Education for All
September 16, 2004
by Harry Browne
I received the following comment in an email in response my article "Free
the Schools":
I agree wholeheartedly
with your conclusions regarding the state of public education. However,
there is one aspect of complete privatization I've been unable to work
out, and wondered your opinion.
What happens to the
students whose parents are too poor to afford to send them to any
private school, even a very inexpensive one? Are these children simply
denied education based on the socioeconomic circumstances of their
birth?
In the first place, no one should have a right to demand that someone
else pay for his education — whether
kindergarten, elementary school, high school, university, or chiropractic
college. Or is everyone entitled as well to a new Corvette and a set of the
Complete Works of Oprah Winfrey?
Literacy Then & Now
In the second place, children don't have to go to school to learn how to
read, write, and add. Realize that there were no government schools until
the mid-1800s, and yet people learned to read and write
— from their parents, in one-room school
houses, or even on their own.
John Taylor Gatto has pointed out that, prior to government schools in
America, the literacy rate among non-slaves was close to 100%. His lengthy
article, "Eyeless
in Gaza" on the history of the decline of education in America is well
worth reading in its entirety.
In it, he points
out:
Looking back, abundant
data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that
by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was
between 93 and 100% wherever such a thing mattered.
According to the
Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was
illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people
in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels
of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in
1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10
million copies to match it.
If you pick up an uncut
version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history,
culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and
actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only
a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in
1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to
speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our
own?
Elsewhere in the
article, he says:
By 1820, there was even
more evidence of Americans' avid reading habits, when 5 million copies
of James Fenimore Cooper's complex and allusive novels were sold, along
with an equal number of Noah Webster's didactic Speller
— to a population of dirt farmers
under 20 million in size.
In 1835, Richard Cobden
announced there was six times as much newspaper reading in the United
States as in England, and the census figures of 1840 gave fairly exact
evidence that a sensational reading revolution had taken place without
any exhortation on the part of public moralists and social workers, but
because common people had the initiative and freedom to learn. In North
Carolina, the worst situation of any state surveyed, eight out of nine
could still read and write.
In 1853, Per Siljestromm,
a Swedish visitor, wrote, "In no country in the world is the taste for
reading so diffuse as among the common people in America." The
American Almanac observed grandly, "Periodical publications,
especially newspapers, disseminate knowledge throughout all classes of
society and exert an amazing influence in forming and giving effect to
public opinion." It noted the existence of over a thousand newspapers.
Contrast this with
a recent study by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, in which it was
discovered that "53% of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally
illiterate." The study classified "3.8 million Los Angeles County residents
as ‘low-literate,' meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing
error, use a bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map."
Part of the problem in Los Angeles is the low literacy rate of
immigrants, but immigrants don't begin to approach 53% of the population of
Los Angeles County.
In other words, prior to government schools literacy spread to virtually
everyone — rich or poor. Now illiteracy
spreads to people everywhere — rich or
poor.
The Free Market to the Rescue (As Always)
In the third place, it is highly unlikely that poor children would go
without schooling if there were a totally free market in education.
Today there are over 200,000 churches, mosques, and temples in America
— funded completely by voluntary
donations. Americans as a whole give over $240 billion a year to organized
charities. Providing a private-school education to every poor child would
probably cost less than 10% of that.
There already are
close to a hundred privately funded scholarship
programs for elementary and high school students
— sending poor children to private
schools. The Children's Scholarship Fund, the
Houston Children's Educational
Opportunity Foundation, Children First Utah,
the
Educational Choice Charitable Trust, and dozens more
are making it possible for poor children today to get the kind of really
good private-school educations that politicians provide for their own
children.
The choice is simple: Either we provide worthless government schooling
for everyone at an enormous cost — or we
provide real education and self-responsibility to everyone at a
fraction of the cost.
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