State schools

Can You Learn with a Gun to Your Head? por Jeffrey Tucker:

Why are the problems essentially unsolvable? The public school sector, Rothbard shows, is rooted in coercion: funding comes first, but coercive participation inevitably follows. The coercive means are forever afflicted with the same traits that can be observed in any state-funded and -administered system. It is politicized. It is expensive. Its results are difficult to evaluate. It is heavily bureaucratized.

The consumers have little or no say, unless they run for the school board. The main concern is the collective, not the individual, and the results are accessed according to politically determined criteria.

Education is a service, one in heavy demand. That means it can be subject to the economic means of production and distribution, same as software, shoes, and spaghetti ..

Even today, private schooling somehow miraculously survives despite the massive tax state that extracts private wealth to benefit public schools, the relentless crowding-out effect of the public schooling system, and the near-total domination of education by the state. These private solutions have been consistently shown to cost half as much and produce much better results than the state system.

What would education today look like in absence of state coercion? Consider the provision of food. What forms of delivery are available? There are corner convenience stores, large grocery stores, farmers’ markets, home-delivery services, high- and low-priced restaurants, fast food, and the ability to grow your own at home.

.. Where we see pockets of freedom — private schools, home schools, and even charter schools — we see a dramatic difference in results. The student flourishes because there is a relationship between producer and consumer, there is a commercial metric to keep the economics honest, and because the real goal is to educate rather than push the civic religion.

Slave-based schools work no better than slave-based economies. They will always be outperformed by volition-based institutions.