On the Role of Government in Education
December 11, 1996
(Remarks at the Inaugural Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Luncheon)
By Douglas Dewey
December 11, 1996
May I begin by thanking Dr. Finn, and the Fordham Foundation for inviting me to speak at their inaugural luncheon, and congratulate the Foundation and offer my own best wishes that the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation be a fruitful instrument of learning and liberty.
An increasing number of men and women of good will, scholars, educators, businessmen, have been giving consideration to the question of the appropriate role of the state in the education of children. Not only am I a relative newcomer to these issues, I am a callow subordinate in rank, learning and wisdom. But it seems I am like a grain of sand that happens to be positioned in just such an irritating spot underfoot that it demands the attention of the whole body. So if anybody removes their shoe and taps in on the side of their chair, I'm going to get very nervous.
My personal story is not without significance for the issue of separating school and state. I didn't start out holding this position. In fact, it didn't even cross my mind. I was thrilled to extremes to be hired by Bruno Manno at the dawn of America 2000 and really believed that our brilliant and earnest efforts were going to change everything. By the way, I am still most grateful for the unique opportunity that working at the Dept. of Educ. afforded me, and will never hold it in contempt.
The two things that jostled me out of my former frame of reference was first reading more, especially about the history of government schooling, and second dealing with my own children's growth and education.
The bottom line is that I consider myself a fairly average person. I did not have an exceptional upbringing or education; no religion, and freedom in my house meant getting away with things. My "averageness" then is significant if we consider how likely it is that a radical idea like separating school and state could ever gain broad currency. I give myself hope that it can.
Now let me change gears for a moment...
Have you ever noticed how people from the past, say, anytime before the Civil War, sound so much smarter than us? The newspapers, ordinary correspondence, even the simplest writings and utterances, seem to be more learned, more eloquent than what is typical of our age. We sound "modern", they sound "old-fashioned". But really what we are saying is that we sound dull, superficial, and opaque, and they sound witty, deep and lucid. I'd like to suggest a simple explanation for this difference: in the old days, people were smarter.
Browse through any book on the history of American education, and the first thing you'll notice is that it is really the history of education reform. The government schools were no sooner established than they needed reforming. Complaints about educational decline have been ringing out from all quarters since the mid-19th century. It seems that every generation of school reformers felt about as we do today that bold correctives of one form or another are essential to bring improvements.
But the improvements haven't come, have they? In spite of so many years of earnest efforts to the contrary, the history of government schooling been one long slow steady decline of everything. Who here would like their life's work to have been any of the big bold reforms of the past thirty years? How about a hundred years? Whether the reform idea was narrowly sound or unsound is immaterial. When you're traveling via the Titanic, how well you've packed, or how carefully you've kept your diary, or made your bed, or argued your case against women's suffrage to the first-mate, are what are known as academic questions.
And here's an interesting problem. If the mean level of education has been steadily declining, and here we sit at the low point on the slide, should that increase our confidence that we're more clever or insightful than our fore-reformers of the 1960s? Isn't it possible that they thought they had the same advantages of historical perspective, or technology that we think we have?
I've never read that book by Thomas Kuhn about paradigm shifts that everyone talked about for a few weeks back in 1990. But somebody told me that the author maintains that scientists can become so fixed within a given paradigm that they are physiologically incapable of seeing certain contradictory data. This is not so much their unwillingness to grasp, anticipate, or embrace new data or a new paradigm, as it is their fundamental inability to see it, even when it is shown and explained to them, and they listen openly and attentively. It is as if they cannot place it on their mental screen even if they try. I think there may be something like that going on with government schooling.
Paradigm shifts happen in phases. The social scientists refer to the first 1-2% who move to the new paradigm as "innovators." Next, there are the "early adopters" -- about 2-4%. Third comes the Victor Hugo phase (the idea whose time has come), when the "early majority" of 30% adopts it. Then comes the late majority, of about 40%. Pulling up the rear is about 5%, sometimes known as the flat earth society. [Source: The Yankee Group]
A real life example: In October 1988, how many people were talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall? In October 1989, how many people were talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall? By November, 1989 it had happened.
Alternate example: One hears stories about Americans traveling to Communist China and the former Soviet Union and talking to people who were hungry, harassed, humiliated by their government and the oppressions they endured at its hands. Yet, they still fundamentally believed in communism, and a control economy, idolized Mao and Lenin and solemnly believed in ridiculous stories about capitalist American imperialism. Now there is something to be said for the power of state schooling in the USSR and China to induce this kind of childish mental servility, but the point I am trying to make is that even when people carefully described a radically different political, economic, and social arrangement, these poor people were often completely unable to comprehend or place any trust in what they were being told. I've been in conversations with people about government schooling. Over the course of an hour of discussion, they will seem to be grasping and agreeing with many things I might say about the institution of government monopoly schooling. Then they will say something like "well they're not perfect, but we can't give up on the public schools." Like a mantra, or a pious ejaculation, almost word for word, one person after another. I sometimes ask myself, where are they holding the meetings of this vast secret cult that the vast majority of Americans belong to? Why haven't I been invited? Then I realize which church they all went to, and send their own children back to. The government schools.
I was for the most part privately educated, and am only beginning to appreciate the significance of this in terms of my own readiness to consider the ultimate critique of government schooling. My own children are being educated at home. These personal experiences have had more of an effect on my mental elasticity than I had previously given credit for. This is not so much that the pedagogy I received at private schools differed much from that of government schools, as the self-identity that one gets from being in any private school. (i.e., I didn't need the government for my education... maybe nobody does.)
Very briefly, then, here are the a few reasons why government schooling is not compatible with liberty, justice, self-government, and the contemplation of, in the words of Pope John Paul II, the splendor of truth.
It is contrary to natural law for the state to usurp the natural authority and responsibility of parents to educate their offspring. The inalienable right of parents to educate their children flows from their having given them life. The traditional principal being that he who authors has authority (auctoritas auctoris). Although the state has a legitimate interest in the education of its citizenry, it does not necessarily effectively serve this interest by removing from parents their dignity and prior responsibility to educate their children themselves. In fact, the state does itself a disservice in this way.
It undermines self-government because the basic unit of free peoples is the family. By removing the most important function of the family life the passing on culture the state eviscerates the family. Other mediating institutions draw their power and authority from families, and so they too wither in kind. In this way government schooling flattens out society so that there is little left between the state and the individual who soon enough cannot distinguish himself from the state.
There is no way to separate learning from the normative sense. There is no way, therefore, to have the state run schools without it running de facto churches. When church attendance is at the point of a gun, it undermines even the true things that might be taught there. In order for truth to endure and be cherished, it must be assented to, and not coerced. This is why in the struggle between the educational interests of the state and the rights of the family, the family must win, or the authority and currency of truth itself is undermined. This is especially so if the basic operating truth of a society is the supreme importance of human liberty. We must be self-cultured if we are to be self-governing.
What are some things that can be done to lead us in the direction of less government educational dependence, and more educational self-reliance?
I thinks Einstein's remark that "You can not solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that has created the problem" speaks to education reform that is oriented to reducing (and/or ultimately eliminating) state involvement. That is the basic reason why I oppose vouchers because it employs one of the twin pillars of government schooling: funding. (The other one being compulsion.) The chief evil produced by funding is not regulation, but dependency. Before doing anything else, vouchers spread the evil of government dependency.
Let me propose several other reforms that will move us in the direction of education freedom.
(1) Repeal compulsory attendance laws. Here is an objective that voucher proponents, with all their resources, organizational skills and political savvy could pursue with zeal. The popular cause for their repeal is that children who do not want to be in school are not doing much learning, and are disrupting the learning of those who do. Compulsory attendance laws force bad apples to stay in school and spoil the whole barrel. The Separationist case for repealing compulsory attendance laws is that it will remove from the state a great source of its power and pretense of authority and deal a tremendous blow in the popular imagination to the idea of government schooling. Without compulsory attendance laws, the state would have no power to accredit teachers, establish curricula, or define a school. Under these conditions a whole range of tax-related schemes that enable families to keep more of their own money, such as tax rebates, tuition deductions, and "opt-out" provisions, may be comparatively risk-free to schools and parents, and worthy of pursuit.
(2) Encourage home education. Repealing compulsory attendance laws would also begin to sever the Siamese-twinning of "school" and "education." Already, home education is challenging the myth of institutional learning that says "I spent twelve years in a box; everyone I know did the same; therefore it is the only way children can learn." Hundreds of thousands of home-educated children have proved that they can get a much better education outside the system. The pernicious corollary to institutional schooling is that "only professionals" can teach. Yet, again the tremendous success of uncredentialed parents contradicts this assumption. The false premises of institutional learning metastasize into the system we are now burdened with. The need for special buildings leads to school zones, districts, boards, and departments, buses to get to them, and massive infrastructures to keep everything humming. Non-parent teachers lead to a professional teaching class, which gives us unions and the competing interests of teachers and families. And group instruction gives us the fragmented, depersonalized, dumbed-down, and expensive factory curriculum. All of which adds up to thousands of extra dollars per student each year. An ordinary mother can teach her three children at home for $1,000 a year out-of-pocket, and they learn as much as, or more than they would in an institutional system that costs an average of $6,000 per pupil. Home education collapses the widespread belief that education is so expensive that we must have government funding and so difficult that we must hire professionals.
Emerging technology and the successful example of a million home educated children will continue to make this perfect indictment of government schooling a growing and viable option.
(3) Liberate the poor. Privately-funded vouchers, or low-income scholarships, are working quietly behind the scenes to accomplish the purported goals of government funded vouchers. Businesses, foundations and individuals contribute to a fund that pays a portion of tuition to help low-income families send their children to the private school of their choice. In all the programs, even the poorest families are required to put up a goodly share (typically half or more) of the tuition themselves and they do. Like home education, low-income scholarships demonstrate that poor families can be just as responsible as middle- and upper-income families. Privately funded choice programs now operate in 27 localities, serving more than 10,000 low-income children. The average scholarship is only one thousand dollars per student: a lot can be done at a modest cost. In 1993, I co-founded a program in Washington, D.C. [called the Washington Scholarship Fund] that helps 225 children attend 61 different private schools. Our scholarship program enjoys support from prominent Republicans, Democrats, and business and community leaders of every political persuasion.
Americans already give $125 billion a year to charities, and $21 billion more for higher education scholarships. In Washington, D.C., for example, $18 million would be sufficient to send 18,000 children to a private school (about one third of all low-income children in the capital) while the cost of maintaining these same children in a government school is closer to $180 million: ten times as much! And this is accomplished without any government interference with the mission or methods of private schools.
Apart from the great good they do for the families who participate, low-income scholarships are an excellent way to connect the "haves" with the "have-nots," deepening the stakes of interdependence that give integrity and vitality to communities. Low-income scholarships may not yet be able to help every needy family, or even most of them, but they are an effective leveraging strategy to undermine the belief that poor people cannot or will not educate their children without government.
(4) Exodus. Instead of trying to make government schools a little less hostile to traditional sensibilities, religious conservatives and others should shake the dust from their feet and leave. Millions of religious families chafe under the weight of a system that openly disrespects their beliefs, in the vain hope that they can transform a system that is hostile to parental rights by design. The structure of government schooling would not long remain standing if millions of its most dedicated families pulled out and either sent their children to private schools, built new ones, or taught their children at home. Many of the families "left behind" will have less reason than ever to stay, and will follow their more energetic brethren out the door. There is no reason to deny that some portion of the 45 million children in government schools will remain there right up until the day they find a "closed" sign on the door. At that point, their parents will have to decide whether and how they will go about providing their children with an education, just as they see to their feeding, sheltering and clothing. In other words, they will have to be responsible: this can be frightening, as can be many of the most important things that we do in our lives, but the more people assume personal responsibility for their children's education, the more it will come to seen as a simple and manageable duty common to all parents.
(5) Educate. Think tanks, politicians, and academics should stop wasting energy trying to fix government schooling, and instead devote themselves to educating the public about its genesis, purpose, and inevitably corrosive effects. We need to shake people's confidence in the idea of government schooling, not reassure it. Americans need to know that we were more literate, skilled, and civic-minded before government schooling was imposed in the mid-19th century than we are today; that the great majority of families sent their children to school before compulsory attendance laws were passed; and that the people, politics and philosophies that launched government schooling are not necessarily the noble things we were taught in government schools.
Many conservatives and libertarians have been doing just this in areas such as health care, social security, and welfare. Let's give education the same treatment. This critical exercise must involve painting an attractive and credible picture of what American education would look like with government gone, and parents in charge, as we already see emerging through innovative private and home schools.
Other worthy efforts include eradicating the federal role in education, creating rival teacher's associations, and encouraging investment in education technology and service delivery.
And now I'm sure that we're out of time. Thank you for listening.
Doug Dewey is founding president of the National Scholarship Center (a Washington, D.C.-based clearinghouse on the private scholarship movement) and the Washington Scholarship Fund (a D.C.-based private voucher program).
