Steve Benen on Maddowblog has a retort to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ desire to introduce vouchers throughout the United States, which ricochets by my own interpretation of the problem:
OK, so maybe DeVos’ vision is overly myopic. But so what? Why not treat education and transportation as comparable service commodities?
The answer is that the two have very little in common. If you want to turn to taxis and ridesharing to get to where you’re going, you pay a fare. It’s a business venture that relies on profit. If you want to turn to a school to educate you child or children, it’s a very different model, at least if you rely on the public-education system, which doesn’t even try to turn a profit because the kids don’t pay tuition.
Even private schools operate in fundamentally different ways. Imagine, before you could take advantage of a ridesharing service, you had to pass an entrance exam. Or had to profess certain religious beliefs. Or faced discrimination based on your sexual orientation. That would be absurd, of course, with Uber or Lyft, but in private education, parochial schools have operated this way for decades.
So he skips by the fundamental problem of processes optimized to make money, rather than educate kids.
But an alternative approach to a riposte is also opened up by the entire tenor of the post. There is an unspoken question of benefit – that is, why should someone get educated? Why, to benefit them – but they should pay for it. That’s the unseen bone in the creature of this debate. (I’ll skip trying to make a carapace work.)
But this common libertarian skips entirely over the other entity that benefits from education – society. As a society, we benefit only insofar as the members of society contribute to society – and it’s common knowledge that higher education results in far, far greater contributions to society, in most cases, far out of proportion to the cost.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment: let’s become a society of deliberate simpletons. A high school diploma might be the ambition of the deviant, the non-conformist; the rest of us trot about, doing menial labor over the day and then trudging home at night to pray to God for his guardianship and deliverance.
Is there any doubt whatsoever that within two generations we’d be a subjugated people, our resources stripped, perhaps our best people removed as well – even voluntarily in disgust at what we’ve become? In case you wish to dispute, calling upon God’s wrath as our shield, let me introduce an element of doubt to you by reminding you of an old Army aphorism: God fights on the side with the biggest artillery.
Using this result, I think it’s entirely probable that the entity that benefits most from consistent and excellent education is society. What benefits the student, intellectually, will also benefit society – and the farther our students go in their education, the greater benefit to both parties. Indeed a highly educated person in a sea of mediocrity may have great prestige, but the accomplishments may be small compared to the same person embedded in a society of similarly educated and enthusiastic people, as the well-known network effect results in laddering of effort. If you are doubtful, consider why Silicon Valley exists.
I’ve explored the theoretical foundations of the problems of the private sector running educational institutions, and the recent collapse of various private educational institutions1 such as Corinthian Colleges and several other institutions, noted on this blog, as well as various other problems such as the collapse of tenure systems at such institutions, bolster the legitimacy of such analyses. Since we should demand excellence in our education, both theoretical and initial real-world results strongly suggest that the traditional, conservative approach to education appears to work best – and we should use it. To the extent that any student does not attain minimal standards due to failure to extend both opportunity and motivation, society suffers. This single argument, in its fullness, should be adequate to the case for public schools as the dominant form of education.
The fact that society pays for public schools, and via taxes, is completely rational & proper in that society benefits most from it. Anyone familiar with the private sector should find this result unambiguously normal, proper, and moral. The fact that society as a whole and in its parts benefits from the higher education of its members suggests that the taxation should fall on nearly everyone’s shoulders, in one form or another. The bare minimum education should be entirely free, as it generally is now; whether this should apply for college-level education is a debate of some complexity, involving such factors as resource scarcity, facility costs (particle accelerators aren’t cheap, for example), and others that, quite frankly, I don’t care to think about just at the moment.
But in the end, neither DeVos nor Benen are completely properly characterizing the debate. Understanding the full benefits, and upon whom they fall, is important in assessing how to deliver a good education.
1I do not include Trump University, as it appears to have been either a trade school or a simple scam from the get-go.
