Alex Tabarrok is struck by how conservative and homogeneous schools are, regardless of their public or private status — which is exactly what struck me, too:
Private schools, despite having the autonomy, have not pioneered novel teaching methods. Montessori was innovative but that was a hundred years ago. A few private schools have adopted Direct Instruction, but how many offer lessons in memory palaces, mental arithmetic or increasing creativity?
I am enthusiastic about developments coming out of Elon Musk’s school and Minerva but it’s still remarkable how similar almost all private schools are to almost all public schools. The global adoption of a nearly identical education model is also disturbing, as I harbor significant skepticism that we’ve reached an optimum.
He agrees with Richard Hanania’d point that public education involves an extreme restriction of liberty beyond anything we usually accept:
The only substantial populations of individuals who have their lives structured according to time-place mandates in a free society like ours are prisoners, members of the military, and children. The mandates for children have gotten less strict over the years now that all states allow homeschooling, but opponents of school choice for all practical purposes want to do what they can to shape the incentive structures of parents so that they all use public schools (liberal reformers tend to like vouchers that can be used at charter schools, but not ESAs, which give parents complete control). Of course, children don’t have the freedom of adults, and so others are by default in control of how they spend most of their time. But it’s usually parents, not the government, that we trust in this role. Given the unusual degree to which public education infringes on individual liberty and family autonomy, the burden of proof has to be on those in favor of maintaining such an extreme institution.
This brings us back to the point of proponents of public education having to think that government is really a lot better than parents at deciding how children should spend their time. Is there a good reason to believe this is the case? Yglesias points to data showing that the evidence on whether school voucher programs achieve better educational outcomes is mixed. But there’s a lot more to childhood than maximizing test scores. In a free market system, parents would likely base their decision of where to send a child on a countless number of other factors: cost, safety, the pleasantness of the experience, the values that a school teaches, distance from home, which hours a school operates, extracurricular activities, etc. Parents who take their children out of public schools often cite a variety of reasons beyond likely impact on educational outcomes as measured by tests.
The more complicated and multi-faceted a decision is, and the more state control involves an infringement on individual liberty, the less we trust government to make it and the more we trust private parties. An American child spends almost 9,000 hours in educational establishments before graduating junior high. That’s more than what an individual would spend working at a full-time job for over four years. In the process, the government tells children what to read, how much and when to exercise, how often to go to the bathroom. This needs to be kept in mind when analyzing arguments and data.
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To me, the true promise of the school choice movement isn’t that it might simply save a bit of money or avoid the worst excesses of public education. Rather, it presents an opportunity to rethink childhood. Ultimately, this can work against many of the pathologies that have emerged in American society over the last several decades, including delayed adulthood, high real estate costs, negative-sum credentialism that robs young people of their best years, and culture wars that are exacerbated by the fact that the children of people with radically different values are forced into the same institutions.
On what basis did we as a society decide that the ideal way to spend a childhood was to attend government institutions 5 days a week, 7 hours a day, 9 months a year, for 12 years? That most of that time should be spent sitting at a desk, with say one hour for lunch and one for recess?
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I’m convinced the main reason we accept public education is the status quo bias. If someone proposed that any other population be placed in government buildings at set times organized by neighborhood and told what to do and think, people would recognize this as totalitarian. If told this was for their own good, citizens would demand extremely strong evidence for this claim and still likely oppose the program even if they found any evidence provided convincing.
