It would depend on how one classifies scarce, and what value one places on knowledge. Knowledge to fit purpose is certainly of value, for to be without it is to live in a world without light; but by the same token, to pursue useless knowledge is worse than worthless, it is a waste of precious time. See Herbert Spencer, "What Knowledge is of Most Worth," Westminster Review (July 1859). Good schools are scarce, and useful knowledge invaluable. Individually, we are as much as we know; and as a nation, our democracy is dependent on an enlightened citizenry, which justifies placing a premium on education. What form that education takes - what curriculum our public schools provide - is a matter, if not all important, at least essential to everyone.

Actually, removing the state control of education would cause a dramatic fall in the overall price of education, along with an increase in quality, for two reasons:

1) Abolishing compulsory education would reduce the artificially high demand for education, thereby reducing the price. Also, it would get the unwilling students (who are invariably the troublemakers) out of school, thereby improving the education environment for willing students.

2) Allowing free enterprise in the education industry would increase competition, thereby lowering the price and increasing the quality. Since knowledge can be duplicated indefinitely, the sale of knowledge (i.e. education) is very profitable, and as such it would attract lots of entrepreneurs. Lots of enterpreneurs means lots of competition, which means lower prices and better quality.

1) Abolishing compulsory education would reduce the artificially high demand for education, thereby reducing the price. Also, it would get the unwilling students (who are invariably the troublemakers) out of school, thereby improving the education environment for willing students.

The student wouldnt be the one who decided whether or not he went to school, his parents would be, and while the cost of education will go down for the rich, it will go up for the poor (who dont pay income tax anyway, because they dont own homes). Due to this, school turn out for the poor will be reduced dramatically, and poor people will have much less ability to change their status. This in in turn will destroy our class equilibriam, because it means that once your poor, you will have no chance to become rich or middle class. Thus rich people will get poor, poor people wont get rich, and the majority of our population will become poor. Is it any wonder the worlds most prosperous nations all have mandatory education?
Why is it that libertarians are always so fond of how things are done in the third world?

2) Allowing free enterprise in the education industry would increase competition, thereby lowering the price and increasing the quality. Since knowledge can be duplicated indefinitely, the sale of knowledge (i.e. education) is very profitable, and as such it would attract lots of entrepreneurs. Lots of enterpreneurs means lots of competition, which means lower prices and better quality.

As I said, the poor arnt paying anything for it to begin with, and because the rich will no be longer taking a great deal of the burden off of the middle class, prices will go up for virtually everyone. Quality and price are two opposing ideals, so its likely that quality would really only go up for the rich, because the middle class would be more concerned with price.

That is an issue detached from the one at hand.



Equal opportunity cannot be achieved through the actions of the State, for in the long term, the State is always an agent of inequality. Rather, equality can be achieved by dismantling the state privileges of the rich - the credit monopoly, the patent monopoly, private property over spacial locations (landlordism,) corporate welfare, etc. A simple land reform could make natural resources (and therefore self-employment) accessible to all, leveling the economic classes considerably.

The free market is actually far more egalitarian than it is commonly believed to be.



Last I checked, the third world was filled with Dictatorships, and there is nothing libertarian about that.

That is an issue detached from the one at hand.

Not really, because his parents may decide (and most do in countrys without public education) to have him work rather then learn, even if they know that will bad for his future. Similarly, kids who hate going to school (and as you say will cause trouble), will often be forced by their parents go anyway this generally applys to people in good economic condition). So there will be no attendence purification.

Equal opportunity cannot be achieved through the actions of the State, for in the long term, the State is always an agent of inequality. Rather, equality can be achieved by dismantling the state privileges of the rich - the credit monopoly, the patent monopoly, private property over spacial locations (landlordism,) corporate welfare, etc.

Equal opportunity cannot be achieved by anyone, because we are innately born with higher and lower abilitys. Patents are neccessary, because an inventor wont be motivated to invent, if someone else can steal of his ideas, and take t

What I meant was that we have the political option to put the student's education in his own hands. That is a separate issue from this one, though it does influence this one. Forgive my choice of words.



Then what is public education all about? The claim is that public education helps erode class distinctions - I merely pointed out that there are other, non-socialist ways to erode class distinctions.



Patents are not necessary to create an incentive to invent - the incentive already exists in the free market. When an inventor invents, he initially possesses complete control over the supply of knowledge about his invention - that is, he's the only person who knows how his invention works. The natural incentive to invent lies in the ability to sell said knowledge at a high price while still retaining it himself. Granted, every time the knowledge is duplicated, the price lowers, but this means that the inventor gets his due along with everyone who helped spread the knowledge to society.

Having lived in a third world country, I would have to say that apathy towards education is a significant factor in its poverty. I can definitely see the benefits of mandated educations, although I usually don't like dictating how people should live their lives (which is not a benefit). Perhaps education should not be mandated, but available to all people should they choose to use it.

The problem with making it available to all people, currently, is the monopoly government has on the system. Any organization with a monopoly on a market is bound to abuse that market. Take the state of California for example. The state spends over $10,000 per pupil per year. A class size of 30 costs $300,000 per year. If the teacher takes home roughly $60,000, where does the remaining $240,000 go? Surely the annual cost of books, a classroom, and supplies does not justify this gross overage. Serious abuse is occurring in the administration of our educational system.

If the monopoly government has on administering education is broken up, whether it be through vouchers or some other means, I believe that our society can get the kind of education it pays for.

The error of your position is in assuming that every person can without help access all relevant knowledge, process it and make use of it. Teaching is more about helping students acquire the skills needed by which to continue learning and increasing in knowledge throughout life. Your argument is based on the false axiom, "Those who can, do and those who can't, teach." Those who teach must not only be able to do but also help others to do as well. A better axiom is "You only really know what you know you can teach." Teaching is both a science and an art. The science is in learning what statistically works for the largest number of people in the least amount of time and the art is in knowing how to plan, present, assign, evaluate and extend all that science brings to the table.

The irony of education is that everyone knows that university professors are among the nation's worst teachers and yet they are teachers of our public school teachers. University professors do not have to be great teachers to effect great learning because universities are far from complusive and their successful students are all highly motivated self-learners. K-12 teachers, on the other hand, must be able to sell the whole concept of learning even and especially to the most reluctant learners as per their mandate from the public. Yet professors get great praise for all the work their students do and public school teachers get great criticism for all the work they do in behalf of their students. A century ago, public school teachers were trained far less by university professors and far more by master teachers. Teachers in most other industrialized nations are federal employees who answer directly to the state for their actions and not to a myriad of local entities with a host of differing and often conflicting expectations.

Furthermore, teachers are the least well-protected professionals under current labor law. Teachers can lose their credentials for a whole host of reasons that would not result in criminal prosecution, including merely changing jobs in the middle of the term. A teacher who is dissatisfied with his or her terms of employment is bound as tightly as any indentured servant of the American colonial period by the teacher's annual contract. Teachers in states that do all some job portability still require teachers to give 30 days notice of severence but do not have to give teachers the same amount of notice. School boards may at any time revoke tenure, provided they have a substantive case against the competence of a teacher. The real reason that schools rarely fire "bad" teachers that many administrators let tenure take the blame for their own reluctance to do their jobs as evaluators of teacher performance. If you tell a teacher that he or she is doing a poor job, then you need to be able to tell the teacher HOW to remediate their performance to your satisfaction. Good principals constantly teach their teachers how to be better teachers and rarely have to resort to such tactics because they create an environment of learning in their schools. Less effective principals are constantly "weeding out" their staffs. The worst principals just throw up their hands and claim to be held captive by tenure.

Also today's public school teacher has to make up for increasingly incompetent parents who think nothing of sending children to kindergarten who are not even properly potty-trained, much less school ready. Part of my personal preparation for kindergarten in 1960 was to learn to tie my own shoes. Today, elementary school teachers more often than not teach children to tie their shoes rather than the parents of those children. So as expectations on what teachers should be able to teach go up, expectations of preparing students for school go down.

Furthermore all of the critics of education live in denial of the fact that different children have different capacities for learning as well as differing learning styles. They often compare teaching to manufacturing where the manufacturer has total control over the quality of materials accepted for processing. Their analogies fail immediately because teachers have no control over the make up of their classes, except in high school classes with prerequisites. Even then, exceptions are often made for non-academic reasons over which the teacher has no control, making any comparison between schools and factories absolutely ridiculous at best and just plain dishonest at worst. Today's teacher is expected to approach every topic from a variety of teaching styles, so as to facilitate as many differing learning styles as possible. So, as topic learning become more intensely precise, teaching methods are expected to become more diverse, putting all the more pressure on teachers and no one else.

The "waste" of public education is actually in having teachers teach children those things which the children's own parents should have taught them in preparation for attending school. The trend in education is for everyone to increase expectations of teachers and of schools while lowering expectations of students, parents and the community. And yet a surprising number of young adults still feel the calling to become the next generation of under-appreciated, misunderstood and even persecuted teachers.

This silly question, cooked up from strange logic, begs the answer intended by the person who wrote it.

The object of education is not to spread knowledge, but to develop the intellectual faculties of young people. Among these are the ability to read, write, cypher, and to operate a keyboard, but also higher skills, such as the ability to think critically, to judge what information bears appropriately on given questions, to have some idea of how to find that information, to write entertainingly and persuasively, to speak effectively, and to engage in higher mathematical and logical pusuits. The object of education defintely is not to convey a finite set of facts, the student's regurgitation of which on a test could demonstrate the success of the process.

The social object of education is to increase the productivity of labor. Since everyone benefits, on some level, from the productivity of each individual, universal access to a good education has traditionally been considered socially desirable. If instead education, like other goods, were rationed on the basis of the ability to pay, society would be worse off in aggregate: even the wealthy would be poorer, for want of a high level of productivity in the economy as a whole. Traditionally, a universal system of public education has therefore been considered a worthy object for the expenditure of tax revenues. That this conclusion has been reached in every country of the world sheds, I believe, a certain light on its correctness.

I think RedCountyTeacher hit on a couple of important points when we consider the question of whether schools should be tax-supported or privatized. If we are going to expect teachers to RAISE kids, in addition to just teaching them, we'd better ask parents to pony up for the bills.

I have a friend who's been teaching for over thirty years. She has told me that over the years, she has had to shorten the reading-aloud period from one hour to five minutes, because kids' attention spans are so brief now that they are TV and video-game trained. She also says that over the years, kids have engaged in behavior that their 1970s counterparts wouldn't have dreamed of -- talking back, cursing, attacking other students. We're talking about eight-year-olds here.

I'm not enough of a libertarian to believe in divorcing education from the government. As others have pointed out, poor kids would be the biggest losers if that happened. But I would like to see more emphasis on math and science, and other basic skills -- and less emphasis on touchy-feely stuff, outcome-based education, and crackpot progressive theories.

Finally, I graduated from a Christian high school in 1983, and agree with the Catholic school grad above who noted that a good education enables students to QUESTION religious doctrines rather than merely knuckling under to them. I am no longer a member of the denomination that ran my school, although I am still a Christian today -- and the capacity for critical thinking that I gained in eleven years of public school and two years of private school is responsible for that.