For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

The very existence of the public school system, furthermore, involves a complex network of coerced levies and subsidies, all of which are difficult to justify on any ethical grounds whatever. In the first place, public schools force those parents who wish to send their children to private schools to shoulder a double burden: they are coerced into subsidizing public school children, and they also have to pay for their own children’s education. Only the evident breakdown of public education in the large cities has maintained a flourishing private school system there; in higher education, where the breakdown has not been as stark, private colleges are rapidly being put out of business by the competition from tax-subsidized free tuition and tax-financed higher salaries. Similarly, since public schools must constitutionally be secular, this means that religious parents must be forced to subsidize the secular public schools. While “separation of church and State” is a noble principle — and a subset of the libertarian principle of separating everything from the State — it is surely going too far in the other direction to force the religious to subsidize the nonreligious through State coercion.

The existence of the public school also means that unmarried and [p. 134] childless couples are coerced into subsidizing families with children. What is the ethical principle here? And now that population growth is no longer fashionable, consider the anomaly of liberal antipopulationists advocating a public school system that not only subsidizes families with children, but subsidizes them in proportion to the number of children they have. We need not subscribe to the full dimensions of the current antipopulation hysteria to question the wisdom of deliberately subsidizing the number of children per family by government action. This means, too, that poor single people and poor childless couples are forced to subsidize wealthy families with children. Does this make any ethical sense at all?

In recent years, the public school forces have promulgated the doctrine that “Every child has a right to an education,” and therefore that the taxpayers should be coerced into granting that right. But this concept totally misconstrues the concept of “right.” A “right,” philosophically, must be something embedded in the nature of man and reality, something that can be preserved and maintained at any time and in any age. The “right” of self-ownership, of defending one’s life and property, is clearly that sort of right: it can apply to Neanderthal cavemen, in modern Calcutta, or in the contemporary United States. Such a right is independent of time or place. But a “right to a job” or to “three meals a day” or to “twelve years of schooling” cannot be so guaranteed. Suppose that such things cannot exist, as was true in Neanderthal days or in modern Calcutta? To speak of a “right” as something which can only be fulfilled in modern industrial conditions is not to speak of a human, natural right at all. Furthermore, the libertarian “right” of self-ownership does not require the coercion of one set of people to provide such a “right” for another set. Every man can enjoy the right of self-ownership, without special coercion upon anyone. But in the case of a “right” to schooling, this can only be provided if other people are coerced into fulfilling it. The “right” to schooling, to a job, three meals, etc., is then not embedded in the nature of man, but requires for its fulfillment the existence of a group of exploited people who are coerced into providing such a “right.”

Furthermore, the entire concept of a “right to education” should always be placed in the context that formal schooling is only a small fraction of any person’s education in life. If every child really has a “right” to education, then why not a “right” to reading newspapers and magazines, and then why should not the government tax everyone to provide free public magazines for everyone who wishes to obtain them? [p. 135]

Professor Milton Friedman, an economist at the University of Chicago, has performed an important service in separating out money sums from various aspects of government subsidy, in education as well as in other areas. While Friedman unfortunately accepts the view that every child should have his schooling provided by the taxpayers, he points out the non sequitur in using this as an argument for public schools: It is quite feasible for the taxpayer to subsidize every child’s education without having any public schools whatsoever!17  In Friedman’s now famous “voucher plan,” the government would give to every parent a voucher entitling him to pay a certain amount of tuition for each child, in any school of the parent’s choice. The voucher plan would continue the tax-financed provision of education for every child, yet enable the abolition of the vast monopolistic, inefficient, dictatorial public school bureaucracy. The parent could then send his child to any sort of private school that he wished, and the range of choice for every parent and child would then be maximized. The child could then go to any type of school — progressive or traditional, religious or secular, free enterprise or socialistic — the parent desired. The monetary subsidy would then be totally separated from the government’s actual provision of schooling through a public school system.

While the Friedman plan would be a great improvement over the present system in permitting a wider range of parental choice and enabling the abolition of the public school system, the libertarian finds many grave problems yet remaining. In the first place, the immorality of coerced subsidy for schooling would still continue in force. Secondly, it is inevitable that the power to subsidize brings with it the power to regulate and control: The government is not about to hand out vouchers for any kind of schooling whatever. Clearly, then, the government would only pay vouchers for private schools certified as fitting and proper by the State, which means detailed control of the private schools by the government — control over their curriculum, methods, form of financing, etc. The power of the State over private schools, through its power to certify or not to certify for vouchers, will be even greater than it is now.18

Since the Oregon case, the public school advocates have never gone so far as to abolish private schools, but these schools remain regulated and confined in numerous ways. Each state, for example, provides that [p. 136] every child must be educated in schools it certifies, which again coerces the schools into a curricular mould desired by the government. In order to “qualify” as certified private schools, all sorts of pointless and costly regulations have to be fulfilled, by the school as well as by the teacher, who must often take a host of meaningless “education” courses in order to be deemed qualified to teach. Many fine private schools are now operating technically “illegally,” because they refuse to conform to the often stultifying government requirements. Perhaps the gravest injustice is that, in most states, parents are prohibited from teaching their children themselves, since the state will not agree that they constitute a proper “school.” There are a vast number of parents who are more than qualified to teach their children themselves, particularly the elementary grades. Furthermore, they are more qualified than any outside party to judge the abilities and the required pacing of each child, and to gear education to the individual needs and abilities of each child. No formal school, confined to uniform classrooms, can perform that sort of service.

“Free” schools, whether current public schools or future vouchered schools, are of course not really free; someone, that is, the taxpayers, must pay for the educational services involved. But with service severed from payment, there tends to be an oversupply of children into the schools (apart from the compulsory attendance laws which have the same effect), and a lack of interest by the child in the educational service for which his family does not have to pay. As a result, a large number of children unsuitable for or uninterested in school who would be better off either at home or working, are dragooned into going to school and into staying there far longer than they should. The resulting mania for mass schooling has led to a mass of discontented and imprisoned children, along with the general view that everyone has to finish high school (or even college) to be worthy of being employed. Adding to this pressure has been the hysterical growth of “antidropout” propaganda in the mass media. Part of this development is the fault of business, for employers are quite happy to have their labor force trained, not by the employers or on the job, but at the expense of the hapless taxpayer. How much of the burgeoning of mass public schooling is a means by which employers foist the cost of training their workers upon the taxpayers at large?

One would expect that this training, being without cost to employers, will be highly expensive, inefficient, and far too lengthy. There is in fact increasing evidence that a vast amount of current schooling is not needed for productive employment. As Arthur Stinchcombe asks: [p. 137]

Is there anything that a high school can teach which employers of manual labor would be willing to pay for, if it were learned well? In general, the answer is no Neither physical abilities nor reliability, the two mam variables of interest in employers of manual labor, are much influenced by schooling Employers concerned with securing reliable workers may require high school diplomas as evidence of good discipline Otherwise they can train workers better and cheaper than a high school can, on the job.19

And, as Professor Banfield points out, most job skills are learned on the job anyway.20

The relative uselessness of the public school system for training manual labor is demonstrated by the fascinating work of MIND, a private educational service now operated by the Corn Products Refining Company of Greenwich, Connecticut MIND deliberately chose high-school droputs who were unskilled for manual jobs, and in a few short weeks, using intensive training and teaching machines, was able to teach these dropouts basic skills and typing, and place them in corporate jobs Ten years of public schooling had taught these youngsters less than a few weeks of private, job-oriented training’ Allowing youngsters to drop out from enforced dependency into becoming independent and self-supporting could only have immeasurable benefits for the youngsters themselves and for the rest of society.

There is considerable evidence linking compulsory attendance laws with the growing problem of juvenile delinquency, particularly m frustrated older children Thus, Stinchcombe found that rebellious and delinquent behavior is “largely a reaction to the school itself”, and the British Crowther Committee found that when in 1947 the minimum school-leaving age was raised by the government from fourteen to fifteen, there was an immediate and sharp increase in the delinquencies committed by the newly incarcerated fourteen-year-olds.21

Part of the blame for compulsory attendance and mass public schooling must also be laid at the door of the labor unions which, in order to reduce competition from young, adolescent workers, try to force the youth out of the labor market and into educational institutions for as long a time as possible Thus, both labor unions and employers exert powerful pressure for compulsory schooling and therefore for the nonemployment of most of the nation’s youth. [p. 138]

• 17Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 85-107.
• 18For a libertarian critique of the voucher scheme, see George Pearson, Another Look at Education Vouchers (Wichita, Kan.: Center for Independent Education).
• 19Arthur L Stinchcombe, Rebellion in a High School (Chicago Quadrangle Books, 1964), p 180. Quoted in Edward C Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston Little, Brown & Co, 1970), p 136.
• 20Banfield, <em>ibid.</em>, p 292.</p>
• 21W. Lee Hansen and Burton A. Weisbrod, Benefits, Costs, and Finance of Public Higher Education (Chicago: Markham Pub. Co., 1969), p. 78. On Wisconsin and its comparison with California, see W. Lee Hansen, “Income Distribution Effects of Higher Education,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (May 1969), pp. 335-40. On the general problem of redistribution from poorer to richer in the modern “welfare state,” see Leonard Ross, “The Myth that Things are Getting Better,” New York Review of Books (Aug 12, 1971), pp 7-9.