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.
[…]
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?
[…]
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.
Probably most parents feel vaguely bad about not doing enough to help their children thrive. Homogeneous public schooling gives us an excuse to feel enough is being done. Parents who devote tremendous resources to help their children thrive through home-schooling make the rest of us look bad, and feel bad. This applies to most other alternative approaches to education. Therefore, most people don’t want to talk about improving education because it would require an effort most people can’t or won’t make. The education system as it exists is probably largely about salving guilt without requiring too much effort.
The manifestation of school persists so uniformly because the U.S. legally owns the children, and the children’s fathers, though not now legally owned by the U.S., were legally owned by the U.S. not ten to twenty years previously. Everyone was subjected to an industrially monolithic mind-formative regime by the public institutions of U.S. government school and tellyvision and oversocial media, and everyone understands tacitly that fathers’ continued custody of the United State’s children is conditioned on their perfect compliance. Sometimes, not even perfect compliance suffices to satisfy the United State’s appetites: everyone has firsthand witnessed judges reassign the benefit of custody away from fathers to the favor of women and other of the United State’s direct or indirect agents. Forbye, in consequence of the corporate structure of the capitalist farce-economy, the employers’ wagies (who comprise substantially all of the United State’s children’s custodial parents) remain implicitly under the public charge. It is as difficult as ever to make a man understand something when the meaning of his life and of the lives of his children rests on his not understanding it. G-d bless America.
A body will always tend to advocate policies that just coincidentally expand the powers of that body.
The proverbial ‘unaligned disinterested bureaucrat’ is not only not an exception to this dynamic, but the greatest shining example defining this dynamic; the measuring stick to which all other kinds stand up too and fall short of.
Like democracy, the current system is the worst imaginable, except for all the rest. Novel teaching methods have been shown not to work. The old-fashioned methods taught just about every child to read, write and do arithmetic. School is a form of day-care, when one or both parents work. Asking hypothetical questions is not a valid form of argument which is one of the reasons why I write Tabarrok off as a third-rate thinker.
“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?”
There were several key figures and several historical turning points. America admired Prussian drill-masters from the earliest days of the War for Independence.
Some key figures — perhaps libertarians would says that these men constitute a rogue’s gallery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wilhelm_von_Steuben
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bellamy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
Shadeburst…”The old-fashioned methods taught just about every child to read, write and do arithmetic”
Indeed, and this was also the case with kids with illiterate parents from immigrant families.
It’s commonly said that the schools are like Factories…but factories are expected to actually produce their products reliably.
Private school have never got a culture of freedom. They are heavily regulated by the Governement.
Old fashioned methods such as, other people’s children’s tenure of indentured servitude to the matriarchy ending at ages 10 rather than ages 25+?
The obvious conclusion to ‘results of education are the effectively comprable regardless of method used’ is that *the thing itself is effectively inconsequential*. But because this obvious conclusion would have the equally obvious implication that drastic clear-cutting of the academic-industrial complex is a salutary course of action, it is the one conclusion that the sovereign bureaucracy cannot allow to be metaphysically possible in its Official Reality.
This is one of the reasons why I write off people who parrot Churchill’s thought-terminating cliche as not even rating as thinkers.
It’s human bondage for money, and a disgrace to the parents and the nation that we allow mandatory schooling to go on.
And it’s motives are money and power, and you Daddy’s are getting beat by fat Karens.
The purpose of reproduction may be to have children to send to school, to employ marginal people and provide cover for predators….or perchance there’s another reason to have children.
School in America is Daycare, and the price for this Daycare has become too high, and I don’t mean money.
My Education reform is fire, BTW.
I always felt that school was a prison; punishment for the crime of being young.
I turned 18 before I graduated. I dropped my books off at the office and walked out.
The school went nuts, calling my parents, the state truant officers, and even the police, trying to drag me back.
TRX, I envy your youthful wisdom.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have done as you did: I had the spine for it. I was, however, too naïve: I thought that college would be different.
It wasn’t.
One of my earlier memories is of sitting on the floor of the kindergarten classroom, gazing up at the row of cursive letters on the wall, and silently lamenting that I had been condemned to suffer another twelve years of stupidity until I could Go To College, where all the smart rich free people doing smart rich free people things were.
LOL.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have gone ballistic right then and there. I would have gone full-freakout, full-psychotic, full-retard; I would have melted down like only a five-year-old nuclear firecracker can melt down. No schoolteacher could have tamed me; no schoolroom could have contained me; no schoolhouse could have chained me.
School is literally worse than the Holocaust.
Juvenile concentration camp delenda est.
*stupidity, apathy, and corruption
Burn Them.
If you can see a Schoolhouse know that you are Doomed.