Right? Wrong.
In E.G. West’s Education and the State, we learn that (HT to David Henderson in his excellent Joy of Freedom):
It couldn’t possibly be the case that people managed to pay for their children to learn to read or write. Nah. It couldn’t possibly be the case that numerous private organizations taught children to read. It couldn’t possibly be the case that a single man in the early 19th century could manage to teach 1000 people to read each year … all by himself. Nah – maybe I’ll make up a post about a mythical British creature that was able to do exactly that using 10th century technologies.
That was in England. West’s book has tons more data. What about here in the US?
Impressive, no? Especially since you can make the claim that 1 in 7 Americans in a country making $45,000 per year per person have trouble reading anything more than a children’s picture book. Of course, if we only had “universal” public schooling that problem would be solved.
Oops.
From my practical experience, there are more people than you think who read at the same level as my second-grade class in our one room schoolhouse. This is appalling to me.
I’d settle for much less from government than everybody being exposed to Hayek in high school, but it is worth noting that my history teacher took us to Temple one evening to a discussion of the Road to Serfdom. We were seventeen-year olds — imagine that? We also went to Temple to hear Toynbee. Both evenings I remember vividly. Which makes your point, Wintercow.
This was private school. Not Andover, but Pennsey Prep. My history teacher got his degree from the Naval Academy; my English teacher, who got blown up in a tank in WWII got his degree from Dartmouth; my math teacher, perhaps the world’s greatest, got his degrees from Lehigh, and may have been the only teacher in the school qualified to teach in the government schools.
This is not to say all government schools are bad. Rather, couldn’t they all benefit from competition?