In the comments on a recent post, someone expressed the commonly held (and much-applauded) attitude that,
It’s the kids in the classrooms that matter here..
It’s about the life of the child and the parents that are trying to give this child a good life with opportunity — this is the goal here.
But this attitude is the root problem that gives rise to every other problem with public schools.
It’s about maintaining a free society. That’s what matters.
As soon as we make it ‘about the kids’, about ‘giving kids a good life’ or about ‘bright futures’ or whatever, we set ourselves up for precisely the kind of failure that we’ve been seeing for generations. We make it about taking actual freedom from everyone in order to offer the illusion of a benefit to some people.
(Note that the NH state constitution prohibits government from doing this, because the people who wrote it understood how that kind of thing always works out.)
It’s difficult to get a group of people of any size to agree on what it means to be ‘educated’. But I think nearly all of us can agree on what it means to be uneducated.
If you can’t read, are you uneducated? Yes. If you don’t know enough math to manage your finances and understand the kinds of policy arguments that are debated for your benefit, are you uneducated? Yes. If you can’t tell when someone is (metaphorically) peeing on your leg and telling you it’s raining, are you uneducated? Yes. Are you, therefore, a danger to society? Yes.
On the other hand, if you have never played an organized competitive sport, are you uneducated? No. (You might not be ‘well-rounded’, but you’re not uneducated.) If you can’t play a musical instrument, or speak a foreign language, or weld two pieces of metal together, or assemble a robot, or program a spreadsheet, or solve an integral, are you uneducated? Not being able to do these things doesn’t make you uneducated.
Antoine St. Exupery said that perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. When talking about being educated, there is always more that can be added — especially when other people are paying for it. So there is no end to that process.
But when talking about being uneducated, we can take away things like sports, AP calculus, wood shop, and Spanish, and ask: If a person can’t do this, would we say that he is uneducated? There is definitely an end to that process. And at the end of the process, the place we arrive at is precisely the definition of an adequate education, in the sense that anything less is clearly inadequate.
The purpose of tax-funded assistance for education should not be ‘to educate kids’, because everyone thinks that means something different. (This isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s been that way since the concept of education was invented.) And as Zig Ziglar used to say, if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. That’s probably the best explanation of the state of public schools that I’ve ever heard.
The purpose of tax-funded assistance for education should be to avoid having uneducated kids loosed on the world as uneducated adults. It’s not an aspirational effort. It’s a matter of self-defense.
It is the desire of parents that their kids be educated, however the hell they want to define that, because that’s for the good of those particular kids.
But it is the responsibility of parents to make sure that their kids are not uneducated, because sending uneducated kids into the world is a public menace. (If you drive drunk now and then, that’s a public menace, but you usually get away without harming anyone, and you can stop doing it at any time. If you send an uneducated kid out into the world, you have created a potentially unending cascade of problems for everyone else, and you can’t just stop, the way you can stop driving drunk.)
To the extent that some parents can’t afford some of the cost of carrying out this responsibility, it is in the best interest of society (as opposed to government — they are very different things) to help them with that task — in order, as Article 3 says, to protect the rights of everyone.
But when we focus our policy discussions on what kids and parents want, instead of on what a free society needs, we move 180 degrees from the direction that we ought to be moving in.
