History Shows the Value of a Private Education Marketplace -- 04/14/1999

History Shows the Value of a Private Education Marketplace

14 April, 1999

By Brandon S. Lynaugh
CNS Information Services

If you think the current arguments on school funding are anything new, think again. How to fund education and decide the government's role in it has been debated for thousands of years. What is remarkable is how often in the span of history the same questions arise.

With this in mind, a new book challenges us to draw upon history for guidance when deciding contemporary public policy questions regarding education. "Market Education: The Unknown History", by Andrew Coulson, examines 2,500 years of public and private education to find out what has worked and what hasn't.

One need look no further than the Ancient Greeks to find examples of both. Two cities, Athens and Sparta, were little more than 100 miles apart in terms of geography, but worlds apart in everything else, especially education. Athens was known for its thriving poetry, philosophy and literature, while Sparta is remembered for its brutal, regimented control of most aspects of life.

Coulson notes that a fundamental difference was how they viewed the role of parents in education. Sparta believed that the state, and not the parents, was best equipped to make decisions. So, all young boys attended government-run schools and were fed a one-size-fits-all curriculum of physical training, with little attention paid to arts and sciences.

Athens, by contrast, put their faith in parental freedom. Anyone could open a school, and all were run as private institutions. Competition and charity kept costs low. Some schools, like Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, charged no tuition at all.

Competition for students drove schools to offer new curricula Secondary institutions arose out of a demand for more education. While Spartan children were confined to the physical arts and warfare, Athenian children studied mathematics, art, astronomy, philosophy and a host of other disciplines.

The results are recorded in countless history books. Athens was the most literate society in the Western world. It was the birthplace of democracy, philosophy and medicine. Sparta is remembered only for its ceaseless wars against Athens.

Coulson examined other societies, including fifteenth-century Germany and seventeenth-century England, and the United States during the birth of the current system of public education. He found that a competitive education marketplace outperformed a government-operated system in each period.

Before the mid-1800s, America relied on the competition between private, for-profit and non-profit schools. In small communities, "district schools" were established. A district school was funded through a combination of tuition and local taxes, enabling some students who could not afford the tuition to attend. Larger communities relied on private, independent institutions to educate their young people. Some charged tuition. Others, relying on the philanthropy of wealthy benefactors, charged no fee.

This competitive approach remained the norm until the mid-1800s when the idea of government run schools took hold. Government schools did not arise because the private, independent institutions were not serving the needs of the public. On the contrary, literacy rates in America rose steadily in the early 1800s. Rather, they surfaced due to exaggerated promises of what government-run schools could accomplish and a desire for uniformity in education to counter the influence of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and other non-Protestant nations. Government school advocates looked to the regimented, homogenous school systems of countries like Prussia for organizational models.

This regimentation is the unfortunate legacy of mid to late nineteenth-century public education. As policymakers grapple with the ever-clearer need for fundamental reform, they should not be afraid to rethink the assumptions underlying the current public school model, and to look to history – and to books like Coulson's – for guidance in fashioning a solution.

Brandon S. Lynaugh is Director of Communications for The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

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