A Libertarian Argument Regarding State Schools and the Curriculum

Great Debates
1

A friend of mine got into an argument with me on the email. My ideology of confrontationalist atheism, I was informed, is essentially authoritarian. My friend asked me if in my view, creationism (which we presumably agree is tripe) should be taught in school. I responded in the negative. Aha, he’s got me now!

First off, he tells me, we shouldn’t have public schools. How dare the government be stuffing ideas into our kids’ heads! Government action is never a virtue, unless taken to defend “people from direct physical harm caused by other people without their consent.” If taken for other reasons, it impinges on our liberties! How dare the government tell us what to think! Once they can tell our kids how to think and use taxpayer money for those purposes, what’s to keep them from coming to our houses with guns to force creationists to turn from their “heresy?” If we absolutely have to have public schools, they can’t endorse any agenda whatsoever. There can be Holocaust Denial classes and Evolution classes, but the government endorses nothing and none of these classes are required.

I’ve responded that the Establishment Clause should prevent government schools teaching religious ideas, but he’s rebuttled that free speech and liberty should prevent the government from endorsing other ideas too, no matter how much we (that is, him and I) agree them to be factually valid.

Well, I’m tuckered out with this argument and told him I’d get back to him in a few days (of course, I’ll let him know about this thread). Wanted to throw up our argument to the teeming millions, curious for outside opinions.

2

Last I checked school boards still had to answer to the voters. So if he has a problem with that schools teach then he needs to take it up their boss, the voters.

Further I think your friend missed the most important thing school taught. It wasn’t “what to think”, but how to learn. I have no clue what the hell the capital of Iowa is, but at the time it was good practice making flash cards, which I still use sometimes. Various reports taught me to weight sources more carefully. Reading was a skill that took a year or so but is the most valuable skill I have. Nothing I do would work very well or at all without it. I use that skill everyday and can even come to ideas different than what I learned in school. So far no jack booted thugs have busted down my door, but thanks for the heads up. I’ll keep a look out.

3

All sorts of problems with that. First, the alternative to public schools is massive public ignorance; they were created in the first place because before the government stepped in most of the population had no formal education at all. Second, evolution and the falsehood of creation is a fact, not just an opinion. Third, children are not the toys of parents to exploit as they will, they have rights too; including the right not to be rendered hopelessly ignorant because their parents prefer lies over truth.

And fourth, his position is the authoritarian one; as libertarians typically do he is pretending that government action is the only possible source of oppression. Saying that the government should only take action to defend “people from direct physical harm caused by other people without their consent” is a demand that the primary function of government should be as a tool of oppression for the wealthy and powerful organizations. Because the rich and large organizations like corporations, political parties and religious organizations and so on don’t need to use violence to get their way, to oppress and exploit the common people. The common people however need the government to protect them from just that. And if the government refuses to protect them, then all the common people have left is force - and then and only then is when the libertarians like your friend want the government to step in, on the side of the wealthy and powerful. Under the system your friend wants the only real function of the government is to serve as a giant boot to stomp on any of the lower classes who get uppity. not to help people, not to educate or defend them from being exploited; just to crush them when they get tired of being treated as slaves.

4

As I see it, the central problem in libertarianism tends to be an unexamined faith in the sacred value of private property, not realizing that private property is a quintessentially governmental solution to the problem of allocation of resources. Without government around, resources are much more fluid: you use your house until someone more powerful or more vicious or more connected comes along and kicks you out of it.

Government says, “Nope, that’s not how we’re doing things any more: here are some procedures to say that nobody can kick you out of your house, and if you do that, we’ll shoot anyone who tries.”

It’s a pretty good system for folks who currently hold the resources, and it works pretty well to make more resources; there’s a lot to recommend private property as a solution to resource allocation. But it doesn’t exist absent government.

So if you’re gonna do the private property thing, you need to set up a government to manage it. (Libertarians tend to ignore that, thinking private property is what you have in a state of nature, and that all governments do is they defend what’s naturally already there.) Once you decide to set up this governmental system, you need to set it up in a fashion that makes it sustainable.

The best model we’ve found for that so far is the fairly crappy model of democracy. And we’ve found that building an informed electorate with some shared values leads to a more robust democracy.

Enter education.

As a society, we don’t demand that everyone think the same, or claim to think the same. However, we do demand that everyone pay into the system that strengthens those shared values and informed electorate. That’s what our schools do.

As for what constitutes information, we decide that as the electorate. Removing all standards from education, as your friend proposes, would remove the benefit of public education.

5

Ask him what he’s going to do if his house catches fire. Presumably, he will take a principled stand and refuse to call the fire department, except in the case of arson.

6

Bpelta’s friend, like a lot of libertarians, starts with a nucleus of valid thinking and then builds a lot of absurdity on top of it, and so most people will only notice the absurdity and not the valid idea. The valid idea is this. In the public school system as we know it, all significant decisions about the curriculum are made at the top, i.e. by politicians and a school board. Those people are easily pushed around by dozens of special interest groups, and also generally follow a pro-government viewpoint. Therefore, the curriculum gets pushed around by dozens of special interest groups, and we end of with a curriculum that reflects their interests. It also gets slanted towards the government. Examples are a dime a dozen.

In government or citizenship classes, students get taught that we have a system of government wherein checks and balances exist between the three branches, where the process of a bill becoming a law functions in a certain way, and so forth. They are not taught about the fact that lobbyists wield tremendous control over legislation, that the three branches have found ways to bypass the traditional checks and balances, that there are procedural rules which often bring the entire process to a halt, and so forth.

In science and health classes, students learn that the food pyramid tells them what to eat to be healthy. They’re not taught that the American agricultural lobby has had a hand in designing the food pyramid.

etc…

7

I don’t think that’s the case here. Bpelta’s friend starts out with an absurd premise- that government action is bad no matter what- and then finds some (valid) reasons why it’s true in the case of education.

In other words, he is following your blueprint, but backwards.

8

Are they generally taught these things in private schools? It is one thing to argue that private schools have higher academic standards, an opinion with which I agree; this is the first time I have seen it argued that private schools provide a more realistic view of government machinations.

(As an irrelevant aside: Der Trihs, I have provided an example of proper semicolon use. You are overworking the semicolon and it is tired and sad. If the clause you’re introducing could not stand on its own as an independent sentence, please give the semicolon a break and use a dash or a comma.)

9

You can sidestep that by having public funding of education but not public schools. Essentially the government gives parents money or vouchers or whatever to ensure the education of their children and the parents can send their children to whichever school they wish.

10

That only sidesteps the problem if you assume parents prefer their children to have their ignorance removed. Alternatively there may be a significant percentage of parents who would choose to send their children to schools that would increase their ignorance - fundy schools for example.

11

Won’t work. Without massive government oversight - which means we might as well have the government do it all like now - you’ll have millions of children going essentially uneducated because the for-profit schools will do the for-profit thing and take the money while providing the kids with essentially nothing. And then there’s the problem that public schools are required to take everyone, while a private school can tell your kid they aren’t interested because they are too poor or have a learning disability or whatever. And all the other problems that crop up when the profit motive becomes involved. And you can guarantee that one of the first things that happens will be that all the existing private schools will raise their tuition by however much the government is shelling out. People who support vouchers and such always seem to assume that they’ll be able to send their kids to the same kinds of private schools that rich kids go to, without realizing they’ll be more likely end up sending their kid to school where classes are taught by a near-illiterate working for minimum wage while the voucher money all goes into the bank account of the people who own the “school”. And as villa says, you’ll also have parents send their kids to the Christian equivalent of madrasas where they’ll be taught nothing but how to pray and praise Jesus and smite the heathen.

When you want islands of excellence surrounded by seas of garbage, go for the private sector. When you want mediocrity, when you want a minimal required service provided to everyone, go for the government.

12

I’m closer to libertarian than any other mainstream ideology, and while I’m not necessarily enthusiastic about public funding of schools, it’s far, far preferable to even the chance of rampant ignorance. But the problem with public schools is that, while they’re accountable to voters, it forces so many kids into a one-size-fits-all approach to education. When you put all the average kids together, the above average ones don’t get the challenge they need and the below average students don’t get the extra attention they need.

Instead, I’m okay with mandatory educations, but I’d like to see parents and students having a bit more choice in their education. Not just along overall academic performance, but even on overall subject matter, so kids that show great promise in a particular area can get a little more focus on that.
Anyway, more on topic, I am a Christian, and I absolutely think evolution should be taught in science classes and creationism should not be taught in science classes. Creationism isn’t science, it’s theology, so it doesn’t belong in science classes. Evolution is a well supported scientific theory with no real mainstream competing theory, so it should be taught in science classes. I can understand offering alternatives to certain theories, like to string theory since it’s not a concensus, but that’s not really relevant here.

That all said, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to consider having some sort of religious studies class as potentially required in a large range of study programs. I think there’s a lot of ignorance about a lot of common beliefs out there, not just about mainstream ones like various denominations of Christianity and Islam, but lots of other beliefs as well. In such a class, Creationism is a valid topic that should be covered in the appropriate context.

Either way, I DO think that refusing to teach something at all is authoritarian, but at the same time, schools simply cannot cover every possible alternative view on a particular subject, and so they have to cut off somewhere. Besides, Creationism and Evolution aren’t even really relevant to eachother, they’re orthogonal concepts. Creationism is more about whether God did it or not, and Evolution is about whether it happened through natural selection over millions of years.

Personally, I’m sick of seeing this whole Science vs. Religion thing that it seems so many people insist on having when they really have very little to do with eachother. Trying to use religious concepts to answer scientific questions is dumb. Trying to use scientific concepts to answer religious questions is equally dumb. If we stopped conflating them and trying to teach them as an either or concept, maybe we could stop confusing the children.

13

When you put it that way, it seems to undermine your argument. The problem with mediocrity in education is that it generally fails to provide for even that average students, muchless the truly gifted ones. Meanwhile, with the “islands of excellence” the truly gifted and even some of the average would get the attention they need. Sure, the below average would suffer more, but how many of them don’t already work jobs where they don’t even need a basic high school education, working retail, cooking/serving food, etc. So, would we really be doing them so much of a disservice if they’re not even really using the education they’re getting?

14

And I am sure you have a way already lined up of determing which religions are covered in this class, and which creation myths are covered.

15

I think by “appropriate context” he means studied for historical value.

16

I understand that. But you still have to choose which religions to cover, and who is going to teach them. If the aim is to remove ignorance about common beliefs, that is going to be problematic when teachers are overwhelmingly Christian in this country, and in particular in certain areas where the dominant form of Christianity is, shall we say, less accepting of other religions.

17

Obviously, like every topic, there has to be some threshold, but I’m not appropriately educated on the topic to begin to know where to draw that line. Obviously, the number of adherents is an important part of that line, but it’s not the only part of it. But is drawing that line really relevant to whether or not such a course should be more prevalent in our children’s educations? We teach literature, but can’t have kids even read everything; how do we decide what they read?

Either way, I think in a semester in high school, it’s not unreasonable that a decent covering of the religions of 90-95% of the world, which probably covers more than 99% of anything anyone in this country would run into, is possible. I also think that if more kids were more educated about religion in general, it’s probably a lot less likely we’d have such situations as the large amount of Islamophobia in this country. Like it or not, religion is a huge part of the human condition, it has had huge influences on history, the least we can do is give kids a basic understanding of more than whatever particular beliefs they grew up with.

18

Well if you can find a constitutional provision that prohibits the government from endorsing F. Scott Fitzgerald over Ernest Hemmingway, then I will have issues with the teaching of literature in public schools. Until then, I would consider the religion question to be more potentially problemattic under the Constitution.

19

It is literally impossible for any government to take any sort of action without it constituting an endorsement of an idea or a set of ideas. He wants the government to protect individuals from direct physical harm at the hands of other individuals? That right there is the government endorsing an idea. He needs to rethink this particular premise of his argument.

20

Wait… what? I’m not saying religion should be taught so as to have children following them. I’m saying it should be taught so that children understand the basic ideas of their faith.

Are you seriously arguing that a scholarly review of religion is a violation of the constitution? Many high schools already offer it as an elective, and many public universities do as well. Unless you’re drawing a distinction that somehow offering it as an elective rather than as potentially mandatory for more courses of study is a violation, and even then, I don’t think you have any basis for such a claim.