust and has made significant progress over the last generation (particularly during Covid), and while it doesn’t say out loud that it wants to dismantle the public education system, that is probably what it would amount to: breaking up the government monopoly on the education of children. Sure, maybe public schools don’t vanish entirely—there is certainly a case that might be made for their uses—but the monopoly will vanish. There would be open competition. There would be—dare I say?—freedom. Freedom of association. Freedom of movement. Freedom of religion. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of speech.

Forgive me, but I am on the side of freedom. I am on the side of parents being able to choose from a wide variety of educational options for their kids. If a school wants to teach white kids to feel shame that they are inherently part of an oppressive cabal dedicated to the domination of the “other,” or teach black kids that they will never succeed in this country no matter how hard they try, or if they want to spend hours teaching about white atrocities toward Native Americans in Algebra class (as my daughter recently experienced), or if they want to teach Lucy that she can be Larry or Bruce that he can be Brenda, or if they want to tell all the little girls to get comfortable with naked boys in the locker room, or tell the middle school swimmer that she should look forward to competing against fake girls in the high school championships, then by all means let them advertise it and compete for students. Force them to persuade the parents that, yes, this is the place for your child! How do you think that experiment would go?

They’d be bankrupt in a week. But the system as it is presently constituted is entirely insulated from such bracing accountability, by virtue of its being compulsory. The kids are forced by law to go, and they have nowhere else they can go unless their parents are engaged enough and well-heeled enough to afford a private education. Notice how much our debate is over transparency. School boards have almost no need to be transparent about what they are teaching your kids. In fact, they get very angry when asked, and in some cases they have you escorted out of the public meeting or send letters to the President asking him to have the FBI investigate you as a domestic terrorist. Terry McAuliffe lost his bid for the Virginia Governor’s mansion because he said what he and many other “educators” think: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Ah, yes. That’s the job best left to the “experts.” The parents, for once, refreshingly begged to differ and sent Terry back into retirement.

Jonah Goldberg has occasional episodes on his podcast called “Half-baked Ideas.” He and a guest mull over a variety of very funny ideas that they are not exactly fully convinced of—they are “half-baked,” not “fully baked” (things like invading Greenland, lancing volcanoes with space lasers, and expanding the House of Representatives—all pretty decent ideas!). I assure you that my idea of breaking up the public school monopoly is not half-baked.

Well over a century ago, Abraham Kuyper and his Anti-Revolutionary Party in Holland faced a similar issue with regard to education. In a diverse Dutch society (ours is exponentially more diverse!), how best to facilitate the education of children? Who would be in charge? Who decides what to teach? The Dutch Calvinists wouldn’t entrust their kids to the secular liberals, and the secular liberals weren’t going to send their kids to the Catholic schools, and so on and so forth. So what was Kuyper’s idea?

Rather than forcibly dissolving all these distinctive and deeply held convictions in a bath of anodyne “uniformity” in a state-run, “one-size-fits-all” school system (a recipe for the very conflagration of passions we are seeing at this very moment), every community could set up whatever schools they wanted, and they would equally receive government funds. This accomplished a few important things for Kuyper. It recognized the reality of pluralism, that the state is unable to force everybody to see eye-to-eye, and it shouldn’t be able to force everybody to see eye-to-eye. That is, it preserves the liberty of conscience for parents and communities to educate their kids according to their deeply held convictions. It keeps the State out of the business of the family and church, as he saw things. He was in favor of a limited government that did not impose a national church or play favorites, but rather established a level playing field for society to work out its own disagreements in the public square by way of persuasion, not coercion.

There is a lot to like about that, and it is, in fact, very much in line with America’s founding vision. Education is part of civil society, the realm of free association and mediating institutions that act as a buffer between the citizen and the state. Where there is no buffer, there is politics; this is why everything is hyper-politicized today. And if education is solely state-run, it cannot not be political—neutrality is a mirage. Hence, our current culture war over education. But children are not wards of the state, and the current educational regime tends to make people forget that. (I’ve often thought, by the way, that Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was in many ways indistinguishable from Burkean classical liberalism. Maybe I’ll write on that someday.)

While I think Kuyper was on the right track, I also think it contains more than a few flaws. Leaving aside the question of whether education should receive government funding at all (a question that I think ought to be open—you’re telling me that philanthropists like Carnegie and Rockefeller could open a string of libraries, but not schools?), Kuyper’s model automatically ties funding to institutions. Just set up a qualifying institution, and it gets funded by the State coffers. While this might satisfy the State’s need for a limited, neutral role in education (not playing favorites on religious and convictional matters), it hinders an equally important market element: competition. Guaranteed government funding distorts the marketplace, always and forever (see: housing during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008). It props up institutions that ought to fail. Speaking of public education today….

This is why the far better model is to tie funding to actual children, and the money follows the child wherever they go. Think of it. In my home state the government (local/state/federal) is paying, as best I can tell from state and federal reports, $14,546 to educate one child every year. Very little of which goes to actual teachers, I might add. They ask for millions more from taxpayers every single year by way of mill levies, which they invariably advertise as “For The Children!” They get the money, which then goes to pay salaries for executives and administrative assistants, and undersecretaries and assistants to the undersecretaries, and assistants to the assistants to the undersecretaries and… I exaggerate, but you get the drift. Actual teachers have to buy their own classroom supplies, year after year after year, mill levy after mill levy after mill levy. (I mean, you do the math: a class of twenty-five is bringing a single classroom $363,650 per year. The teacher’s salary? The median is $55,000) Bureaucracy at its finest.

What if they couldn’t just take those millions of dollars for granted? What if they were unable to just cynically put a new mill levy in front of voters every year, telling them that they must hate children if they vote no? What if they had to compete for students and, therefore, compete for money?

You’d see a completely different school system, that’s what.

Churches, community groups, charities, for-profit enterprises, and, yes, philanthropists of all stripes could all start educational institutions and compete for students. The students bring the money with them. The poor kid stuck in a terrible inner city school would suddenly have on the order of a thousand dollars a month or more to go to a better school. Schools would have to hire better teachers, offer better curriculum, and achieve better results. And they could all have their own educational philosophies and worldview commitments that reflect the great multicultural mix of this variegated and dynamic nation. There is no downside here, unless you’re committed to absolute ideological uniformity from sea to shining sea.

And that last part is why progressives will fight to the death for this not to happen. They want ideological uniformity in this country, either cultivated (via “education”) or coercively imposed by them (via law). They are the “experts” to whom we must all bow. But they also know deep down that in an educational free market “Woke” schools would survive and maybe even thrive in San Francisco or Seattle, but empty out almost everywhere else. They cannot compete without government monopoly.

So we can play King of the Hill with our local school boards, and pass all the legislation we want regulating school curriculum, but real and lasting change and real and lasting solutions—a real cooling off of this culture war will not happen unless and until we bust up the monopoly, separate education and politics, citizens and state, reinstate freedom, and force an even playing field.

As an oftentimes homeschooling family, I wonder what I could accomplish in my kids’ education if I had the opportunity to put that $14,546-per-head to use instead of some bureaucrat deciding it is better spent on race lectures in Algebra class?

I could take my kids on a months-long world tour every year for that kind of money, and have plenty left for books. Our current system is not just in many places a dangerous and divisive propaganda machine, not just woefully substandard when it comes to actual education; it is also an obscene misallocation of resources.

Miscellany

• Speaking of all the gender stuff, John Sailer attended a big conference at Duke University. He reports back on what he heard, and it is, as the kids say these days, “next-level.”

• This video clip is from a little more than two years ago. Yes, two years ago a man said on a cable show that progressives believe that “men can menstruate.” The audience howled with laughter, and his host and fellow guests looked at him like he was from outer space. Today it is an article of faith among that same crowd that men can menstruate, and saying otherwise gets you canceled. My, we’re moving at warp speed, aren’t we?

Mythinformed MKE @MythinformedMKE

Dennis Prager is mocked on Bill Maher when he describes the now mainstream leftist belief that “men can menstruate” This is from Nov 2019. Queer Theory and Critical Race theory ideology are so radical and incoherent, one risks looking crazy pointing them out. @wesyang

• People on the left are understandably quite outraged at being called “groomers.” Neil Shenvi uses the opportunity to show how critical theory works. It’s clever, excellent, and true. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

• One the greatest financial stories in years: After long-criticizing Twitter’s negligible grasp on the concept of free speech and open discourse, Elon Musk quietly bought enough shares of Twitter to make himself (by far) the largest individual stockholder and is now a member of the board of directors. Who knows? Maybe he’ll get my account back for me while he’s at it. So much for the right-wing theory that only government intervention can make a difference.

• Have you ever seen a dorky Facebook post or meme complaining that The Lord of The Rings doesn’t make sense because the Fellowship could have just flown into Mordor with the eagles? Well, here’s an audio clip of J.R.R. Tolkien giving the final, definitive answer to that objection. Make sure you stick to the end to hear it. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned.

• This is an out-of-commission Russian tank:

  

  If you’re looking for American Exceptionalism, look no further. Where did somebody get the idea to spray paint that on the side of the tank? You’re welcome, Ukrainians. You are most welcome to appropriate that glorious cultural artifact.

• Thanks for reading. Have a very Happy Opening Day, and may all your baseball dreams come true! *

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