Homeschooling: a Libertarian Education?

        While libertarian philosophers may think that they have found their archenemies in American government and politics, the essential roots of libertarianism are already planted and spreading in the area of education within the American system. An examination of the modern homeschooling movement shows strong libertarian leanings, even if homeschoolers would not identify themselves as libertarian in philosophy. Furthermore, the way homeschooling could transform America through the economic repercussions of widespread homeschooling – such as if became the only form of education in America – should give even the most downcast libertarians hope. Let us now look at what public education currently looks like and what its problems are, why public schools exist at all, discover what causes homeschooling to look so much like a  libertarian education, then how this kind of education could affect the American economy as a whole if it was implemented.  

When Milton Friedman was writing in 1980, the state of the public schools was very bad. According to his research published in Free to Choose, “Parents complain about the declining quality of the schooling their children receive … Teachers complain that the atmosphere in which they are required to teach is often not conducive to learning … Taxpayers complain about growing costs.”[1] The situation has not improved in recent years. As reported by CollegeBoard an agency that administers the SAT to thousands of students every year, the overall test scores have risen 7 points in Mathematics, while dropping 29 points in Critical Reading since 1972[2] – a trend that is not altogether encouraging, especially considering the developments in technology whose purpose is to improve education. It is to be expected that the purpose and goal of schools is that their students get a good education. There is nothing out of order with a public school desiring good grades from its students, and still less reason why the federal government would want to have their citizens perform badly. Indeed, as academics are one of the ways a government shows the prowess of its citizens, there is every reason to believe that a government would actually be in favor of helping its citizens to do the best they possibly can. Why then, if homeschooling is actually such a good alternative, do American public schools exist at all?

This is not to say that the public schools do not try to acknowledge areas of strength and weakness; certainly that is what Advanced Placement and Special Education classes are for. However, it is one thing for a teacher to say that a child is good at English and assign increased reading requirements. It is something different entirely to realize that this child could do quite well writing novels, or going to trials and practicing writing legal arguments, or researching and writing for Wikipedia, and then helping that child to excel as an individual. Tutoring children who struggle in their schooling is also a commendable enterprise, but depth of knowledge a parent has about their child makes them naturally better suited to know the nuances of how their child will learn best. If a child needs specific attention in a given area, it is the responsibility of the parent to either learn what they need to know to teach that child, or else assign the task to someone whom they know cares about that child as an individual and would do an excellent job. The most important thing is not that the teacher is more or less qualified, but that the parents have direct say in what happens and are able to change tutors if they do not feel that the job is being done correctly.

There is, to be sure, the concern of parents who really do not care about their children and do a terrible job with raising them. This is not an easy concern to address, but there is the question of if this is actually covered in libertarian philosophy. As Richard Epstein says in Libertarianism and Character, “… as a moral theory, [libertarian thought’s] sole office is to establish the proper set of legal relationships between individuals….libertarian thought sets rules that, in many ways, moral theorists would treat, at most, as moral minimums.”[3] From this it can be seen that there simply is not a nice answer in libertarianism for the problem of neglectful parents. While that is undoubtedly something that needs to be addressed, the philosophy of libertarianism does not cover all parts of life. Epstein continues, “The legal enterprise sets some boundaries on individual choice and then lets each person decide what moral principles to follow within those bounds.”[4] Thus, while this question needs to be answered, it is a question of instilling moral principles and as such is beyond the scope of this paper.

At the same time, while there is not a moral answer in libertarian philosophy, there is the argument of economics: that a parent would want to give their child the best education possible for the economic benefits. In this case, perhaps if parents realized that the welfare of their child was entirely their concern and no welfare state would bail them out, they would be more responsible. For the libertarian argument, it must be assumed that parents realize their responsibility to care for their children. In a literate society such as America, it is also rational to presume that caring for children includes giving them an education, and the capitalist part of libertarianism takes care of the question of quality of education – it would have to be the best.  

The problem here in America is that the citizens are the ones running the government (as can be seen by our constitution and election of government by the people from the people). That the citizens do not want to take personal responsibility, so they hand the responsibility off to someone else, can be seen by the very fact that we have public schools at all. This does not indicate a vote or a public decision of the popular will, but a fact that is by the virtue of the schools existing. This ‘someone else’ that the schooling is given to becomes the government at large, since the government is made up of the people. Public schools exist, then, because individuals do not want to take care of schooling their own children, but not because they do not want to have their children well taken care of.

This is important, because it does not require the illogical step of parents individually deciding to release all control over the education of their children. Instead, having schooling taken care of by the government means that schooling has gone public – exactly the opposite of what seems like the logical thing to happen, as will be seen in terms of efficiency and end result of education quality. The crucial point to remember, though, is that there is no clear distinction between the government and the people. This causes the general will – or laziness, as the case may be – to be towards the government taking care of the situation, instead of personal responsibility without personal conscience over neglecting children to an unknown entity. Just as it is easier for legislative bodies to send issues to committee, it is easier for individuals to put the burden of schooling on the public as a whole instead of taking the responsibility individually and schooling their own children. Since each individual legislating is so integrally related to ‘the government’, they wouldn’t think that there would be any ill effects arising from having their children taught by others. Indeed, the argument could well be made that just as legislators are trained and experienced in the field of policy making, the education of children should be left to those who make it their specialty. My argument is that this is not the best option.

The inability of individual parents to dictate what happens to their own children in the system of public education is what is robbing our public schools of their value. In the American culture, which does not claim to be one that is communist and trying to form its citizens into homogeneous followers, the concern raised by JS Mill in On Liberty is particularly appropriate. He writes that “Every extension of education promotes [the assimilation of people to be like each other], because education brings people under common influences, and gives them access to the general stock of facts and sentiments.”[5]  These ‘common influences’ are the very things that can are dangerous to America as a nation, because they dull the individuality of its citizens. For this reason, libertarian thought suggests that education be as ‘extended’ as little as possible, since the less extended education is, the less assimilated individuals will be to each other. On the other side of the situation, homeschoolers are able to immediately monitor their children’s education, which keeps this issue of assimilation to a minimum. Parents are taking their fundamental beliefs of parental involvement and high quality education and making it into something that is giving their children the kind of education they want them to receive, instead of allowing others to make those decisions for them.

Of course, not all libertarians believe the same way. However, according to a strictly libertarian philosophy, the government would have to be completely hands off in regards to education, since it does not directly pertain to protection in society, which is the libertarian’s view of the role of government. For that reason, since this paper is based on what libertarian theory would be, I find it necessary to acknowledge these deviations in libertarian practice but concentrate instead on what a pure libertarian would do.

If the education system was similar to modern homeschools, government intervention and assimilation of all toward one pattern of thought would be limited. Since there would be no stages in which the government was involved parents, not the government, would have final say in what children were taught. While this is not the practice in America’s public schools today, there is certainly the case to be made that the government in American is not libertarian in its approach to education! Indeed, in American history there is evidence that education being used for this very non-libertarian assimilation is not a new idea, as is recounted by George H. Nash, “[Leonard Read] soon became convinced that only a profound educational reorientation would suffice to quell the forever bubbling cauldron of erroneous doctrine … His task was explicit: to combat radicalism in California by a campaign of education.”[6] Regardless of what Read’s political intentions were, the goal of his campaign is clearly that individuality would be lessened through all being taught the same thing. The nature of homeschooling, in that the parents are directly supervising the education of their children if they are not actually teaching them all subjects, is such that this mass ‘reorientation’, as Nash calls it, cannot take place. From a libertarian perspective this is a good thing, as preservation of the individual is a priority. Mill writes, “There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence.”[7] This clearly implies that while it is not necessary that all have completely separate opinions from all others – which would be unreasonable to expect, if it was even possible – it is still necessary to keep the independence of the individual.

Even though there are a lot of educational practices that at first glance are helped by a government-controlled system, like computers, larger facilities, etc, in the long run a government such as the American government, which was not designed to be in charge of educating its citizens (as can be seen by the fact that at its founding public schools were not established,) must fail to do the best job of education. The argument that the government must have at least some form of standards for all schools, even private or homeschools, is actually detrimental in the long run because ultimately it destroys the sense of personal responsibility that is essential to libertarianism. While schooling with no government regulation is not currently available in America, the theory remains. Homeschooling, the closest thing currently available to a libertarian education, appears to be working; in my training as a telecounselor at Houghton, I was told that Houghton pursues homeschoolers because on average they are better students and earn higher grades. However, on account of homeschooling in its current state being a relatively new movement, there is as yet little to be seen in the way of overall trends. For now, the theory must suffice, but if Houghton can be used as indication of what colleges like in students, the trend may be encouraging to homeschoolers.

The prominence of libertarian education would also improve the general economy, since money would be spent directly on the children, by the parents, on the things that were most needed for personalized and effective education. The model now is, instead, one of mass redistribution of wealth through taxation and reimbursement which places the individual needs of the children at about the lowest level on the priority scale. The concern certainly exists that home or private schooling of children would give advantage to those whose parents are wealthy and are able to afford better education. However, as Friedman points out, “… the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location. It is no accident that most of the country’s outstanding public schools are in high-income enclaves.”[8] From this it can be seen that although bringing education in line with libertarian philosophy may not bring equality for all, it is not replacing a system that currently provides complete equality.

The more levels of bureaucracy involved, the less efficiency will occur in educational economics. In the libertarian situation, since the parents would be either administering the education or else directly supervising it, they would be paying directly and the overall cost would ultimately be less.  Paying directly would encourage the parent to find the most cost efficient ways of educating their children, although the drive to look good would keep the education at the highest level possible. They would not pay top price for a curriculum that was not the best, encouraging a competitive market in curricula. This would encourage capitalism, which in turn would start a revolution of the market. This rise of the market would be enhanced by not only having the curricula be competitively priced, but also the things that the family would be able to buy by not having their income sucked out by taxes.

This is an example of Frederic Bastiat’s ‘what is seen and what is not seen’ – the seen effect would be the demise of public schools, which could not exist without the benefit of government subsidies. The relatively unseen effect, since it would be in the separate form of the people who were spending their money elsewhere, would be that of a widespread positive influence on the economy. If there is to be a real difference made, then the libertarian argument is that it must come naturally and not as a result of any government subsidies or forced growth in a particular area. The economic gains that would come from privatization of education would be a result of the decisions the parents made, but also the children being raised could see the value of having their parents take personal responsibility for something they thought was very important – the raising of their children – and how well individual choice worked out. They would then turn out as the individualist described in Bastiat’s What is Seen and What is Not Seen – “he is rational in his spending, seeks only moderate and reasonable enjoyments, thinks of the future of his children; in a word, he saves.”[9] Citizens of this type, starting with the concept of rational spending and saving, would plainly bring a radical change in direction to the American system of economics.

An educational system like this does not require a completely libertarian philosophy to be implemented in the entire country. If the American government were to take a libertarian approach to the school system, while still retaining the same structure as now exists, the educational policies that I am now describing would be completely possible – although, as I have said, I do not think the current ways would last long. The teachers would not have to be the parents, but the parents would be making the decisions regarding teachers, costs, and curriculum. Libertarian philosophy in no way requires that everything must be done individually. Instead, there must be an economically sound purpose behind it. If there is one principle that governs libertarians, it is that the economics behind the practices must have reason. If there were no such economic reason, there should be no libertarian possibility of a practice like the one I have described. The theories would clash, leaving the idea flat. Libertarianism demands pragmatism, and if the theories did not match, libertarians would be forced to drop the idea of individualized education for the greater cause of their ideology. As of yet, this has not happened and private education is still a possibility in line with libertarian philosophy.

The first step in a changeover to personal education would be convincing parents that they really do need to be involved in educating their children. The danger of governmental education is not that the government is trying to take over the family and limit freedom and economic efficiency, but that is the natural result of a government in which the rulers are the citizens. As Mill writes, “… when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression….”[10] As can be seen from Mill, then, while such interference in education may be beyond what an individual would be able to justify, the government – representing society as a whole – may be allowed. That is why individual parents must decide that the education of their children is their personal responsibility, and take the initiative to do it.

As soon as this privatization takes place, but not before (since the government is, after all, not libertarian as a whole and should treat education as any other aspect of government that now exists), the government would need to cut all funding to education since the people are no longer using their services. Schools would then be either directly taught by parents or private schools that receive no government funding and are directly supervised by parents. Either of these categories would be libertarian approved, since they would be separate from governmental jurisdiction, and superintended directly by those involved. Of course, the lack of funding from the government would kill the public schools, which – even with taxpayer dollars assisting – are heavily subsidized by the federal government. However, since the people would be doing their own schooling, the public schools would no longer be necessary, and the overall American budget would improve as well since the monies now designated for education would be available for other needs.

The result of this kind of educational practice would be simple but revolutionary. Students would receive a better education, since their parents would be the ones driven to allow them to succeed. The libertarian economic and social principles that say this would be true have already been stated. Furthermore, the overall economic cost would be less, since the people paying for the education would be interested parties who would like to spend the least possible amount of money on the things they must spend money on. However, since the interest would also be a personal one of gain, they would spend enough money to do a good job with their children’s schooling. Lastly, the government would not be involved in anything above their responsibilities as the government, and so would be able to focus on the things that really are important for them to take care of. As can be seen, then, having an education system that follows libertarian principles is assuredly not the best for keeping the American social system stable as it is, but for a radical change in a positive direction, there is reason to believe that it could be effective.

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[1] Friedman, Milton. Free to Choose. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. p.151

[2] http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2010/tables

[3] Epstein, Richard A. "Libertarianism and Character." Berkowitz, Peter. Varieties of Conservatism in America. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, n.d. 75-102, 2004. p. 76

[4] Ibid, 76

[5] Mill, JS On Liberty. www.bartleby.com/130/. P.44

[6] Nash, George H. "The Revolt of the Libertarians." Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. n.d. 1-49. p.28

[7] Mill, p.3

[8] Friedman, 166

[9] Bastiat, Frederic. "What is Seen and What is Not Seen." Selected Essays on Political Economy. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1995. p. 42

[10] Mill, p.3