Mandatory Schooling, Remote Learning, and Government Schools

From the New York Times: When school is voluntary by David Leonhardt:

More than a century ago, U.S. states put in place laws requiring that children attend school. The guiding principle was that school mattered too much to children’s lives to be a matter of individual choice.

My emphasis. This is an interesting comment. It begs the question, “What is the primary purpose of education?” I say it’s to teach the child to think critically and independently so as to prepare the child to make her own individual choices throughout their adult lives. Apparently, that is not the goal of the advocates of compulsory school laws.]

Helping on the family farm or getting a paid job was not a good enough excuse to drop out. Nor was parental convenience or preference. And students could not leave school simply because they wanted to.

Mandatory schooling laws did an enormous amount of good. They increased high school graduation rates and the share of students who attended college, as research by the economists Derek Messacar and Philip Oreopoulos has found. The extra schooling, in turn, lifted future earnings and reduced future unemployment.

Note that government schools are not mentioned. Also, mandatory schooling is a vague term. Parents do have a moral obligation to educate. If they don’t -- e.g., if a child can’t read at age 10 -- child neglect laws have a valid place. So it’s how you define mandatory schooling that is the crux of the matter. Mandatory schooling doesn’t have to involve government schools. Nor should it be legally mandated.

But the idea that mandatory schooling laws did an enormous amount of good is a vast overstatement, especially when coupled with government schooling. It can be argued that it has done more harm than good, given that most kids are funnelled into Progressive government schools. 

The problem with remote school is that children learn vastly less than they do in person, according to a wide range of data about the past year and a half.

Remote schooling, a la COVID measures, is not the same as homeschooling. Homeschooling is widely recognized as a superior education. Of course, most parents don’t have the wherewithal or motivation to homeschool, which for serious parents is a career in and of itself. Remote schooling is a watered down version of in-school education. But it is important at this point to stress that homeschooling is also in-person, and it is not remote learning. 

So, if we’re talking about remote—that is, on-line—learning, the article may have a point. On-line courses have their place, I’m sure. But on-line probably shouldn’t be the core of education.

But I think the implication expected to be drawn from this article is that mandatory in-person government schooling is the only avenue to an educated population. Well, we’ve had that for a century, and the results can only be considered mixed at best and a failure at worst. Literacy is still not universal. Math proficiency is poor. And battles over curriculum and/or education philosophy are routine because of dictatorial school boards and the monopolistic power of the teachers union. Socialist central planning that empowers governments, local, state, or federal, to impose one-size-fits-all policies on everyone leads to constant battles, such as the current civil war over the teaching of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, as well as the ever-present friction over religion, like “intelligent design” vs. evolution, in the government schools. 

The problem is, we all don’t agree on what education means. To Progressives, it means training children to prioritize group authority and emotions over objective thinking. To others it means independent, reality-oriented thinking over conformity to the group. 

Of course, how we define “individual choice” also matters. If we’re talking about children’s choice, of course they shouldn’t be allowed to just drop out. But individual parental choice is another matter entirely. Parental school choice is exactly what we need, on a universal scale. The quality and diversity of education options would abound, as educators would have to compete to persuade parents to voluntarily pay for their service and voluntarily send their children to their schools and accept their methods and curriculums. Ideally, a complete separation of education and state, where the state neither pays for, administers, or regulates education,is what a fully free society should have. But, politically, it’s too soon to advocate for an end to “free”—tax-funded—education in the short to intermediate term. But it’s not too soon to transition to a system in which education tax dollars follow the student, whether through properly structured tax credits or by having the per-pupil cost of public schooling follow the student (Education Savings Accounts), and to fight for full privatization of school administration, whether charter schools, homeschooling, and secular or religiously run schools. 

Yes, children should attend school. But individual choice—parental choice—not mandatory submission to top-down dictated bureaucratic choice, should be the means. After all, as Milton Friiedman correctly observed, “Not all 'schooling' is 'education,' and not all 'education' is 'schooling'.” Only a free market can sort that out, and is the only chance to arrive at the best results.

Related Reading:

The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard

Compulsory Schooling Laws: What if We Didn't Have Them?

Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of schooling on education.

The Myth that Americans Were Poorly Educated before Mass Government Schooling 

Early America had widespread literacy and a vibrant culture of learning.

93 Vermont Towns Have No Public Schools, But Great Education. How Do They Do It?

Chris Christie’s School Choice Achievement.

A Newark, NJ Mother Demonstrates the Educational Power of Parental School Choice

Related Viewing:

The Assault on Homeschooling and Freedom in Education by ARI