 Welcome to our Libertarian Lecture Series, our first installment, which we have entitled The Untouchables for the reason that others declined to touch some of these tough issues as well as what we consider the only real solutions to these issues. Our speaker today is Sheldon Richmond, who is Vice President of Policy Affairs at the Future of Freedom Foundation, and the author of Separating School and State How to Liberate America's Families, which was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation. My name is Jacob Hornberger, and I am President of the Foundation. At the conclusion of Sheldon's talk, we're going to have some brief comments by David Bose, Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, and then we'll open it up for discussion, which will include not just questions, but comments, observations, and your reaction. Sheldon is a graduate of Temple University. He went to work for the Institute for Humane Studies after being a reporter for some time, and most recently he was Senior Editor at the Cato Institute. His essays have been published widely, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Times, Christian Science Monitor, and many more. You know, it would be difficult to find a better example of socialist central planning than public schooling. We have a central directorate, whether at a state level or local level or national level, of government officials, whether appointed or elected. And having what Friedrich Hayek would call the pretense of knowledge, believing that they can plan in a top-down fashion the educational decisions of thousands or millions of school children across the country. And of course the results of this concept of central planning are predictable, and certainly they have been predicted by libertarians for decades, whether you look at public schooling in the United States or public schooling in Cuba, North Korea, Russia, China, and other places where this concept of socialist central planning is found. The results have been horrific, at least in terms of the goals that the advocates of public schooling wish to achieve. We believe that there is only one solution. We at the Future Freedom Foundation, of course, most libertarians. And that is a separation of school and state. A while back we contacted Sheldon about coming up with a very readable book addressed to just the layperson interested in liberty, giving the history of public schooling, how it came into existence here in the United States, what the results are, what the goals were, and then of course what the solution is. And we believe that the solution is a separation of school and state. The idea that repealing compulsory attendance laws, repealing school taxes, ending all government involvement in the educational arena, turning things over to the free market, the type of things we advocate for people in Eastern Europe and Russia and so forth. That would mean, of course, that entrepreneurs would decide the educational vehicles that families would be demanding, and that families would be deciding the best educational vehicle for each of their children, considering that each of their children is of course different from each other. So would you please help me welcome Sheldon, who's going to be speaking on separating school and state. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bumper. It's an honor to be the inaugural speaker of the Future Freedom Foundation's series here in Washington, and I'm delighted to get the nod. My talk is almost written by the daily papers. If you're watching the Washington Post or probably any major paper around the country, even smaller papers around the country, just about every day there is some article which illustrates why there seems to be so much dissatisfaction with the public schools or what I prefer to think of as government schools, because every school that I know of has members of the public in it, so that's not very good distinction. We're talking about schools that are coercively funded. I mean, if we really want to get down to the basic issue, we're talking about school systems that get their money through the taxing power. If you change that, you've made a radical change in the entire system, so that seems to be the defining characteristic of what we call the public schools, what used to be called the common schools, or better called government schools. On Sunday, there was an article in the Washington Post, the front page, no accounting for some workers in DC schools. DC officials overspent their personnel budget by $54 million over the last five years. Budget analysts say largely because hundreds of unauthorized workers have remained on the payroll. These are just little bureaucratic anecdotes. In Montgomery County, there was a big article on the 15th, also Sunday in the Metro section. Parents are upset because in Montgomery County, in Maryland, they've redrawn the district lines. They've redistricted the state or the county, sorry. Therefore, people who thought they were going to send their kids to one school, maybe even bought a house in that district, in that area, because they thought that meant their kids would go to a particular school that they heard good things about, now find that their kids are going to go to another school because the lines have been changed. Which is sort of interesting. I mean, I can't imagine waking up one morning and find out I can't go to my local bookstore any longer because they've redrawn the lines and now I have to go to one over there or that I can't take my kids to the shoe store I used to take them to because they've redrawn the shoe district lines and now I have to take them somewhere else where I don't really like it. I actually moved in this area because I like that shoe store. People are turning out at meetings quite justifiably and screaming at the school board about these things. The board can't understand why people are getting so upset. I mean, they're the ones entrusted to run this system. Why are these parents coming and yelling at them? One of the members of the board said, I have never been through such a gut-wrenching process. These parents are coming out actually complaining that we're moving their kids around like chess pieces on a chess board. In New York, there's a problem that there are too few schools for New York students. And I keep thinking, am I ever going to wake up one day and see Blockbuster Video complain that there are just too many customers for videos and couldn't we do something about this problem because they can't handle all the influx of new people and instead of expanding their business, which is what they sort of do, will they someday complain that maybe something ought to be done to keep the number of people out of the area so that that won't happen? In California, not very long ago, the superintendent of public instruction went before the people of California and said regarding the method of teaching, reading that they had put into place 10 years ago, namely the whole language method and also some new method of teaching math, as she put it, we made a mistake. It was an honest mistake. What we made was an honest mistake, she said, because scores plummeted shortly after putting into practice these new methods, but it took them 10 years to realize that their method was the problem and to actually decide to do something about it. Well, how many millions of children went through the schools in 10 years, that's a long time in the life of a school child, but we can feel better that it was an honest mistake. I mean, it wasn't just, they weren't just out to, they weren't out to do the kids harm, so I'm sure they all feel much better about that. Imagine what a decentralized private system would do. Can you imagine a system like that persisting in an error for 10 years? I mean, parents would immediately realize something was wrong and take their kids out of the school and put their kids somewhere else. And then the one that I liked so much from last February was the Secretary of Education released his annual State of Education report and said that we had a national reading crisis and it was our most urgent task to address this crisis. Now I find this very funny because in my view it takes a government to create a national reading crisis. If I can paraphrase the first lady, radically paraphrase her. There was a time when this was a very highly literate society. Reading seemed not to be such a tough thing as a skill to acquire. It was such an easy skill to acquire that the southern states before the Civil War had to pass a law making it a crime for slaves to learn how to read. Now it seems to me you don't pass a law against something that's virtually impossible to do without the official sanction of the state. And if they're passing laws against this, this implies to me that it wasn't so tough. And you know how, I'll tell you how slaves learn to read. They learn from their children and you know how the children learn to read. They learn to read by playing with the plantation owners kids after school. And the kids would, by playing school and other kinds of games teach the kids, slave kids how to read. It was that easy. Reading is not a tough thing. Lots of kids even today basically teach themselves how to read with a little bit of guidance from parents asking questions and things like that. But we have a national reading crisis. And to me that's the final indictment of a government system that it could bring us to this. Because this was a highly literate society before there was widespread government involvement in education. European visitors to this country before the 1830s and earlier marveled at how literate the society is. Tocqueville and DuPont and Amour would come and talk about how many newspapers there were. There was, you know, more newspapers per thousand of population than in any country in the world. Books, novels and pamphlets sold the equivalent of 60 million copies in proportion to that population at the time. And of course there was a slave population too, which weren't going out and buying books and pamphlets. But books by Noah Webster and Sir Walter Scott were selling incredible amounts. I mean nobody sells in those kinds of numbers today. So somebody was reading and somebody was buying reading material. And that's not consistent with the idea that this was a fairly illiterate society. Even though reading was not the necessity that it was, the economic necessity, let's say, that it is today, because it was a highly rural economy obviously, it was almost entirely rural, if not entirely rural. And it wasn't as necessary to be a reader in those days as I say today. And yet people still felt for maybe non-economic reasons, it was a good idea. And they were able to acquire that skill and that goes for poor people too, they're relatively poor because as a society of course it was a poor society by today's standards. So what brought us to this mess? Well let me divide the discussion into two roughly broad areas, the politics of government schools and the economics of government schools. And I'll start with the economics and point out why it's likely to be the case that a government run system is going to be, well not likely to be the case, is always going to be the case that a government run system will be inferior to a free system, a free market system. And by that I don't mean everything done in the name of education would be for profit in a free system. There will obviously be non-profit organizations providing educational services. There'll be homeschooling efforts and even what I think of as expanded homeschooling efforts where maybe people in neighborhoods get together and do this, where it's not being done on a for-profit basis. So when I say free market, sometimes people take that too narrowly and think I'm only envisioning for-profit schools but we're going to, obviously we would have a whole range of providers, anything you can name and things that we won't even think of until we actually see somebody come up with them in the marketplace. The government schools can be really described in a single word, bureaucratic. And I'm not just using that as an insult although I mean it that way too. But that's a technical term. I mean it in a technical sense in the way Mises discussed bureaucracy in his little book, Bureaucracy and William Scanan has written a book on sort of the public choice of bureaucracy and so there's a literature on bureaucracy and the key thing about a bureaucracy as far as I can tell is it, again and I mentioned this earlier, it has a sort of a guaranteed flow of income because it's financed through the taxing system and that sets in motion a process and a dynamic that is going to be I think inimical to the to the stated purposes of the bureaucracy. I mean the school bureaucracy would claim if you asked anybody who works in it what is your purpose they will say to serve children educate children. Now they'll also say serve the larger society and all that because it's good if we're an educated public and things like that but the primary target I imagine they would say are the children, is the children. But if you look at it day to day doesn't seem to quite work out that way. You get a sneaking sense if you follow this that it's actually being operated for someone else's benefit. For example the initials NEA mean anything to you. I'm not talking about the national demo for the arts that's another lecture all together. But you have a strong sense that it's being operated for the teachers union which isn't to say that every teacher is a bad person I don't mean that and I don't mean to imply that as my friend Marshall Fritz likes to say if you put a good person in a bad organization or a bad system the system wins. So even someone who has great intentions and is capable and competent that person will find them himself or herself fighting almost every day with the bureaucracy to do the kinds of good things that that person might well want to do. So I'm not really discussing the motives here of any individual person or the competence. When you have a guaranteed flow of funds you don't need to really attract customers do you? We don't think of the people that go to public schools as customers in the same sense that we're not customers of the post office or sort of stuck with them. If we don't like what they do and we can't really just go across the street to a rival post office so you could get sneaky and try federal express but maybe you'll get raided by the postal authorities and they'll say what you're sending is not urgent and therefore you owe us the postage. They did that to a company not too long ago. Anyway that's what happens when you're stuck with an essentially a monopoly organization that has a guaranteed flow of money. They can have a certain arrogance sets in and again they may not think of it that way but they're sort of anointed because they have the access to this money. They are the public system, the system and it has a corrupting effect. It reminds me of the famous act in quote about power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't know how many of you have been to a parent visitation night at a public school but it's a very weird feeling. It reminds me a lot of being in the post office. I did it once and it was a very unpleasant experience and on the other hand I've been to a private school, private preschool and kindergarten, a Montessori school and it was much more like being at federal express. The two feelings were very distinct and it was very clear to me what was going on there. So they have this guaranteed flow of funds which sets in them I believe an attitude which is not really helpful to parents or children. The other thing it does is it inherently, it necessarily cuts off the people that run the system from the flow of new ideas that we always see in a free marketplace. So what I want to do is contrast bureaucracy to what we find in a free system, namely entrepreneurship. Those are really the two I think contesting principles there because when you have an entrepreneurial system what that means is people have the freedom to be alert to new ideas and what lures them of course to be alert to those new ideas is the possibility of making profit because they can take the new idea, go out and offer to people, try to find willing buyers and if they do find willing buyers they have the possibility of making profit. Israel Kursner who's really the dean of Austrian economists and a very fine scholar and thinker makes a distinction between two ways of looking at the world and it illustrates the problems with the public schools versus a private system. There's what he calls the closed-ended view of the world and the open-ended view. The closed-ended view which is also sort of part of the whole neoclassical model of economics sort of sees the world this way that we already know all of the objectives, all the things we might want to achieve and we know all the means, all the resources, all the methods of getting to any of those objectives. So now the only thing that's left for us to decide is what objective do we want and then do the calculations to come up to arrange the resources, the known resources in the proper way to get the objective. So it's a matter of taking out our calculator. The point is though we have all the relevant information. We just need to make some decisions. Okay, that's one way to look at the world. The other way to look at the world is that we don't know all that stuff, that tomorrow we're going to discover things that we didn't even know were there to be discovered. So there's two kinds of ignorance that are involved here and it's very relevant to the whole issue of schools. There's an ignorance which economics calls rational ignorance and that's where you don't know something but you are aware of your ignorance with respect to that something and you choose to remain ignorant because it's not worth your while to find that thing out right now. After all, time is limited, our resources are limited, we wouldn't have time to learn anything anyway so we make choices and some things we say look I don't need to know that, the day I need to know that, the day I believe that the benefits outweigh the costs, I'll acquire the information. I don't know the population of Zaire but the day I need to know it, I know how to find it out and I'll then exert the effort and incur whatever the expanse if I believe it's worth it to get the information. But there's another kind of ignorance that's much more important and this is where this shows up the flaw of a government system of education. There's a radical sort of ignorance or what Kersner calls an utter ignorance. This is where not only are we ignorant of a particular thing but we're ignorant of our ignorance. We don't know that it's there to be known. Let me give you an example. Well, I can't give you an example, can I? I can give you a hypothetical example. If I'd never heard of the nation of Zaire, I wouldn't know that I was ignorant of the size of its population. That's maybe not a great example but it's what I'm getting, you know what I'm getting at. The point is when you turn a corner on the street you don't know what you might see. I mean you could list a bunch of things that you might see but you also might see something that you never would think to put on the list and that's the way the world is. Serendipity happens. It's the flip side of that, you know, that bumper sticker you see a lot. You never see that one but that's the upside of it. That's the good side of it, right? But that's true and that's what entrepreneurs do. Entrepreneurs are out looking to make discoveries and what lures them to do it, I mean they don't just do it out of the goodness of their heart, I mean they may do that too but they might be doing other things if they felt like they had a chance of entrepreneurial profit as a result. What lures them is the chance to advance themselves through entrepreneurial profit so they're always looking for things that are going to appeal to other people but just not things that we all sit around already knowing about saying oh I wish that we had X but things that we don't even sit around thinking we wish we had but the moment we see it we're going to say great idea I'm sure glad someone came up with that. This is what the government system can't give us because it's in a sense a closed system. Because the school board and the people they work with the teachers union and administrators and all that they act as if they have a monopoly on wisdom that they already know all the things. Now it's just a matter of choosing what they believe is the best one. Now if you told them this they would object they'd say no we don't make a claim that we know all of this, we have all the wisdom that we have all the good ideas. You come to us with good ideas we're very happy to hear from outsiders. Well that sounds appealing you may think they're not making this claim. But think about what happens next someone comes to them with a good idea who gets to decide whether the idea is adopted or not. The very people who claim that they don't have a monopoly on wisdom but isn't that an implicit claim of a monopoly on wisdom if they're saying okay we like your idea you come in no we don't like your idea you go away. They are claiming the monopoly because they're going to be the final judge. Now in a free system you don't need to go before some board and get permission. If you have an idea you're just free to go out and offer it. Now sure maybe you need to borrow money to start an enterprise but of course in a free market there's lots of sources you can save there's lots of ways to get some startup capital so that's not the same kind of barrier as going before a bureaucratic board and getting permission to present your idea so that if they like it they can adopt it. The market system the free system is open-ended it's a constant process of discovery as Hayek put it the discovery procedure we don't know what's going to be discovered tomorrow but that means we're maximizing our chances of coming up with good new ideas about education about how we want to educate our children. Okay let me jump now to the politics of it. As I mentioned this was a highly literate society before we had widespread government schools so the reason we have government schools is not that huge numbers of people could not be educated. We have them for another reason and the reason we have them is that there was a feeling by the intellectual elite in this country which at the time was sort of a Protestant elite basically in the northeast part of the country that felt that without there being a sort of consciously designed and planned educational system we would never be able to create the right kind of national culture that they felt was so necessary. In other words they did not understand and again I'll grant them good motives okay we might not like what they've done but we don't need to ascribe bad motives to understand this story and I think the case actually is much stronger if we don't ascribe to them evil motives because it's too easy for people to just knock that down and say oh you're just a conspiracy theorist so let's grant that they had the well-being of the country at heart and they were kind-hearted people but they made a bad error they made a bad intellectual error. They didn't understand that a society and a culture is a spontaneous order that essentially generates itself and evolves itself just through people's activities and that it doesn't need to be self-consciously planned by wise people like this class of people but that's what they wanted to do they felt that they needed to take the influx of say Irish Catholic immigrants into Massachusetts and turn them into good Americans because there was this feeling that there was this suspicion that Irish Catholic adults were likely to bring up Irish Catholic children and there was a strong correlation and these were social scientists you know and they felt that the Irish Catholics were a little bit rambunctious and maybe their loyalty was a little bit divided because you know they're Catholics and it wouldn't be great if we could get the kids out of the house and turn them into good Americans and this was one of the strong motives it wasn't only aimed at immigrants but that might have been the big impetus to finally doing something about this the idea was to get the kids young because they felt that the older generation was sort of lost you weren't going to really get the parents and change them very much but to get the children early into school at least get them for a few years they didn't immediately start with a 12-year program but let's get them for five, six years and you can then sort of set them on their way to good citizenship and make them good compliant taxpayers and they won't rock the boat too much after all, if you're part of the leadership class it's very helpful if people tend to support you and not constantly raise objections to what you're doing and resist it's nice if there's a consensus Walter Littman in the 20s talked about the system manufacturing consent well I think this was a big part of it because if the leadership class was going to get the maximum cooperation out of the people it would be very useful to get the kids early to teach them that this is a benevolent system it's for their benefit, that their cooperation is needed and that it's in their interest to cooperate and that way things can go along nice and smoothly again you don't need to have bad motives ascribed to these people to understand this it's perfectly consistent with them being doing all of this in good faith so look what's learned in history there's a series of stories just about entirely in which evil actors in the private sector are finally brought under control by benevolent politicians you have the industrial revolution you have the trust problem of the trust the monopoly, the depression leaving aside the wars for a second which somehow big business always figures it in that too but it's always a politician on a white steed usually named Roosevelt riding to the rescue to save us from robber barons and monopolists and evil people running satanic mills and things like that why is it, is it an accident? the Marxist used to say it can't be an accident how come there's never a story where a politician does a bad thing and somebody in the free market in the private sector is the hero there are occasionally bad politicians but they're usually bested by good politicians it's never totally reversed and someone in the marketplace is the hero and people generally come out of school I think with a sense that businessmen are usually up to no good Chris is reinforced by television where every drama at night has the bad guys a businessman there are probably a few but you can't really readily think of a story where a businessman or a businesswoman is actually a hero in one of these stories the rare movie now and then well let me close my point is that the schools are always irresistible to the politicians as laboratories for social engineers and that's why every few years there's a new fad here's a new way to teach reading here's a new way to teach math and the kids are sort of the beings we do experiments on and the parents are asked to support the system to tell their kids to do the homework but don't do anything more I mean don't come and actually make demands on us your place is to be the cheerleader support your teacher do your homework be a good student but don't get too pushy and tell us really how to do things so I like to sum this up by saying the school system treats the parents as children and the children as guinea pigs and that's the proper place for these two components because if you look at how they get treated that's the best comparison I can think of when we demand educational freedom you often hear people resort to some sort of empirical argument who objected to this they'll say there's no evidence that private schools are better than public schools well that's kind of nonsense studies are pretty clear on this you can argue what exactly is the factor that makes kids in private school do better than kids in public school seems to me that the biggest thing is the support at home and parents that actually take their kids out of school and put them in another school are already showing some sort of a self-selection they're already the more aggressive parents who are doing something on behalf of their kids so maybe you shouldn't be surprised at that but you'll hear people say there are good public schools but I want to point out that that's not the issue which should not even turn to this issue which is better I mean freedom should not depend the case for freedom should not depend on whether the institutions that parents will choose on their own is better than the one the government's providing that's irrelevant that's beside the point the case for freedom stands on its own why don't... isn't it intolerable that in a country that still claims to be a free country we have a system in which all the big decisions about a child's education are made by someone other than the parents who decides what school your child will go to how many hours a day how many days a week how many weeks a year how many years when the child can actually quit school who makes those decisions is made by strangers it doesn't matter that the parents can go to the polls every year every two years and vote for those strangers that doesn't change it okay that's almost a facade to make parents think that they have a great deal to say about it but think... is that really accountability how much accountability is in the fact that if I'm upset with the school district the school board I'm free to go out and raise money and get all my neighbors to vote them out I only have one vote by the way I'll throw that as a footnote so after all that I only get to cast one vote compare that accountability to the accountability I have with the shoe store owner or the bookstore owner I don't have to do anything but walk across the street if I'm bothered by the service I get there I don't have to get my neighbors and get 51% to vote against that guy that's expensive that's time consuming I mean the rest of us all those people may have nothing to do but think about public policy but the rest of us have lives to live and we don't want to be bothered with this some of us here think about public policy all the time but outside the Beltway they've got other things to do it's a different world I realize so when they come back and say no this is a democratic system we get to vote we have input it's a very pale form of power if we want to call it that it doesn't really deserve to be called that the case for freedom stands on its own parents ought to bring children in the world under the assumption and the understanding that they are responsible for the child's education including the funding of that education and not believe that it's going to be paid for by someone else or that the decisions are going to be made by someone else because to the extent that they have that understanding to the extent that they realize that someone else will be making all the decisions they will be less responsible parents than they would be otherwise so what we have done is we've sort of we've sort of bred a class of irresponsible parents it's a very subtle and insidious thing but to the extent that all these decisions are made by somebody else parents are less responsible than they would be otherwise if they knew that those decisions were in their own in their hands I'll close with a word about reform because I'm sure it'll be on people's minds and it's likely to come up as a question of course the most popular reform that has been talked about over the last I don't know how many years is some form of a voucher program where the money or some portion of the money that the state would have spent on a child's education is given to the parents in the form of a ticket which they can only use at a school to educate their children and the idea is to introduce some competition to the public system let me make two quick criticisms about that and if people want to bring it up we can discuss it the first thing I wanted to say is that it seems to me that any voucher program eventually gets passed will contain lots of rules and regulations on the hitherto independent schools because I just find it hard to believe that voters will approve a system that would let quote public money which is how they see it they don't really see it as the parents money and of course in some cases like a case of pork parents it may not be their money at all because it would be some transfer anyway they won't want to see quote public money go to schools which are not accountable to the quote public meaning to the government or the education authorities and so there it seems inevitable that there are going to be rules and conditions attached to the voucher so parents will be told look you can take your voucher to any school on the approved list and to get on that list you'll have to do certain things the school would have to do certain things which will compromise their independence and cut down on the degree of competition that the system is intended to produce the second thing I want to say is that the voucher system doesn't attack really the heart of the public school system the public school system is really one of the first welfare programs in the United States or maybe anywhere it's an unmeans tested welfare system and quote my friend Marshall Fritz again if a free lunch at noon is welfare why isn't a free math lesson at 10.15 welfare the point is there's a transfer that's going on and the voucher system doesn't even address the idea that there's a transfer going on so my view is that we have to talk up the actual radical solution to all this which is the complete separation of school and state and bypass these reforms because we need to teach the public what's wrong and to the extent we focus on these lesser reforms we're taking our eye off the ball we're taking opportunities to talk about the real thing it may not be politically realistic today but the more we talk about it the more realistic it becomes so I think we should be out there talking about it and what is unrealistic today may well become realistic tomorrow thank you we're holding this meeting in Washington DC of course Washington was named for George Washington who was famous for being first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen today Washington is known as in terms of education first in spending first in dropout rates and last in achievement I'm not sure exactly what to comment here because I don't think Sheldon said anything that I disagree with but I'll maybe add a couple of points and then maybe raise a question at the end I think to add to some of the economic points that Sheldon made I would make a point that I believe is in his book which is when you talk about whether private schools are better than public schools or whether public schools are worse than they used to be there's a real question as to how you determine the quality of any service in the absence of a marketplace what do we mean when we say that the quality of a particular product or service is too low we usually mean that a better deal is available somewhere else either I could get the same quality for a lower price or I could get better quality for the same price for instance I would like to have a better apartment a better car a better house cleaning service but better quality in all those things is available to me if I'm willing to pay the price so it wouldn't make any sense really for me to say the quality of my car is too low I could have a better car I'm just not willing to pay more money to have a better car so in that sense what does it mean to say the schools aren't good enough if spending more money would make them better we would just be saying well we want to spend more money and the question would be why don't you go out and do it the real point is in the absence of a market you don't know what combination of price and quality is available to you so public systems which are virtually non-market although there's a little bit of choice it's very hard to make that kind of determination one of the issues that you get into when you talk about education and particularly education in the state is values schools are where we bring up children and to most parents it's very important what values their children are brought up with and conservatives and liberals have both complained a lot lately that the schools are imposing values on their children that they wouldn't have chosen I would suggest that on the whole conservatives probably have a better of that argument these days although that might not have been true 20 or 30 years ago court decisions and political pressures have tended to remove conservative values such as school prayer from the public schools while the schools have become more responsive to concerns about multilateralism, sex education environmentalism, other things that liberals might prefer to see and which liberals tend not to see as imposing values on children some observers however complain that conservatives and liberals are both wrong values being imposed in the public schools they say that political pressures in fact create and I'm quoting here I think from John Coons a narrow curriculum produced by a political process by political necessity the content of that curriculum is a matter for lobbying by and must emerge inoffensive to feminists, business interests gays, lesbians, unions, blacks seniors, Jews, Christians scientists, Christian scientists in short the curriculum is to be censored. The curriculum is whatever survives this comprehensive system of prior restraint. There is a lot of this pushing of benevolent values these days, sharing and multiculturalism and environmentalism and I think the substitution of these benevolent social values for education has probably reached its zenith recently in Pennsylvania where the state board of education has decided to scrap such outmoded high school graduation requirements for four years of English and three years of math in favor of 51 learning outcomes that include such achievements as appreciating and understanding others being able to relate the history and nature of various forms of prejudice in the United States making environmentally sound decisions in their personal and civic lives relating basic human development theories to caregiving and childcare strategies demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of the family and the cultural, economic and political factors affecting it and learning about HIV infection and AIDS, tobacco, alcohol and substance abuse. Now one might wonder if the schools are going to teach children to appreciate other people and to understand the family do we now expect parents to teach long division and why we wrote the Constitution? This problem of values and values being imposed that parents may not like I think is an important one in the schools and other places and that's why in my forthcoming book Libertarianism a Primmer available from the free press and at your local bookstore starting in January I talk about the separation of church and state and then I go on to say and the same reasons that we want to separate church and state that we in fact find it essential to separate church and state mean that we should also separate education and state, art and state family and state race and state I certainly would go on and say I know the next lecture in this series is separating money and state and economy and state although those are a little bit different all of these others that I've talked about family and art and education really are bound up in values the same way separating church and state is all of these things family schools, art should be left in civil society not in political society I think there is something we have to worry about though with values in the schools if we want to maintain a free society we need people who understand what a free society is I would say that I want students when they leave school to have a healthy understanding of the role of private property and the rule of law and the constitution and the bill of rights and the separation of powers and the independent judiciary in protecting and securing freedom so I think we all have an interest parents have a responsibility to educate their children but we all have an interest in maintaining a society in which children learn these concepts at least theoretically public schools are supposed to impart these values at least theoretically it's possible that private schools wouldn't it's one of the things defenders of the public schools say you have private schools you have choice and you'll get Farrakhanism and David Dukeism and you'll get witches teaching schools as they promise to do out in California a whole range of illiberal values being taught to children now I think as an empirical matter there is simply no evidence for that there's no evidence that a large number of parents want to send their children to schools that teach illiberal values and if we think about most of the leading adherence of illiberal values in the United States from Lewis Farrakhan to David Duke to maybe Timothy McVeigh what we notice is they were all educated in public schools so they don't seem to be doing a great job of that a lot of public schools today I think have lost any commitment to teaching the real meaning of the Constitution much less the importance of private property instead they're committed to a sort of value neutrality that the way you teach thinking about serious issues is to let students know that everything is a matter of opinion and so they ask students what kind of ice cream do you like best what's your favorite color how do you feel about abortion and stealing in the sense that there's no difference between these kinds of things now even people in this audience might disagree about some of these important topics and certainly people in a great big country like the United States do but if we had schools that responded to what parents want and offered parents a program then I think you would get more teaching of the kinds of values we want but now I want to raise a problem here I agree with Sheldon that full educational freedom and parental responsibility is what libertarians should want and more than that is what would be good for a free society but I want to read you another quote from the Washington Post that appeared recently story not long ago began DC school superintendent Franklin L. Smith anxious to graduate more students who can read plans to hire a private firm to provide 11th hour tutoring to as many as 600 district high school juniors and seniors who on average read at the fourth grade level that's the reality of education today in the United States and full educational freedom would be a lot better but politically, realistically the choice we face it seems to me is between the potential risks of school vouchers and the disastrous reality of bureaucratic socialist monopoly in the schools so the question is what do we do about poor kids who are trapped in disastrous schools we've been hearing in New York City recently that the mayor is going to encourage private businesses to raise $2 million to send a thousand kids to the Catholic schools that's great but that's 1,000 kids out of 1 million kids who are going to escape and the mayor hasn't raised the $2 million yet although I'm sure in New York City $2 million is plausible the question is what about the other million kids in the New York City schools some of whom are too poor to pay for education themselves some of whom come from middle class families who are already paying for schools once but not getting any education what do we say to them we don't have a plausible strategy for moving to full educational freedom and I think therefore that we have to think seriously about whether the reality of the schools today is so bad that we're willing to take the risk of a halfway measure like a voucher plan in the long run there's no more economic reason to provide schooling collectively than to provide food or clothing collectively if it's so dangerous to have the government educate children then it would be to have it feed and clothe children so libertarians in every country the United States and all the other developed countries and certainly the countries that are still developing civil society should try to withdraw the government as far as possible from the transmission of values to children and therefore from schooling the question we have to discuss is how far is possible thank you we'll open it up for some discussion questions, comments Bill what is the point it seems to me private students do better academically than public school students I can describe this to involvement commitment but where does that commitment or involvement or rather how does it arise what accounts for even students from the inner city in Chicago and Buffalo score more according to my data and what is this the real source of this superiority of application that results in superior outcomes well one answer and the one the public school defenders would like to say is that the children in private schools come from more affluent families where the parents are better educated is true on the whole but you can adjust the statistics and still find that private schools do better and then they say well then the statistics aren't capturing something they're not capturing the fact that given two people with the same socioeconomic status the one who chooses a private school is the mother who is going to see that the child gets up every day and ask him what his homework is and so on now that's an interesting defense the mother who sends her child to the public school obviously doesn't care as much about his education as the mother who sends him to a private school which is an odd defense of public schools but it is what they say interestingly enough we now have a genuine random experiment up in Milwaukee where a voucher plan was created for a thousand kids in private schools more than a thousand applied they were chosen randomly who could get in so for the first time we have a pool of people who wanted to get into private school but without spending their own money and that might mean they had some less commitment than people who somehow found the money themselves so we have two pools of people people who didn't have enough money or enough incentive on their own but got into the voucher plan people who didn't have the money or incentive to send their kids to private school on their own applied for the voucher plan and were randomly turned down now it turns out that in the first and second years we don't see much change in the test scores for those kids who got into the private schools but in the third and fourth years we see significant improvement it's a new study from a professor at Harvard for the first time we really have what seems like a random experiment and the private schools do better and I would suggest that the reason there becomes the private schools do something different they have a sense of mission they have the autonomy to carry it out in the public schools on average there are I think five levels of bureaucracy between the teacher and the school board in the Catholic school system there's one level of bureaucracy between the teacher and the school board that's the principle and obviously in schools other than Catholic schools typically there's no bureaucracy it's the teacher and maybe the school has a board but it's a board only for that school so I think it's the autonomy and the sense of mission that a private school has parents go to that school because they like that school and if they don't approve of the way it teaches they don't go there that means the whole school community feels a sense of community and possession and commitment that you just don't get in public schools there's another reason as well I think in the private school teachers are more free to teach in 1960 there were fewer than a dozen federal regulations impacting the classroom today there's over a thousand teachers in government schools don't teach they're providing custodial care and a good deal of their time is just to spend in maintaining some kind of semblance of order this is why the average government school student gets about two minutes a day of personal attention and this is why I have four kids under 12 and we've adapted a child education strategy of doing it ourselves and keeping them away from these places one of the things you've passed over and you passed over a lot of things that I'm sure you'd love to have covered was the racial problem in modern day public schools and I'm speaking particularly of the famous issues of Richmond having to integrate with its surrounding counties of Boston, Massachusetts of New York City and so forth I'd be interested in knowing whether or not the private schools whether they be Catholic or Montessori whatever it is what have they done to advance or retard racial problems or just not appear at all in the problem versus the public school systems in other words coercive freedom or coercive attendance forces racial issues where freedom avoids those things all together well I think private schools are probably more integrated than public schools are because you had white families moving out of the cities for various reasons maybe racial and otherwise and going into districts which then tended to be largely white and leaving inner city districts as schools is largely black which then leads to this thing that you're referring to in Richmond where they want to integrate the out line counties with the city in order to undo what the parents themselves brought about by moving but lots of private schools are integrated have are racially mixed I'm for freedom I think parents ought to be able to make decisions about this I don't think that means that you're going to find in a free system just a series of all black and all white schools I just don't think that's the way things are going to work out but I'm willing to leave that up to the choices that parents are going to make for their children to help them well it does seem to maybe have fewer pitfalls than voucher under tax credit if you pay tuition for your child's education you would just get a what a straight dollar for dollar credit is that the sort of idea you're thinking of because you're relieving the state of the necessity to pay for the education for that child I think this idea is also floating around in California it does seem to have some advantages over vouchers except I can still see the door opening to to regulation and standards because the government could say well you only get the credit if it's a school we approve of or if your home school program is something we approve of well okay that's the idea that would be floated let's say by a libertarian but the question is how is it going to come through the mill the lawmaking mill once you've let the idea go it's sort of like a butterfly you're not going to determine where it goes and this is where I begin to get worried because it could end up piling on regulations not only on homeschoolers but on independent schools it does seem to maybe have less dangers than vouchers but I don't know I guess I'm still a little nervous by it I don't like to oppose tax credits I'm for anything that lets people keep their own money well right and one way around that in a proposal that was put on the ballot some years ago in Washington DC if someone educated pay for the education of another person's child he got the tax credit so you could have actually businesses providing for the private education alternative education of children and they get the credit and that was a way of bringing people in who weren't paying enough taxes to do it I was going to say one other thing about vouchers but I've now slipped my mind so I'll get back to it when I think of it well that's the public goods defense of government schools and there's a huge literature on this where people have economists and others have defended public schools on the grounds government schools on the grounds that there are spillover benefits to the society so why shouldn't the society pay for them in other words people who don't have kids pay for those benefits because they're getting something out of it and in a way that argument proves too much because in a society by definition is something is an arrangement where lots of things that people do have spillover benefits to people who haven't paid for those things I mean that's part of the definition of society seems to me we get benefits just by living in proximity to other people benefits that don't just come out of the direct exchange we make with people but just the fact that we're around other people and so once you go down that road you end up you could end up calling for tax support for lots of different things so it's an argument that has a very broad application if you're going to take it very seriously see the other part of that argument is in the case of a public good if you're not capturing money from the people that are getting benefits then it's going to be under that good is going to be under produced in terms of education what it means is people won't buy as much education in a private system because the larger group which is benefitting isn't paying for it so therefore why should I buy so much education David's going to benefit but he's not paying anything for it so therefore I'll buy less that strikes me as a pretty ridiculous argument I think people will buy the education they think they want for their kids without thinking that wait a second my neighbors are going to get some good out of this and they're not paying anything I can't imagine people thinking that way they're going to decide what education they want for their child and they're not going to be thinking of larger benefits the larger benefits are just going to be sort of a spontaneous effect from what people do in serving their own good so I really think it's a non-issue it's very well I think the argument is very well debunked by E.G. West in his book Education in the State a very good work long-standing work on this whole area and if you want if you want to read at any greater length a refutation of that argument I would refer you to him well I don't understand why you'd be concerned that unless we have a government run system we're not going to get trained and literate people I think he's asking I don't think I think there's a myth that this education is inherently expensive poor people were getting an education before government had a great deal of involvement in education before there was compulsory attendance it's true of England too West documents this poor people somehow were able to get their kids off the school where they learned to read and do arithmetic and learn something about the history of their country it's not inherently expensive now you might say well in the computer age certainly it's expensive but you know Apple and IBM and other companies work very hard to get their computers into schools at very low cost and they give them away very often because they want the kids to learn those systems so even even in the computer age where you think you might need a lot of technology in a school and that would increase the cost you're going to find the companies are going to be happy to give this stuff away or sell it very cheaply well I think Sheldon's answer would be that he wants to have a free market and you know in a free market you're allowed to go to any blockbuster any bookstore any park you want to but it's your problem to get there you don't have a system for doing that in a voucher plan that has been brought up as an objection well you know you'd still have to it would be hard to get there and so what about paying for transportation and so some voucher advocates have said okay we'll pay extra for transportation we'll give you transportation my view is that a voucher plan if you're going to have one should be as close to a free market as possible and so I would say listen where I grew up the closest private school would have been 25 miles away well voucher probably wouldn't have made much difference to most people in the town I grew up in not many people would have wanted to send their kids to the next town so okay people keep going to the public school if you keep it around but in Washington DC or New York City most people have a Catholic school in their neighborhood that's the Catholic Church has ensured that many people have some other school in their neighborhood there are public schools as Sheldon was saying they changed the boundaries your house didn't suddenly get farther away from you the school you'd been going to they changed the boundaries and said you have to go over there so that problem has always existed there have always been options and if people feel that the only convenient reasonable option is the public school that's nearest them then under a voucher plan it seems to me okay that's the one you go to otherwise your kids could ride the metro in the city buses like they do when they go to their after school jobs or when they go to the mall on the weekend or when they go grocery shopping I agree I thought yeah that's what I was hoping would come out of my remarks I agree with you I read somewhere that there was an individual who set up a school system and they used the students to train younger students and they had a monitor system and they served your company I think there was an article in the agreement about three or four years ago about that I vaguely remember it but I don't know any more than you killed us I believe that was called the Lancaster system and it was done in England for some time and I don't know the history as to why it was eliminated I mean one answer may be because the public system came along and squeezed it out as it did Dame's schools and some of the religious schools and lots of other things but well Jefferson while he was in favor of a government setting up education system was opposed to compulsory attendance there's a quotation from him I have my book and you can find it in lots of places where he says it's unconscionable to take a child away from his parents against the parents will so if you go to the Jefferson Memorial see quotations about public schooling about forcibly taking the child out of the home because he was against that now he was in favor of making literacy a requirement for citizenship even for people born here so he wanted to induce people into the schools that way but he was against using the power of the law to actually take the child away who actually made arguments against him I can't name any particular individual in the US against government schools because most of the critics were in England there was a sign of the Declaration of Independence besides Jefferson Benjamin Rush who was a very major advocate of government schools and went well beyond Jefferson it was Rush who said that we have to teach the child that he's public property, that he does not belong to himself and that he should forsake his family when the welfare of the nation requires it I never have uttered things like that but this was Rush who was also the father of American psychiatry if you want to see what he's got to say about psychiatry read the works of Thomas Zaw they're not complimentary but I can't I guess I could look at my book quickly the major figures that I studied in opposing public schools tended to be Englishmen not Americans I'm not sure there was a huge body of unless it was just sort of in the blood of the people that they didn't like the idea of government running schools I can't think of a major figure who I argued with Jefferson about that I don't know of anything like that the home schooling parents tend to be relatively well organized they have lots of newsletters and when something is cooking it gets around very quickly you might remember what was it 1995 maybe there was a provision in some bill that was being suggested that sounded like it was going to require that you couldn't home school unless you were certified I forget the actual details of this anyway Michael Farris' organization which is the home education defense legal defense association quickly put out the word this was a threat to home schoolers and congress got deluged the fax machines were jammed up it all happened very very quickly the internet of course facilitates all this too they went around very quickly and they ended up changing I think they took the provision out but I don't know of an effort of the nature that you're describing where they actually focus on a district well are you talking about affecting the public system yeah you know the teachers have had some training in how to deal with parents who come in and ask the wrong kinds of questions first of all they assume they're just fundamentalist christians and therefore part of the christian right the mold they put them in even though they may not be I mean they may be sort of left wing counterculture that their kids are being taught patriotism or something like that but nevertheless they immediately put them in a box and assume if you're asking too many questions about what's going on at school you must be part of the christian right yeah school systems try to compel people to not use home schooling try to compel people to not use vouchers they use public funds well the state of Oregon in 1948 passed a law prohibiting private schooling right schools were prohibited by law it was actually earlier it was in the 20's but it was a KKK inspired law which then led to the famous landmark Supreme Court case Jewish groups in New York City it stinks it's terrible they want to get out of it it gets back to the values issue that David was discussing the catholic system begins early on because the schools are essentially Protestant parochial schools see one of the things we don't understand about in the post 60 era we sort of forget that before the 60's the public schools are essentially Protestant schools there were Bible readings every day there was prayer but it was not catholic prayer it was not Jewish prayer it was Protestant because the system was essentially set up by a Protestant intellectual elite now when the elite changed to more secular relativist leanings that eventually led to the case in which the Supreme Court struck down prayer in the school but again to cite Marshall Fritz they didn't knock catholic prayer out of the public schools because catholic prayer wasn't there the only thing they knocked out was Protestant prayer in the late 19th century the catholics in I think New York and also Philadelphia asked whether their Bible could be used for the catholic kids in the public schools and they were told hell no they were basically just kicked out and there were actual riots some Protestants got upset that the catholic even asked this and burned some priests home for even having a temerity to suggest that the Bible something other than the King James translation be used because and some of the early public school textbooks would refer disparagingly to catholics as deceitful catholics and they'd use the term popery now I'm not a catholic but as I understand it that's not a complimentary term but that was not unknown that was not unknown and it upset the catholic so they went out and set up their own systems how many kids are there in public schools not counting higher education it's like 88% of kids in school I think it's around 42 million in public schools and 4.5 million in private speaking of the kids in public schools this work is very important for anyone who cares about kids this gentleman raises a very good point because these kids are in a draconian hell and I think what the government does best by the way in general is manufactured value of its people and this is part of that process but to try to rescue these kids if you love kids this is very very important I want to ask you he's saying he'd like to make a general investment and his kids are grown and I'm in the same position what is the most effective way to try to get these kids out of this hell well there are private scholarship organizations popping up sometimes known as private voucher systems one in DC, what is the national scholarship I think there's actually one called the Washington Scholarship Fund but the phone number is probably the national scholarship center and they raise money from business and private individuals and create and effect private vouchers but under their system the parents pay some because they want the parents to have a stake and you're sort of saying maybe it's the federal express wrap doing Anne and Ron to devotion money to even a good private school help it be great and that kind of thing there are different ways to go but I mean rather than a political solution if you're interested as this gentleman was suggesting and actually helping kids get educated a good education you could donate to an individual school where you could donate to one of these private voucher or scholarship programs and they help low income kids get out of public schools two or three more well obviously I'm in favor of getting rid of the compulsory compulsory attendance laws but that's not the whole story because you still have the compulsory financing it seems to me if you take away compulsory attendance lots of kids are still going to go there because the parents are going to want them to go to school and for most parents the public schools are a natural place to go they went there that's what they think of as school so they're not they haven't yet had their consciousness raised if I can put it that way as to what might be wrong with them but you haven't taken away the the key coercive element which is the money if you change if you deny them the taxing power then you've really made a radical change because then they have to attract people so I want to get rid of both of those just getting rid of the compulsory attendance I'm not sure it's going to have as big an effect as if you could get the money out of there let's take one more that's a good question I don't know of a study it sounds like something somebody should do Kato Institute something we should do it would make a very good study if your church is going it's encountered problems you ought to keep a keep a journal or something of them and then whoever does the study should be referred to you practically speaking I think what we can do most effectively the NEA seems to be the chief proponent for government schools they get the issue off the ballot most often and I think you find that it's a result of the fact that teachers who don't even support what the NEA is doing are paying for this political lobbying that they do and you find that the the most active teachers in the NEA are the ones that aren't doing a lot of teaching so how do we break the how do we break the NEA I mean that's really what the intermediate term goal should be that's a very good question there's a very good article about the NEA and the American Federation teachers I guess it's still the current issue of the American Enterprise magazine by Charlene Har the NEA has more political operatives than the Republicans and Democrats combined, the National Committees combined that statistic sort of blew me out of my chair and of course they have huge power in the state capitals they're very elaborate lobbying machines you're right they're going to stand in the way of any legislative changes there's no discussion you have to appeal directly to the public and hope you can sort of overwhelm them but I don't have a magic answer to that one that's going to be let me wrap it up my favorite way obviously is through the power of ideas I think there's an energy that goes into groups like this and seminars and discussion sessions and supper clubs there's a very real reason why totalitarian dictators try to shut down meetings like this they know the power of ideas and I believe that that's ultimately what's going to prevail when things surface through the political arena and the educational arena it's going to be because there's thousands and thousands of people like us all across the United States having meetings and lectures and seminars and things like this so I want to thank you let me give you some coming attractions all of you should have a copy of this on your chair if not there's some in the back but it's our upcoming schedule in two weeks we have Richard Ebeling from Hillsdale College who's also vice president for academic affairs for the future of freedom foundation as you know Hillsdale's model in the educational arena it takes no government funds and will not permit its students to take government grants so Richard's going to be talking to us about abolishing the Federal Reserve the following that in November Doug Bandow is going to talk about abolishing social security and then December I'll be talking about abolishing U.S. Customs and U.S. Immigration the case for unilateral free trade and open immigration as I say the theme of our talks is the untouchables now for those of you who wish to breathe some free air outside the Beltway on the reverse side is our supper club announcement the Vienna Coffee Club it is the only Austrian supper club that meets in Vienna every single month and next week we have James Bovard who's talking on the nature of the state giving benefits and breaking legs and then we have a very interesting topic on October 10th that we've never done before Victor Niederhofer is probably one of the most successful libertarians in the world he is very good friends of George Soros he runs a hedge fund in New York City and he's also the world champion squash player the guy's an absolute, not only just a hardcore libertarian but he's a genius and so he had the first ranking hedge fund in the country for the last three years and he's going to come down and give us a talk that he's prepared that doesn't really deal with libertarianism it's more of a fun kind of talk he's bringing a pianist from New York City bringing a sound system and they're going to do a show called A Music in Speculation there's going to be an overhead projector and it looks like a lot of fun he did it in London and it got a nice review in the Wall Street Journal Europe so that's going to be sort of out of the ordinary for the Vienna Coffee Club we return back to normal on November 7th with Charles Adams who wrote probably the best book ever on the history of taxation and the title of his talk is those dirty rotten taxes our journal Freedom Daily is available for subscription on the website, front cover it's $15 a year and it comes out monthly and finally the book separating school and state we have copies in the back I know some of you already took some they're not free these are free these are $15 each if you would, if you hope to take it home please come and give me the check or the cash if not please return it to the table and I think that wraps everything coming over from Cato and giving us thanks Sheldon for another great talk and thank you and we'll hope to see you two weeks from now