Why is it that when failures are found in the public school system there is a loud cry for for more of the same, whereas the potential failures of a free enterprise system brings its complete dismissal? It's an unfair double standard. As long as education by bureaucracy demands to be the center of everyone's attention, how will we ever know what our true potential might be?

I found myself recently confronted with yet another "well obviously" conversation. This one began with "Well obviously you have to have the government provide education." After trying for some time to explain why I think there's more to it that that, our conversation attracted some other people and soon I was out numbered and presented with the following facts to demonstrate why we should continue to support government schools.

• Public education is just fine for most people. Kids go to school, and they learn. There's no big crisis, so why tear down something that's working?
• We do have free market education. It's called private schools. If you can't or don't want to spend the extra money, public education will provide. Meanwhile, anyone who wants to spend extra can go to a private school, but don't get rid of the public schools because then the poor kids would end up with nothing.
• Not only is it important that we educate our children, it is good that we have some standardization and a shared experience. Without standards, we might have religious people never mentioning Darwin, or groups teaching that the mixing of races is bad. Public education makes it less likely that we will have schools churning out zelots and hate mongers.

As with so many issues there is no simple demarkation between right and wrong, and getting to the root of the issues often takes people well past the issue at hand into deeper, more fundamental issues of freedom and rights and opportunity, which is too often wrongly dismissed as being utopian rather than pragmatic.

I found myself unable to answer these issues adequately at the time, and as the conversation drifted away I again felt that the only thing I had accomplished was to create another episode that allowed them to label Libertarians as "those folks with the waky ideas."

But this time things were a little different because I was able to take up the matter with the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, David Boaz, during a question period after a speech he gave at the local University. His answer, and other things he said that night, along with having extra time to gather and organize my thoughts, has encouraged me to finally answer those points listed above.

* * *

I went to public school, as did most everyone I know, and I'm sure I turned out just fine. I think this experience is true for most people I know, but that's probably because most people I know grew up in an affluent suburb. Sure, if someone is going to a public school in a decent neighborhood, say a small college town with a lot of school funding, then sure, the education is probably pretty good.

But consider for a moment what would happen if we insisted that the government provide our cars and we didn't have any experience with what we have now. We would probably say that, overall, the cars were pretty good. We probably wouldn't have three big auto makers working hard for our dollars, giving us features such as anti-lock brakes, in-dash CD players, ski racks, electric windows and doors, and a size and model and color for every taste. We certainly wouldn't have very many luxury cars — or if we did they would only be available to wealthy neighborhoods with high property taxes. We would end up with cars that were — pretty much — ok.

Our parents and grand parents were probably happy enough when the phone company was a single, government regulated monopoly. You picked up a phone, heard the dial tone, spun the dial six or seven times, and you could talk to Grandma. It's all we really needed. But today I like having call waiting, answering machines, cellular phones, beepers, fax machines, computer modems, voice mail, three way calling, and other services that have appeared through a market that is allowed to innovate and offer its services to me.

And while most schools may be adequate, some neighborhoods are not so lucky. Some public schools have a really tough time just managing the basics. To me it seems that suggesting that poor schools would be better off with more government help is kind of like telling the man in the old Soviet bread line that what we need is more government involvement in the baking of bread.

There's no grand crisis, no impending disaster, but does seem to be a sort of celebration of the good enough. Public education across the nation is usually adequate, with some schools barely making it at the low end and a few really good ones a the high end.

To say that this is sufficient for the vast majority of parents may be true, but it misses the point. Radios and tape players in our cars are not strictly necessary, and without them our cars would still serve their fundamental purpose of transportation. If we had government supplied cars, and they came with no options, then we could just as well say let the rich people buy stereos, but our cars are just fine so there's no need to allow other car manufactures to compete on a level playing field.

While it is true that government schools are not an actual monopoly, public education is nonetheless effectivly monopolistic. It's not impossible to find alternate education, but for most people, public school is simply a way of life. It's there, and so there's no immediate need to go looking for something special. We end up with adequate or less, and once in a rare while, very good.

There are other examples of social elements that have been pushed aside and left up to the government. Saving for retirement was once something we took care of ourselves, either by finding a company with a good pension plan or by saving. Clubs like the Elks and Kiwanis once upon a time provided its members with a variety of services from unemployment insurance to retirement plans. Now they are little more than places to meet business contacts. Churches and community organizations provided effective help, and because we didn't have a government run safety net, people contributed to help the poor, and they were able to select organizations that really helped rather than squander or waste their donations. We used to expect men to stay with their family and children. Now young women know that getting pregnant is a quick way to get some money and move out of their mom's house.

With good intentions, public institutions moved in and began replacing the traditional support systems that bound us together, becoming the husband to unwed mothers, clothers of the poor, healers of the sick, and teachers of our children.

The problem isn't with the intent, which, after all, is to help people. The problem is that when the government moves in, it displaces other alternatives. Sometimes what it displaces are fundamental values such as responsibility, frugality, fidelity, sobriety. These were the things one had to rely on because giving them up meant peril. Now giving them up simply leads to inconvenience. Why save if everyone get's a free government retirement check? Why stay off drugs if we have free health care waiting for us when getting high isn't fun anymore? Why volunteer at the Y or donate to The United Way when we have government services to do our charity for us? Why keep a family together when there's money for staying apart? And finally, why shop around for a good school when there's one that's probably good enough that will be selected for you?

The government, because it has the power to collect and redistribute money, is the 900 pound gorilla. When it steps into the ring, it's pretty much running the show. Because it has the power to confiscate as much money as it wants, it becomes the instant default just by getting involved. When we accept that move, we validate the displacement of other institutions that previously kept families and communities working on their own.

What free market we do have in education is in spite of, not in partnership with, public education. We also still have private charities and private retirement plans, and some families still actually stay together. But when we do this, we have to show an extra initiative and spend even more of our money. The general idea is that we don't really have to because we are expected to simply roll over, stop trying, and be taken care of.

When government moves in, it becomes the default. To say that most people go to public schools is not to say that most people would prefer to go to public schools. It simply says that when presented with a system that is designed as a universal solution, even a system that is merely adequate or below, it's vastly easier to just fall into step, get your shots, show up, and sit at your desk.

We seem to have convinced ourselves that selecting a school for a child is some sort of magic task beyond the capability of the average adult. Yet every day parents have to make decisions when they select baby sitters and day care, or when they select a doctor. Making these decisions is what it means to be a parent, or at least it used to. So when it comes to perhaps the most important decision, we imagine that having a totally free market in education is beyond either the capabilities or the interest of the average parent, when exactly the opposite is true. When provided with any sort of choice, parents scramble to be a part of it. Magnet schools that provide special art training, or a back to basics curriculum cause such a demand that schools have to hold auditions or lotteries. People will camp out hoping to be first in line to get their child into the school they want.

The reason we don't have more private schools offering these services is not from a lack of a demand. Parents clearly become involved and even excited when they have choice, even limited choice. The reason comes from the fact that, simply by being there, public schools have overwhelmingly become the default choice. What choice we do have in the form of private schools is therefore reserved only for the wealthy, because an average private school simply could not compete with an agency that can just take as much money as it wants from the population at large. If we only had government cars and one Lexus dealer, the fact that most people would drive government cars doesn't mean that they wouldn't rather be driving Neons, or Saturns, or Hondas. Yet the people driving their government car might claim that they can get where they're going, so it's good enough.

Another benefit that people perceive is that public schools attempt to provide a common baseline, a shared experience, and a standard education for everyone. Yet despite forced integration, and programs that bus kids around to maximize some demographic, poor public schools still tend to be populated by poor kids and wealthy public schools are still filled with middle and upper class kids.

Where is the common experience when students in school A have to deal with crowded classrooms, high teacher turnover, drugs, and antique equipment while students in school B have internet access, a chemistry lab and a swimming pool? For that matter, where's the common experience of students in a small farm town in Montana and students in a school in South Central L.A.?

Something that I learned from David Boez's answer to this was that private schools tend to be better integrated racially and economically than public schools in a given area. Private schools, not the public schools, end up with a greater diversity of the population, a better melting pot. Because public school is the default choice, and because schools are funded with regionally collected taxes, government run schools tend to reflect the economic and racial makeup of the community, whereas private schools attract students with shared educational or religious goals regardless of their race or specific income level.

Any notion that there is a consistent level of study or a common experience from one public school to the next is close to fantasy. Even if we did have a universal curriculum, how important is it really that everyone dissect the same worm or study the same values in health class? The type of common experience that comes from public school is the same type of common experience that comes from surviving boot camp or working together on an assembly line. Both have valuable roles in our society, but they're not the best models for schools.

Why not expect that, rather than sharing a particular style of education or even a particular course of study, the common experience of education could be the discovery of the world in a way that touches us, inspires us, and elevates us all?

Sure, what we've got is, for the most part, good enough. But is this really the best we can expect, and shouldn't we allow ourselves to do our best considering the high-tech, global challenges we will be faced with in the next few generations?

We must accept the ugly reality that returning the responsibility of education to parents means that some parents will drop the ball by selecting a bad school or a school that teaches things that make some people uncomfortable. Some parents might forget about school altogether. We can always imagine some extreme cases, but when we look at the extreme cases of the current system we can see just as many failures. The current system includes its share of parents that don't care, kids that drop out, teachers who do more harm than good, violence, drugs, low test scores. If what we want to do is find the worst extreme in any system and use that to invalidate the rest, then why do we ignore the extremes that can come from mismanagement, lack of funding, lack of choice, and low technology that can be found among the nation's public schools? These inadequacies invariably are used as a call for more of the same tired, government solutions, while inadequacies of a free system are used to shut down any opportunity for success.

It's an unfair double standard. For some reason we are willing to abandon really good, innovative, exciting education for a lot of kids because we fear that the failures of a system based on freedom, choice, and responsibility will be so much worse than the failures we see today.

It's true that for a large majority of kids school works pretty well, and it will continue to work pretty well as long as the 900 pound gorilla is stomping around as the big default choice. There will be little incentive and a pretty high price tag for moving beyond that. But is this enough of a reason to turn our backs on finding new ways to handle education for this high-tech, fast moving world?

When I say I think schools that are offered as a service in an open market would be better than the public schools we have now, I'm not saying that there's some big crisis or that what we have is so bad it must be thrown out. I simply mean that we should allow our children to discover the educational equivalent of steel-belted tires, high-speed modems, cruise control, caller-id, anti-lock brakes, and car phones rather than trying to move into the high-tech, connected, computerized, and competitive world of tomorrow with a nation-wide system of education that is, at best, usually adequate.

:^D