Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Providing schooling

This expands a comment I made here.


The dominant purpose of providing schooling is to control belief formation (pdf). That is why the biggest competitors to the state in school provision are religious bodies.

Progressivists generally want to control belief formation as much as possible, which is why they tend to hate private provision and parental choice in schooling. That is the great political bargain: the teacher unions protect and expand the privileges of their members while organising for those "goodies" on the basis of a set of beliefs that channels networking: both within the unions and in their wider political coalition building. So the bargain is—we will promote a shared belief set and you will support our monopolising rorts. Student vouchers are SO not helpful to that.

When parents pay for schooling (either directly or by choosing where to live), one of their biggest issues is controlling who sits "next to" their child. That is, whether kids in the classroom will help or frustrate their child's learning. Hence private schools and universities provide scholarships. Hence also suburban voters not liking vouchers. You spend the premium to buy a house in a "good school" area and the government then pays to ghetto kids turn up: this was not what you were buying.

So vouchers conflict with the interests of teachers, progressive politics and suburban parents. The surprising thing is not that vouchers have encountered much resistance but that there are any voucher programs at all.

BTW The notion that provision of government schooling promotes equality or social mixing is bunkum. Government schooling stratifies by the catchment area and ability to work the political process. (As someone who teaches in lots of schools in Melbourne, private schools are at least as ethnically mixed as government schools, for example.) Indeed, one study found that private schools were more socially racially integrated than government schools.

My original comment prompted a responding comment from economist Scott Sumner:
In my town people are strongly opposed to religion in the public schools, but then allow the schools to go out and indoctrinate students in socialism, feminism and environmentalism. Just to be clear I think the schools should cover economics, gender, and the environment. But it would be nice to have more than one point of view.
Yes, quite, because it is all about controlling the socializing of belief. Those opposed to private schooling want to eliminate rival belief sets in education.

That the new UK Government is making it a lot easier to set up new schools is certainly a positive move. But there is still the deeper problem that, with government schooling, the main provider (government) is also the regulator, a massive and pervasive conflict of interest that afflicts both government and private schooling.

The claim is that government schooling is citizen controlled, which is largely nonsense. Private schooling gives parents more control, more effective say, which is why there is a surge in private schooling in some of the poorest regions of the world, where education opportunities matter most. Government schooling is like public sector activity generally, it is controlled by those who control the relevant attributes: officials and others in the public sector. Having the main provider also be the regulator makes that more so, not less.

If the head of a football club offered to take over the entire football code: set the rules, appoint the umpires while still competing in the code, people would treat the proposal with the derision it would deserve. But that is precisely the way most children are educated. What is obvious nonsense for a sporting code is no less nonsense for schooling. One might be tempted to say we care more about our sport than the schooling of our children, but it is more the case that “democratic accountability” is waved as a magic wand to boost confidence that Ministers for Education and Education bureaucrats are, somehow, magical and “rise above” the conflict of interest.

No, they don’t. Taking a good hard look at the perennial problems of government schooling shows that they don’t.

6 comments:

  1. Hello, I recently discovered your blog from a link at Michael Totten's blog, and I find it extremely interesting. You are quite the renaissance man, apparently.

    You make some very good points about this subject. But here is my problem. Let's face it, there is a reason that the state wants an ideological monopoly on the way children are brought up. That's how the modern nation state was formed, when the state started having increasing influence on the history, language and sense of self of its citizens.

    I live in Israel where there are several sectors that have very different ideas about how to educate their children -- ultra-religious (of varying denominations, religious, settlers-religious, secular, left wing secular and Arabs. Some of these groups have their own school systems, although all are payed by the government.

    Many Israelis feel that this results in an increasingly fragmented society that has little in common and is in fact competing with each other, while at the same time there is resentment that the taxpayer pays for these very different ideologies. While other ideological factions in Israeli society seek to increase their influence on their sectors by making their school systems as independent as possible.

    So there seems to be a certain risk to privatizing the education of future citizens.

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  2. That's how the modern nation state was formed, when the state started having increasing influence on the history, language and sense of self of its citizens.
    State provision of education tended to follow state-building rather than proceed it. But nation building has certainly been a prime aspect: notoriously so in the US whose public schools were very much about turning out little Americans.

    Conscription was also a prime nation-building process too, of course. But, as I understand it, Arab-Israelis and haredi Jews are exempted from conscription.

    Could the Israeli state even impose and maintain a monopoly on school provision? Or would a better option be to have an unencumbered regulator able to insist on certain basic standards?

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  3. [i]State provision of education tended to follow state-building rather than proceed it. But nation building has certainly been a prime aspect: notoriously so in the US whose public schools were very much about turning out little Americans.[/i]

    Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

    [i]Conscription was also a prime nation-building process too, of course. But, as I understand it, Arab-Israelis and haredi Jews are exempted from conscription.[/i]

    Yes, most don't, some do. It's part of the same thing in a way, since the army comes immediately after high school, it's a little like college in the process of bringing up an Israeli. It's a cause of mutual resentment in Israeli society. On the other hand right wing factions like the settlers tend to emphasize the fact that they educate their children to go to elite units while secular schools in liberal areas tend to bring up children who are viewed (only partially with justice) as less inclined to serve or volunteer to elite units.

    Political parties who inherited a left-wing hostility toward religion have used this issue to attack ultra-orthodox, while secular right wing parties use the fact that Arabs don't serve in order to attack them.

    There have been semi-successful attempts to get a handful of ultra-orthodox to serve. This involves the army accommodating them in many ways, but here are results.

    There are Arabs who serve -- the Druze, some Bedouin, others on an individual basis. One idea that has been attempted was to offer Arabs the option of some kind of community service in their own communities (which is what religious girls do). Some Arabs are interested but Arab leadership view this with hostility, since they view the state itself with hostility.

    [i]Could the Israeli state even impose and maintain a monopoly on school provision? Or would a better option be to have an unencumbered regulator able to insist on certain basic standards? [/i]

    The government does control Arab schools (and is resented for it), it has little control over ultra-orthodox schools. The idea you suggest seems the most sensible. The political sphere has this idea floating around, but it is unlikely that Israel could actually impose even that, or that here will be the political will to do so.

    I was interested what this all means from a wider historical, philosophical point of view. It's easy to get so caught up in one's own problems and lose that point of view.

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  4. Your comment is informative and thoughtful, thank you. In the first flush of establishing a government school system, it can work quite well. The problem is the on-going dynamics of public provision: to put it another way, the pathologies tend to mount over time.

    PS You need round brackets () not square brackets for font markers. Computers work according to syntactic manipulations, so such differences make all the difference.

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  5. Thanks.

    On the same subject, have you read about the attempts of the Texas school board to change the curriculum? And have you read "The Tea Party Jacobins" in the New York Review of Books?

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false

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  6. I had read the "How Christian were the Founders" piece, but had not kept up on the Texan School Board controversy. Analytically, it is just following the logic of government provision of schooling. Personal response: so over-the-top it is bound to be counterproductive.

    I find anything by Mark Lilla to be worth reading, so thanks for the link. I think he overstates the effectiveness of broad government action, particularly in such a diverse country as the US (i.e. there are rational grounds to be sceptical of Federal regulation and provision), but it is a highly perceptive analysis overall.

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