• Public Schooling

    The majority of citizens seem to take it for granted that their children will be properly educated in a public school, and that public schooling is the best way to educate the citizenry.   Liberals and conservatives both seem convinced that public schooling is better than a private free-market education system.  I disagree.  

    People on the liberal (“left”) side of the political aisle support public education and are constantly arguing for more money to fund public education, as if that is what will fix poor academic performance in so many of the public schools.  Liberals love public education, especially when it promotes their liberal agenda of diversity, equity, inclusion, protected tenured teachers, teacher unions, gender-neutral laws, lacked discipline, elimination of merit-based admissions, etc. On the other side of the political aisle, conservative (“right”) leaning people also support public schools, and love to see high-stakes standardized testing and the ranking of schools and educators, restoring prayer, or the posting of the Bible Ten Commandments in schools. Many conservatives want to see students wearing uniforms, reciting the pledge of alliance every day, have only their interpretation of history taught, and ban the teaching of content or books that they find objectionable. 

    All of these positions are unconstitutional. Nowhere in the U.S. constitution does it give our federal government the right to force the citizenry to attend these government public schools, and to tax the citizens to pay for the public schooling of their children, or for anyone else’s children.  Therefore, I prefer and support a libertarian position that the government should not be involved in public education, and that the education of children is the sole responsibility of the parents.   How they chose to educate their children should be determined freely by the parent.  While some will home school, others will go to the private marketplace to find and compensate some other adult they trust to educate their children.  

    Although I advocate for a completely free-market private education system that will naturally arise when people are not taxed to support government public schools, I acknowledge (but don't like) that each of our 50 states have state constitutions that call for state-government led, and tax-supported, public education.  While I don’t believe a government-run system is superior to a system completely free of government involvement, I do advocate for changes and adjustments to these state education laws and policies to make these current public school systems as individualized, and free of government interference and control as possible.  The following education policies that I support try to do just that.