The marketplace of ideas

The trouble started early
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The debate over the exact purpose for schools started early. Very early, in fact: Plato’s Republic was an early proposal for meritocracy – in which all are given an equal chance to advance themselves – “each generation is trained in music and gymnastics, and after this education the most talented are selected for further education as guardians. The most talented guardians are educated to be philosopher-kings.”[1]

Thomas Jefferson shared that view – absent what would by then be the eccentrics. His 1779 Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge proposed three years of education for non-slave children. The most talented were to be sent on to regional grammar schools and from their ranks, the best for further education. Horace Mann, acclaimed as America’s “greatest educational leader,” feared that crime and conflict would lead to “violence and mob rule.”[2] It would be best then to teach the common values of maintaining political order.

Two-centuries on, Mann has appeared to have won out. Schools must educate future citizens – and with it indoctrinate them with patriotism and loyalty. The result are “boring” textbooks devoid of controversy – or wrong, but almost certainly filled with mistakes, as James W. Loewen writes in his critically acclaimed, Lies My Teacher Told Me. [3]

Yet, Mann’s victory is not complete - the sheer skepticism of government would point to that. More fundamentally, Mann’s dream of socialization (mixing students of different social backgrounds to reduce tensions) will not win out precisely because it cannot.[4] Such advocacy of schooling as social control is terribly misguided as it lacks any mean for progress.

Paul Houston, an American Association of School Administrators director, is unwisely supercilious in his thunderously asking, “How can systems based on individual or subgroup goals and values promote a broader common good?”[5] This mindset is as scandalously socialist as it is piercingly telling. The greatest irony is that America, defender of liberal markets, is the keeper of illiberal schooling.

Meritocracy is the framework from which innovation and progress is achieved when individuals are offered the equal opportunity to pursue their own interests. It seems that Mann has brought about a two-hundred year odyssey focused irredeemably on an impossible pursuit. Thomas Jefferson was quite sure that an enlightened citizenry could prosper solely on the ability to read and choice of newspaper guaranteed by freedom of press and “marketplace of ideas.”[6] It is this fundamental fallacy that has made for the most damning of errors: schools’ lack of substantive ends has failed to provide a vibrant, enabling education.

A meritocracy depends on equality of opportunity – not through a compulsory, “common” education. Educational meritocracy – undoubtedly analogous to capitalism – is solely a framework in which diverse schools of thought compete to develop persons successful relative to their own interests and abilities. As a result, students are drawn to the philosophy and techniques that best allows them to realize their potential to the betterment of all, in turn analogous to capitalism’s theory of comparative advantage. As capitalism’s quantum element is capital, educational meritocracy’s is that of skill – the ability to read, write, analyze, manipulate, and conceptualize – brought about through exposure serves as the groundwork for intellectual development, whether it should be in the arts or physics.

A market that depends so fully on individuals pursuing their own interests must not be crippled by an education system that views individuals as no more than part of an undifferentiated mass – ironically, the same qualification of Mann’s feared mob. Undifferentiated students make for educational inflation in which the “educational requirements of jobs increase while the actual skills required for the jobs do not change.”[7]

A rereading of Adam Smith can answer Mr. Houston:

The individual “generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. … By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” After all, it is no secret that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”[8]

Yet, this paper is in agreement with the many who look unfavorably upon schools reform in the interest of business. Education must be in the interest of the child – and this as the center for debate about reform. Where this paper distinguishes itself from these critics is in its belief that school choice can succeed in achieving education in the interest of the child, not proximate or ultimate business interests. Whereas Jonathan Kozol views vouchers as a threat to democratic education that is “more dangerous than ever,” it is more precisely “for-profit” privatization that this paper does not support.

“Business partnerships” between schools, which Kozol describes as schools where:

Principals I met in schools like these would tell me they wished no longer to be known as "principals" but preferred to be known as "Building CEOs" or "Building Managers", in which cases their teachers frequently would be described as "classroom managers". Mission statements heralding the need for children to be trained to serve our nation's interests in "the global marketplace" were posted on the walls of many schools I visited. In practice, however, students were more often being trained for careers at supermarket checkout counters or for the bottom level "service jobs" at nursing homes.[9]

The practice is an indefensible sham, but “building managers” and supermarket clerks are not the aim of this paper, or those genuinely passionate about schools autonomy. It is restoring the promise of education to the teacher, the parent, and child that is the heart of this paper, and its proposals are stridently consistent with an enlightened democratic interest. What Kozol describes is terribly misguided, but it is not the reality conducive to necessitating the distinguishing and properly advocating for freedom of choice separate from profit against the public trust is feasible. True choice and real autonomy can transcend this unreality to embrace progress.

Even Marx could agree that history “is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”

[1] The political purposes of schooling. American Education. Tenth Edition. Joel Spring. McGraw Hill. 2002.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lies My History Teacher Told Me. James W. Loewen. Touchstone. 1995.
[4] The political purposes of schooling. American Education. Page 8.
[5] Time to Re-Public the Republic. Paul D. Houston. The School Administrator. September 2003. http://tinyurl.com/366t9h.
[6] Ibid. Page 7.
[7] The social purposes of schooling. American Education. Tenth Edition. Joel Spring. Page 13.
[8] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith. Text available through Project Gutenberg – http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3300.
[9] The Big Enchilada. Jonathan Kozol. Harper’s Magazine Notebook. August 2007.