Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System

Besides national defense, no government-provided service enjoys as much exemption from scrutiny as the provision and subsidization of primary public education. Even presumed champions of the free market, such as Milton Friedman, support the government subsidization of education through high school:

We have always been proud, and with good reason, of the widespread availability of schooling to all and the role that public schooling has played in fostering the assimilation of newcomers into our society, preventing fragmentation and divisiveness, and enabling people from different cultural and religious backgrounds to live together in harmony. (Friedman and Friedman, 1979, pp. 140–141)

The very suggestion that government should be removed entirely from the realm of education is either taken as irrational and malicious or viewed as foolhardy and quixotic. This seems very peculiar when considering that the critics of the present state of public education appear on both sides of the political spectrum. Still, the overwhelming sentiment, ubiquitous in both the general citizenry and academia, is that while public education may need to be reformed, it still should be guaranteed "free" to all by government.

Education, like any other service, cannot be provided more efficiently than via the market.

Andrew Young and Walter Block

Strother rightly names education a service. Here is a rational argument for why it is not necessary for it to be a public one.

Some who are appalled at opposition to public education seek to hyperbolize it in terms of opposition to education in general. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those of us who oppose public education do so out of a deep respect for the actual education process and the knowledge that government-run schools are anathema to anything remotely resembling true education.