Here is a letter I recently wrote: Dear Concerned Leftist, I write to you in response to your concerns with regard to deregulating the business of educating children and ceasing to provide it publicly altogether. First, I assume you would agree that the education system at the moment is anything but effective. According to a study done by the US Department of Education and National Institute for Literacy in April 2013 19% of high-school graduates couldnt read. Could. Not. Read. I understand your answer to this is simply that the government needs to do a better job, and that if we could just vote for better policies the problem would be solved, but more on that idea later, for now lets acknowledge that as it stands, the effectiveness of the education system is akin to toilet-paper raincoats. Now, if you are going to forcibly extract money from people to pay for the education of others you better be damn sure that the education youre providing is bullet-proof, both in the sense of it producing educated and useful individuals who are prepared for the real world and non-shot living ones. In fact, youre morally obligated to make certain that the education youre forcibly providing is gaurenteed to substantially benefit its recipients. However, theres no way you can know for sure the best way to educate people, and theres plenty of evidence to suggest that the current system is doing a shitty job. Once you enforce a system you reduce incentives for the people who run and profit from that system to do a very good job. Why? Because theres no incentive for others to offer an alternative to schooling - youve made it illegal. Youve made the business of educating children a systematic monopoly. Kids are forced to go to school by virtue of no real alternative. Kids are forced to learn formulas that they will almost certainly never use later in life. Your opinions rest on the fact that you think education as we currently do it is the best way, the only conceivable way and your endorsing of its enforcement removes incentives for creative individuals to offer different methods of preparing kids for the real world. Its also key to recognise that theres no real reason to think that government education is going to get any better. Simply because the massive amounts of time and effort a voter has to invest in careful research and analysis not only to figure out which methods of education and schooling are optimal but which politicians best support them isnt worth it. Why? Because he/she knows that their vote is going to have next to zero influence on educational policy. The result? People dont really care too much about the details of education. Instead we send our kids to the local state school, tell them to do their homework, work hard, obey their teachers and we dont think twice about it. Instead we tell ourselves that if education was disconnected from government influence then poor people wont get educated and this will have terrible consequences on the economy. Of course, this isnt because we actually think it will have terrible consequences on the economy as much as it is the fact we cant bear the inherent unfairness of the poor going uneducated, despite the fact you can get a tertiary level education for $2.50 in overdue fees at your local library and can YouTube almost anything. So we vote for public education in utter ignorance of what were really doing. We vote for public education because we think were making the world a better place by doing so, even though we have no idea what were actually voting for; we simply know that were good people for doing so. We dont question the effectiveness of government schools, or even schooling in general because we have an irrational belief that the government has it covered, because the government only wants what is best for us, that its there to protect us from the atrocities that may arise from free-market mechanisms. I humbly request, concerned Leftist, that we stop playing God. That we take the mighty step towards admitting that we dont know how things ought to be done, and that perhaps the combined genius of greedy entrepreneurs that gave us the rapidly improving modern luxuries we often take for granted might be able to come up with something better than the stagnated illiteracy rates your system has perpetuated for the last decade. Sincerely, Crazed Libertarian
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 09:03:52 +0000
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