The debate over Public and Private schools is a fierce one, with passionate proponents on each side. Some of the arguments that can be heard through the fray have their merits but in many cases prove fallacious. Unfortunately the high demand for education makes it a highly sought after source of drawing funds hence the introduction of the state into education.
Taxpayers in the Unites States pay billions of dollars per year toward what has largely been accepted as a failing education system, with control culminating at the Department of Education in Washington D.C. Public schools are governed by the mandates of the state, and as the state becomes increasingly centralized in Washington, so too does control over education. As a result, instead of a cornucopia of private schools, each catering to the specific desires of the parents and students, there is a monolith in education, and this can have its downsides as we have seen. One of the major problems with centralization of control over education is the propensity of the state to unification. Its goal is to create education policy for the entire country to follow. It treats the country; each state, city and community, right down to each individual child in a uniform way so that it ignores the individuating circumstances of each. One size, often, does not fit all. When they fail, they fail big and every child subject to the public school system is worse off because of the poor policy making in Washington. The state claims that its role in education is to create a strong society. Whatever they believe society is, certainly it’s absurd to claim that it is helped by exposing it to generations of miseducated youths, who have had their most important years for acquiring information and learning to think squandered by distant law makers whose primary focus is pandering to interest groups. Herein lays another of the major problems with public education. It is subject to the political whims of the masses, or more importantly the unions, the corporations, and the world changers who would use the state to propagate their ideologies to unsuspecting children and parents. I am not making the claim that these groups wish to purposefully destroy the education of our children; only that policy has a strange way of being shaped by these sorts of people and further, when failures occur and it becomes clear that changes are necessary; they are always slow in coming because of those invested parties.
Conversely, private schools often lack this impediment to change. The primary purpose of the private school is to turn a profit. Yes, that’s right. They want to profit off the education of our children; much in the same way Nike wants to profit by providing us with shoes. In either case, the private business understands that the only way to profit is to satisfy the customer with a good or service that he desires. Maximizing profits means being willing to change when necessary to meet those desires, so that in education, if something seems to be failing, it behooves the private school to alter course immediately to retain its customers, irrespective of what the staff, who stand to lose their livelihoods by the changes, may want. If it does not alter course it will lose customers and go out of business, and rightly so. The market helps to cleanse the system and voting with our dollars has greater power to effect change than does pulling a lever every few years.
Unfortunately, many private schools are still governed by the state. It’s a strange relationship the state has with private schools. It uses its monopoly on force to compel its competitors to meet its arbitrary requirements which in many cases may impede the ability of the private school to deliver services to its customers in the best way it sees fit. I’m sure this isn’t the intent…I’m sure. Nevertheless, private schools have retained a modicum of autonomy and are probably better suited to offer our children the sorts of specialized education we want…that is, if we can afford it.
Private schools have their downsides too. One of the greatest barriers to private education for the poor and middleclass (does that still exist?) is that private education tends to be more expensive than Public education, after all public education is “free”…well, not exactly free but the costs are shared with the “society” so that the burden of educating our own children no longer falls squarely on our own shoulders. We can rely on our next door neighbor to pay his “fair share” in educating our children, whether he wants to or not. The public school system makes sure of that. Unfortunately for the private school, it has to rely on voluntary payments from parents, while competing against the state system with its unlimited resources. The state has the ability to bid up the wages on teachers, and supplies while externalizing the costs. The private school does not. Let it not be forgotten, that they are not only competing in the education market, but more generally, like each of us, they are competing in the market for resources. These are factors in the high price of private education, and would be mitigated if public school disappeared altogether, or at the very least if they were subject to greater competition.
