The Costs of Free Education
Kirk Lennon
May 2002
In the United States, primary and secondary education are compulsory and free to the students. Though seemingly fine, the notion proves appalling when identified in specific terms. The government, using threats of physical harm, captures children and forces them into its own schools. To fund this monstrosity, it expropriates money from citizens, regardless of their parental status, and again using threats of physical violence.
Supporters erroneously absolve the moral conflicts with claims that children need public education. If not for the very existence of public schools, most children would not need them anyway. Few parents can afford to pay taxes for public schools and private tuition. Though private schools nominally compete with their public counterparts, the violently seized taxes effectively compel most parents to send their children to state-run schools. Without the additional cost of taxes, most parents could afford quality, private education for their children. Private charity can easily provide for the relatively few exceptions.
However—and infinitely more important—the premise that needs can somehow override actual rights needs to be checked, and condemned. A person holds the exclusive right to his or her own life. By extension, they also hold the only claim to the product of that life: their property. The fundamental issue is that it is their property, not that of the state, the poor, the elderly, the children—in short, the “needy.” The state may make no moral claim to a person’s property and thus, may not tax. So-called “free” education exists only by stealing the legitimate property of a citizen, by violating their inalienable rights.
The statist clamor that all children deserve quality education at no cost to them or their parents, aside from creating a false and contradictory right, presumes that public schools provide quality, universal education. Presently, not all children actually receive an education at all, much less of any quality. Walter Williams writes:
[T]he National Adult Literacy Survey reported that among adults with twelve years of schooling, more than 96 percent couldn’t read, write, or compute well enough to attend college. In 1990, 40 million young Americans with nine to twelve years of schooling could not make sense out of a printed page. Only 56 percent of blacks over the age of fourteen could read.
Also, ill-behaved students interfere with the education of other students, creating a pedagogical nightmare. The students are required by the coercive power of law to attend school. When each body, thinking or not, equates to additional state money, school districts have an obvious aversion to expelling troublemakers. In a free-market educational system, schools compete against each other. Puerile behavior lowers the quality of education and, consequently, the economic value. Selfish greed motivates school owners to strive for academic achievement. Public schools, which hold a monopoly on education, lack the proper motivation to excel.
Public schools fail to educate students. Twelve years of schooling ought to send forth knowledgeable, inquisitive and productive members of society. Since they clearly do not, why does the government still support them? H. L. Mencken explains:
That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
Even if a parent sends their child to private school, they still have to pay the public school. Microsoft does not charge users of Linux for Windows, yet it somehow earns the moniker “monopoly.” How can public schools get away with such insidious actions?
Anything herald as working for the public good gains automatic and incontrovertible acceptance as moral. Public schooling seems egalitarian and perhaps even a hallmark of a sophisticated society. After all, do we not owe it to every child to prepare him or her for the world?
No, we do not; and we should not appoint that responsibility to the government. The altruistic notion of the “public good” requires a definition of the public before any act can be described as good for it. Apparently, the public is everyone and no one, at the same time. Altruism requires sacrifice to this mythical beast; everyone sacrifices himself or herself to everyone else. Morality becomes a race to a zero. If giving up something you value is good, the ultimate good must logically be giving up absolutely everything of value. If you do not value something, giving it up is not a sacrifice and is thus not morally good, qua altruism. As such, altruism holds death as its end. True morality, however, is a guide for living. Altruism is therefore inconsistent with a rational life of meaningful values and ought to be universally condemned. The public is merely a collection of individuals and hence lacks a common goal of good. The members of society, though bound by a common, objective morality, have individual values and separate personal goals. What is good for some is bad for others. The sacrificial doctrine of death requires theft from one group for the benefit of another.
Individuals, acting on their own selfish interests, create governments. All governments have one purpose: to protect the rights of their citizens. They possess only the rights conferred on them by their citizens. A group of people acting together in the form of a government has no more rights than any single person. There exists no moral difference between a solitary thief who steals your money and police officer that steals your money to provide for some urgent public need. Theft is theft and a democratic vote cannot change that. A proper government simply protects rights. In his pamphlet “The Law,” Frédéric Bastiat explains the source and limits of government’s authority:
If every person has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force—for the same reason—cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
A right is a freedom from restriction. A right to public school creates a positive obligation on another and violates actual rights. The US Constitution specifically mentions the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. No one may deprive another of these but no one is obligated to provide them for another either, as that would constitute their own deprivation. One may pursue happiness, property and even the extension of his or her own life but they may not take these from someone else. In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand defines a right as “a moral principle defining and sanctioning man’s freedom of action in a social context.” She further writes:
Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligation on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.
Government exists for the exclusive purpose of securing actual rights; government education requires the violation of these rights. Thus, government ought not to provide education. Public school sacrifices property—the product of someone’s life—to provide shamefully low quality education for the undeserving. The costs, both in moral abrogation and in actual money, require the expedient abolition of this practice.
Review: Damien Rice’s O
Review: Eisley’s Room Noises