Prescription for Expensive Education; C. Carson

ClarenceB. Carson Prescription for Expensive Education SOME years back, I ordered a typing table for my study from a large mail order house. It came in a few days, and I picked it up at the local store. It was the table I had ordered, was of the correct size and quality, and I was pleased with it. There was only one problem. When I looked at the bill, I discovered that it was for sev eral dollars more than the adver tised price. They had obviously billed me for a larger or higher quality model. I pointed out the error to a clerk at the store and suggested that they attend to correcting it. The problem was too complex for a clerk, and the store manager was sum moned to deal with it. He assured me that the best, if not the only, way Dr. Carson has written and taught extensively, spe· clalizing in American intellectual history. He is thEt author of several books and a frequent contributor te» The Freeman and other scholarly journals.

to correct the I error was to reorder the table. Then, when the new table arrived, I could return the other one, which would b~ shipped back to the mail order warehouse, claim the newly arrived. table, and all would be well, hopefully. I objected that this was the long way around, and expensive, to solve a simple problem. But to no avail. The manager '1Vas adamant: it would be dealt with lfLis way or not at all. I gave in. And, eventually, I got my table, exactly! like the one I re turned. For all I know, that man ager continued his climb up the lad der of managemal success, though my suspicion is that he had already risen a rung or two !above the level of his competency. Be that as it may, it is easy to see that the manager had followed an awkward and expensive route to the lfifi 156 THE FREEMAN March goal. There was not only the ex pense of shipping a table to and from the warehouse but also I had to go to the unnecessary trouble of re packing the other table, returning it to the store, and picking up a new one. It is not always so easy to detect the fact that something is being gone about in such a way as to make it much more expensive and difficult to accomplish than it might other wise be.

A MajorItem of Expense Many Americans are aware, of course, that education costs a great deal today, though the total cost in financial terms even, may not be fully felt because of the indirect ways in which much of it is funded. But ed ucation is the largest item of ex pense in many state budgets. It is often also the largest single item for many county and local govern ments. For a good many years now, it has been an increasing expendi ture of the federal government. In those states and localities where the property tax is relied on mainly in financing public education, rates have become so high as to provoke taxpayer resistance here and there. Still, the high cost of education is widely accepted as inevitable. For many years now, we have been set on a course which resulted in ever more expensive and inefficient methods of providing education. In deed, if I were assigned the task of devising the most expensive and ex tensive system of education I could conceive, I would have to think hard and long to improve on the one we now have. Nor would it be easy to conceive of a more ineffective one, though it might be done.

Lest I be misunderstood, however, let me hasten to point out what I do not mean by the above remarks. It is not my point that teachers are paid too much, that buildings are too expensive, that bus drivers are paid handsome wages, that busses are too costly, that too many frills have been added to education, or that there are too many high-paid administrators. Such criticisms may or may not be valid in some schools, in some school districts, or, for all I know, in a great many of them. But whether they are or not, such things are not the basis of the above obser vations. Nor is it my intention to set forth some general theory of education or in that or any other way to tell par ents how they should go about edu cating their children. It seems to me that the mind set which has produced such theories or prescriptions is one of the things which has led us into the present educational morass.

On the contrary, I shall assume what I believe to be true, namely, that children differ greatly from one another in their interests, in what they are likely to learn, in what they want to know, in the ways in which 1982 PRESCRIPTION FOR EXPENSIVE EDUCATION 157 they can come to any desired knowl edge, and that how, what, and when any particular person shall learn something is no more capable of being settled than is the question of how, what, and when we shall eat. If that be some sort of theory of ed ucation, then so be it, but it is cer tainly remote from any which would provide a regimen for all children to follow, willy-nilly. And that is the only point I want to get out of the way. A Formula for Waste Now, to my point. Here is my pre scription for expensive education. (1) Equate schooling with education. (2) Compel all children to attend school up to a certain age (i.e., take from parents and guardians the decisions about when, what kind, and how long their children will attend school). (3) Take the provision of schooling out of the market. (4) Provide free (Le., tax supported) schools, free text books, free transportation, and free (or subsidized) lunches. (5) Assem ble large numbers of students in centralized schools. (6) Provide a common regimen of grades and courses through which students are expected to go. (7) Make socializa tion a primary purpose of schooling (Le., make social promotion the rule, and try to hold all children to the same level of others of the same age).

(8) Have state certification of teach ers. (9) Pay teachers on the basis of amount of schQoling they have had and the numb~r of years they have taught. (10) Adopt uniform pay scales. There might be a few other things which are or are not done that might be added to the list, but those listed are virtually universally practiced thrQughout the United States, and they will serve ade quately as a p~escription for expen sive (and ineffiCient) education. Actually, the prescription for ex pensive educatlon can be succinctly stated this way: Take education out of the home an~ the market, special ize it, and separate it from the work aday world. At any rate, this latter formulation contains my central point, namely, ithat the way to make education expensive is to take it out of the home arid market. But there are some important subsidiary points to be made, so l~t the more extensive listing stand.

The equation of schooling with ed ucation set th~ stage for the devel opment of edu~ation along the lines it has taken. lit is usually assumed rather than asserted, for it will hardly stand up under analysis. Ed ucation is qualitative; schooling is quantitative. Schooling can be pre cisely measur~d, while education is never more precise than being a matter of degree. Children can be compelled to a~tend school. They can hardly be compelled to learn. Everyone w~o was educable and who lived long enough has always 158 THE FREEMAN March been to some degree and in certain ways educated, though a large num ber of people who have lived on this earth have never attended school. It is possible to be much schooled and have very little by way of education. On the other hand, it is possible to be well educated (whatever that may be taken to mean) and never to have attended school at all. The most that can be said for schooling is that it is one among many ways by which one may be educated. This is not, let me emphasize, a brief against school ing, only an effort to put schooling in the much broader context of edu cation.

Learning in the Home Much of the education of children has always taken place in the home and surrounding environs. It still does, though not nearly so much positive education as in former times. (Children are much more apt to be told what not to do in the home now adays than shown what to do. That is so because there is so little of the house and yard work that children can do, or that their parents want them to do. Complex and automatic machinery has either made it dan gerous for small children or unnec essary for anyone to attend it.) I do not mean by education in the home, schooling. Something akin to schooling has sometimes been ac complished in the home, and there are a few parents who are attempting it today. But the home probably never was an ideal environment for formal schooling, and it almost cer tainly is not today. Perhaps, the role that the home used to perform in education can best be discussed in the broader context of apprenticeship training. Much of the education that people acquired in the past began with their train ing as apprentices. The training of apprentices usually involved little or no expense either for the master or the student. In most jobs, the ap prentice could be helpful enough to defray the cost of teaching and su pervision from the very beginning.

Before very long, if he was apt, he could probably do simple jobs well enough that the master actually was the gainer in the relationship finan cially. We are accustomed to think of ap prentices today only in such lines of work as plumbing and carpentry, but most work used to be learned in this way from a master. This was true not only of such skilled crafts as shoemaking but also what are now considered to be professions, such as law and medicine. Indeed, the mod ern school is in derivation largely an abstraction and specialization of the master-apprentice relationship. In the process, of course, it was largely separated from the workaday world and began its march toward becom ing most expensive. But the home was the main place 1982 PRESCRIPTION FOR EXPENSIVE EDUCA'TIION 159 for the training of apprentices through the ages. To see this, it will be helpful to think of apprenticeship as going much beyond specialized skills. Girls usually served their ap prenticeship as homemakers and housekeepers in the home. Under the supervision of their mothers, they learned to cook, sew, wash, iron, clean, and do the myriad tasks as sociated with keeping a home. On the farm, boys usually learned the jobs of running a farm by serving as apprentices to their fathers.

On-the-JobTraining Education has been taken out of the market, largely, in two ways. The first one takes us back to appren ticeship. There are still some jobs that are learned by the apprentice route. Plumbing, carpentry, and bricklaying come to mind. A goodly number of others are learned mainly on the job, such as service station attendant, but there are now formi dable difficulties placed by law in the way of learning on the job. There is, of course, required school atten dance for the early years. In addi tion there are child labor laws, and, much more to the point, minimum wage laws. The minimum wage re quirement tends to make on-the-job training, or apprenticeship, too ex pensive for employers except where very simple tasks are involved. Often, too, there are schooling re quirements for licensing or certification. A major exception to this in the professiolls is legal training; many states require only the pass ing of the ban exams, not specific amounts of sCihooling. The trend, however, has ~ong been toward ex tensive schooli(ng, and that has be come the accepted mode for becom ing a lawyer. Both social and legal pressures hav~ long been in the di rection of exteIilsive schooling in the United States. In practice, on-the-job training has oecome too expensive for most emp~oyers. It has been largely taken qut of the market, and an inexpensive method of education is no longer geperally available.

Below-CostPricing In general, t~ough, education has been taken 0"ut of the market by pricing schoolipg far below its cost or giving it ~way. Free tax-sup ported element,ary and high schools (plus kindergattens, in most states) and heavily subsidized technical, college, and u~niversity schooling have driven most alternative modes of education o1.llt of the market and made it exceedjngly difficult for pri vate schools tq compete. To put it another way, i schooling has tri umphed as the!mode of education in the United St"tes. Compulsory at tendance and tax support have ac complished th~t. And, state sup ported schools !have tended to price all others out of the market. Schooling, per se, is probably the 160 THE FREEMAN March most expensive mode for getting an education, with the possible excep tion of hiring a tutor. We would all see that, probably, if education were freely available in the market at its market price. Not only does it in volve such costs as hiring a teacher, providing classrooms, transporta tion to the place where the class meets, and so forth, but it is also time-consuming for the students.

Schooling necessarily entails a reg imen of learning that includes much that a student may not want to know, and thus will learn only as a result of the most intensive methods of teaching. Other students are often a distraction to learning, and those who learn more quickly are apt to be held back to the level of the class as a whole. Even so, schooling would almost certainly be one of the alternative modes of education available in a free market. It has some advantages over other methods of education. The very fact that there is a regimen, or course of study, usually results in a broader education than would otherwise be obtained. Self-educated persons, for example, are likely to have gaps in their knowledge which may be less likely in schools. There are social di mensions to schools, too, which many might prefer and find beneficial. Other students may sometimes be a distraction, but they may also pro vide competition and a spur to learning.

Increasing the Options What we could expect, however, if schooling were provided in the mar ket, would be a great variety of schools. Instead of one elementary school in a neighborhood, and a large high school which has resulted from consolidation upon consolidation, would be many different sorts and sizes of schools. Many church build ings, whose Sunday School rooms are rarely used except for an hour on Sunday morning, would probably be used for schools. But there is no need, at the elementary level to have all grades or classes in a single build ing. Classes could be held in any suitable (suitable to the parents, that is) room or space that a would-be teacher could provide or rent. There might well be chains of schools to cater to those with a preference for uniformity or nationally recognized schools. But the variety would surely ex tend much beyond that of facilities. The competition for students could lead to much experimentation in the least expensive and most effective ways to teach courses. In any popu lous area, there would be a great va riety of emphases: there would be traditional schools, experimental schools, schools following this, or that, or the other plan. There would be one-teacher schools and, possibly, very large schools. Those who wanted a strong academic emphasis would find schools and teachers willing and 1982 PRESCRIPTION FOR EXPENSIVE EDUCATION 161 eager to provide it. Those who wanted various kinds of manual and tech nical training would have that pro vided as well.

The greatest changes, however, would most likely be in non-school ing education. This would be the case, especially, if all elements of compul sion were removed from education and the notion abandoned of educa tion as something to be publicly pro vided. It is difficult for any of us to imagine now the distortions that compulsion has wrought in the ac quisition of learning. Our system of education is the re sult of a century and a half of grad ual growth and proliferation. As a consequence, few, if any, of those now living have experienced education without decisive elements of com pulsion. It has conditioned our thinking to the use of force far be yond what the state requires. For example, privately financed schools are likely to be modeled on state schools, in ways that might be avoidable even in the present conl pulsory setting. In any case, we have become habituated to the use of compulsion in education and find :it difficult to imagine education with out it.

Ways of Self-Education There are many alternatives to schooling as a means of getting an education, both potential and ac tual. Training in the home and apprentice ship ihave already been dis cussed. Every sort of information imaginable iis available to anyone who can read. Books, magazines, and newspapers abound. Television of fers considerable potentiality for ed ucation. All sorts of mechanical de vices have been invented which can aid the willing learner. Seminars and lectures provide learning within a social setting. Once the ~ndividual and family assume the main responsibility for education and we begin to treat it once again as something to be de sired, sought after, and mastered, many new aids to learning may be made more g¢nerally available. The widespread practice, particularly by government, i of rewarding quantity of time spent at school rather than the quality of learning, may not ac tually discourage self-education, but it certainly offers no spur to it. A widespread r¢versal of this practice should do much to stimulate people to improve themselves.

My main point, however, is that tax-supported, subsidized, and com pulsory schooling is a prescription for expensiv¢ education. Not only does it place the major burden of paying for education on the public at large but ]t also bends us toward the most expensive method of pro viding it, namely, schooling. Above all, the provision of education, espe cially schoolilng, has been substan tially removen from the market.

162 THE FREEMAN March A Hampered Market We have a severely hampered market in education. It is hampered, in the first place, by compulsory at tendance laws. These, in turn, are supplemented by child labor laws and the minimum wage. In consequence, large numbers of children are forced to attend school who have little or no inclination or interest in learn ing. This hampers learning in the schools, turning them. into places of confinement rather than learning in many cases, and saddles the public with costs of the undertaking. The market is hampered by the difficulties which private schools have of going into and staying in business in the face of free public schools. It is hampered by teacher certification requirements which keep many who would teach .from entering the field. It is hampered by pay scales which place a premium on amount of schooling. It is ham pered because state rules force so much of the effort at education into the framework of schooling.

As a result of the severely ham pered market, there are many ques tions that cannot be answered. For example, how large is the market for schooling? Probably, it is much smaller than the number presently attending school, else compulsory attendance laws might be superflu ous. (It should be noted, however, that compulsory attendance serves other important functions for those concerned with maintaining state power over schooling. Compulsory attendance is the main basis for government controls over private schools.) There is just no way of knowing under the present system. Nor can we do anything other than guess at the market for other ap proaches to education than school ing because of the preference ac corded schooling. No Competitive Pricing How inexpensive could schooling be? The hampered market does not enable us to answer the question. There is not the level of competition that would provide the answer. Many would-be teachers cannot enter the field. Compulsory attendance pro vides an artificially higher demand than would actually exist. Fixed pay scales and union contracts take the determination of teacher and ad ministrator wages out of the mar ket. The use of buildings only as schools increases the cost of facili ties.

But even if we could determine under the present system how inex pensive schooling might be, we would still not know how inexpensive edu cation might be. And that is surely the most important question. The answers to all these questions can only be found in a free market for education. We have all.become accustomed to the use of force in the providing of 1982 PRESCRIPTION FOR EXPENSIVE EDUCATION 163 education. And, since we are accu.s tomed to it, we tend to accept the consequences as more or less un avoidable. Moreover, we tend to make comparisons only among state supported systems of education. Hence, we are unlikely to notice how expensive they are, if a system conn. pares favorably with other like sys tems. We think of paring costs and improving education within the sarrle framework as do members of boards of education of tax-supported schools. That is why I introduced this pie(~e with the story of the typing table.

Few of us are accustomed to return ing a piece of merchandise which we want to the store to pick up one just like it in order to have a price ad justment made. To do it that way is clearly a prescription for expensive merchandise. I wanted to invite at tention to the possibility that it is possible to go about something in an unnecessarily expensive and ineffL cient way. We know that, of course, but it requires some hard thinking to see how and why in a long-estab lished system. Education is, of course, different in many important respects from a typing table. It is infinitely more complex, more subtle, more varied, and requires much more effort to at tain, to mention a few of the ways. In one respect at least, however, they are alike. They are both economic goods. That is, both are scarce, are in demand, and are costly. FalseSignal$ The provision of education free or highly subsi<iized to the recipients, at taxpayer expense, ofcourse, makes it appear that education is not an economic good. It appears to be a surplus whioh must be sold at cut rates or given away to be rid of it.

More, since many of the recipients are compellep to partake, whether they will or not, it looks for all the world like an economic "bad." On the other hand, it has. been pro moted as soyp.ething of such value and importance that whether or not one should have it should not be left to the choice of childt:en or their par ents. In short, it was largely re moved from, the category of eco nomic goods. This was nowhere better signified than in a publicity campaign that went on for many years. Some orga nization would compile figures on how much each state paid teachers on the average, and how much was spent per ch~ld on the average. It might be supposed that the purpose of these figures was to discover which states were accomplishing the task most economically. It might be sup posed, further, that responsible offi cials from the states that were spending more would hasten to study how those states that were spending less were managing to do it. That was not the point at all, however.

Those states that spent the most got the highest ratings, while those that 164 THE FREEMAN spent the least got the lowest. That had all the cogency of attempting to prove that tomatoes taste better in the winter because they cost more. What it does prove is that those who publicized the ratings were deter mined to ignore economic consider ations. So far as I am aware, there is no necessary correlation between the amount of money spent and the quality of the education obtained. That it is an economic good simply means that, other things being equal, those minded to be economical will prefer the less expensive approaches to education to the more expensive. Two things mislead us as to what is economical in education at present. One is the effort to quantify educa tion by schooling. The other is that the recipients do not usually bear much of the cost of the schooling. Thus, so far as schooling is consid ered to be an economic good, it ap pears to be quite a bargain. To rem edy that, or rid ourselves of the illusion, it is necessary to think in terms of actual costs.

The prescription for expensive ed ucation is to take it out of the home and market. The prescription for in expensive and effective education is to restore authority and responsibil ity for it to the parents and recipi ents and permit it to be provided in the market. i IDEAS ON LIBERTY The Case for the Private School A CENTURY ago education was almost entirely privately supported and controlled throughout the United States. Indeed, it was not until the early years of the nineteenth century that the first free school (for Ne groes, incidentally) was established in New York City. Schools were operated by religious organizations or individual educators. The parents directly paid tuition with occasional benefactions from grateful alumni. The private schools turned out fewer graduates proportionately than now emerge from the government (public) school system, but there was no criticism that these could not properly read, write, spell, and figure, nor that they were ignorant of geography, civics, and the great Chris tian principles that motivate men. Under this diverse system based on various educational philosophies and with widely varying curricula, the percentage of literate persons was not only large and increasing but regimentation of instruction was impossible, and there was wide exper imentation. This diversity by its very nature enriched our culture.

GEORGE S. SCHUYLER Brian Summers 12.1 IW. MtUN ;f>HU$", JOE'S PAYCHECK //"/~~~~(>~~ EARLY one evening I was on my wa.y to the bank, when my friend Joe greeted me with some good news. "I got a raise today," he an nounced, holding up his pay enve lope. "I never thought I'd be able to support my family so well. Sure beats when I was a kid." "That's great!" I replied as we walked along. "These days we cer tainly do live better, even though our parents worked longer hours." "Ofcourse," he answered. ''We have better technology. The tools and equipment we use make us more productive. In the old days, workers had to perform most jobs by hand. It used to take a whole crew to do what Mr. Summers is a member of the staff of The Foun dation for Economic Education. one man now.does faster with a bull dozer." "But why does your company pay you more just 'because technology has made you more productive? Your employer, after all, is the one who provided the lnachines."