The Good Canadian

The below is inspired by this recent bit of madness brought to my attention by "Dave" of the Dust My Broom and Bruce at Autonomous Source.

The public reason for public education is compassion and justice.  The state must provide education because of what economists term "market failure."  The phrase is loaded and intentionally so.  To describe something as a failure is of course to implicitly establish a standard of success.  The market is only a mechanism and it guarantees nothing.  The ability to buy and sell freely is in the end all a free market entails.  What men do with such freedom is something else.  They may behave foolishly or rationally.  What is certain is that if a society is composed of short-sighted fools its government will be no better composed.  Even if one could imagine a race of Zarathustras herding and directing the lesser beings into order, those lesser beings could never be human.  You cannot force men to be rational or good or honest, they must choose to think and behave. 

When markets fail it means only that human beings have failed another human being's, or a group of human beings', standard of the good, the right and the proper.  The alleged "market failure" in education is that a free market would not provide universal education.  In truth nothing can provide "education" for all citizens.  The state deals ultimately in force and force is a negative.  You can force attendance and compliance with certain rituals, such as homework, lectures and school assemblies, that knowledge is actually transfered from teacher to student is again something else.  All are provided for, then, by the state but it is not necessarily education.  A purely private and voluntary system could not guarantee universal attendance, nor could it guarantee education.  Nothing can guarantee education because education is a voluntary act on the part of student and teacher.  The question always brought up in discussions of public education is that the poor, however defined, would be unable to afford private schools.  Therefore public schools are a necessary.  This argument makes two assumptions. 

The first is that the state can command sufficient resources to allow all to attend school, again education cannot be guaranteed under any system, merely compulsory attendance.  The second is that private voluntary efforts could not insure that all students who wanted to could attend school.  The first assumption presupposes a society wealthy enough to allow for universal public education.  Despite the impeccable socialist credentials of six decades of Indian leaders, universal education is still elusive on the sub-continent.  Contrast this with the semi-capitalists countries of the early 20th century like Canada, Britain and the United States, where universal public education was a reality by at least 1914, if not earlier.  The second assumption is in fact correct.  A private voluntary system could never guarantee even anything so simple as universal attendance, in truth neither can the state.  Truancy remained a chronic problem in Western societies until after the Second World War, in others until virtually the entire population saw education as a value to their childrens' future lives, rather than as wasted years absorbing useless knowledge.   I exclude in this those who are derelict in their duties as parents, who fail to send their children to school out of indifference or callousness or stupidity. 

A society wealth enough to sustain a public education system, like a public health care system, is a society wealthy enough to do without it.  It entails that the critical mass of the adult population can generate enough wealth to educate their own children, with enough of a surplus to aid those parents who cannot.  What if the rich choose not to help the poor?  There is no guarantee of charity, of course, but let's be realistic for a moment.  For this to be an important roadblock in establishing a purely private, and purely voluntary system of education, one would have to imagine a society of tremendous callousness.  Outside of the worst totalitarian states this has never been the case.  One of the hallmarks of free societies is their tremendous generosity.  There is no nation, either in absolute or relative terms, by private or state means, that has been as generous as the United States of America.  Canada, Australia and Britain are not far behind under this rubric.  For the argument in favour of state financed education to work, one has to assume a perverse society where a comparatively healthy one now exists.  Despite making this unwarranted accusation against a free people the advocates of state education feel uncompelled to explain how their ideal might be corrupted.  How a near state monopoly on education might produce an uncontrollable bureaucracy, whose focus is on indoctrination of fashionable ideas on culture and politics, all the while neglecting the teaching of basic language and math skills.  Yet this is the reality of most public education systems in time, to a greater or lesser extent.  In other words, the defenders of state education ignore its obvious defects while inventing a fantasy world to attack its most logical alternative.

But economics is only the stick of the rationale for public education, the carrot is enlightenment.  Aristotle is suppose to have said that he gained this by philosophy: That he obeyed the law through understanding rather than fear.  That is the dream and real goal of public education - and has been since its inception.  A purely economic argument would most probably have produced a mix-private public system where only the poor would have attended state schools, an approach similar to public housing.  From Thomas Jefferson to Horace Mann to Egerton Ryerson to Bill Davis, the goal of public education has been to create democratic citizens.  Each had their own versions and the needs of the contemporary workforce were never far from mind, but the goal was indoctrination of a critical mass of the population with an ideal of citizenship.  The system of state financing was designed specifically to support that end.  Any parent wishing to pay for private instruction is still compelled to pay for a spot in the public system as well.  In effect they must pay for something they don't use or want.  The reason for this cannot alone be that of subsidizing the poor parent.  If this was the case then parents choosing a private school could opt to lower their education taxes by some proportionate amount, reflecting the fact that they are not consuming school resources and instead freeing them up for others.  The taxation system is designed to compel near universal attendance.  Thus the doctrines of public education are delivered to virtually all, the perfect vehicle to create a "democratic citizenry."  Only a small elite, currently about 5% of the school age population in Ontario, can opt out of the system, often at great sacrifice to parents and children.

In no other part of Western society, with the exception, perhaps, of Canadian health care, do we tolerate anything like public education.  A near monopoly whose political allies have sweeping power to throttle its competition, through the tax code and what can only be termed the school "inspection" racket.  This monopoly has existed for so long and been so pervasive that few can imagine an alternative.  In fact its opponents are decried as fanatics, heartless or elitist, if they're lucky.  A halo hangs over the unionized, bureaucratized nightmare of public education.  The willing and able are trapped with the criminal and incompetent until the age of 16.  Graduation is guaranteed, the certificate of completion in all honesty nothing more than a certificate of attendance, and for that only a very minimal record is required.  It is a travesty of the very idea of education.  All in the name of creating good citizens of a great democracy.  Yet even the very concept, the ideal itself, is an inversion.  It is the people in a free society who dictate to the government how it should act.  Just as the idea of a Ministry of Culture, or Heritage, is an abomination, because it is not the duty or prerogative of government to tell its masters what their culture should be, so the same applies to ideals of good citizenship.  It is for We the People to tell our servants in government what it means to be Canadian, not the other way around.  The people can err and often do.  Our governments, being drawn from us, can in the end do no better. 

Commenter Themis, who happens to be the designer of this blog, is a public school teacher and has this to say:

As some of the other authors of this blog know, I am now employed as a public school teacher in the States.  This choice of job was in part financial and in part a mix of curiosity and personal education.  In the future, I would prefer to work in a private school environment (and much later have my own school).  However, I felt it would be useful for me to experience, first hand, exactly the problems (and potential benefits) of being in a public school, as a teacher.  In the past 5 weeks I've realized a few things that should be obvious to most people that agree with Publius' position.

" The willing and able are trapped with the criminal and incompetent until the age of 16. "

1) The amount of time that a teacher can spend with students who want to learn, much less those students who excel at learning, is cut almost in HALF due to the pervasive problems of disruption from hostile and apathetic students.  In class, I find my time being sucked away by these students who demand too much attention, simply to keep them on task so they will be *as minimal* a disturbance to others as possible. 

After class, during conference time or after school, the time spent on disciplinary phone calls home, paper work and trying to keep track of which students need to make up what (due to excessive truancy) steals away almost all the time I *NEED* as a new teacher for creating lesson plans.

This was a harsh lesson for me.  The amount of helplessness I felt for the other 90% of my students was quickly turning to anger... an emotion incompatible with student discipline.  Since the second week of school, I began using any resource I could to stop these students.  Some of them were given detention (a bland threat for most habitual trouble makers).  Some were sent to the office (some of them would rather be there anyway).  At least one was taken from my room by a police officer.  Many have begun to taste an older form of discipline, such as being thrown out of class into the hall or having to stay after class and pick up text books.

I keep hearing that new teachers face all sorts of problems like this, but I refuse to keep such a high amount of my attention on these students if it means stopping my instruction.  The impossibility of public education, however, is that these students can never be fully kicked out of school, leaving the parents to find more appropriate solutions on their own time and money.. 

We can put them in In School Suspension, send them home for extended suspension, or even remove them to an alternative school.. but never for an entire year.  At some point, these students who are incapable of interacting with the rest of the student population, are simply dumped back into the system.  Teachers have to figure out how to keep them in order as well as catch them up (sometimes 6 weeks worth of work).  Both, in a realistic sense, are borderline impossible.  Assuming the teacher is giving instruction in a proper hierarchical fashion, it is not appropriate to say, "Well, they shouldn't be held accountable for the previous material," because they will not be able to understand the new material without what came before.

What is a teacher to do?  I can't simply forget about the problem (behavior) students.  If I do, I can't teach my class.  Even when they're not in my class, I know they're coming back.  Either I devote an even larger portion of my day to those students and privately tutor them in an attempt to connect on them at some social/emotional level with the goal of reducing the behaviors some small degree (as well as keeping them up to date on my curriculum) or the problem completely takes over my class, again, when they return.

In the horrendous excuses for teacher education/certification classes, one keeps hearing a veritable hodgepodge of idealistic (yet philosophically disconnected, irrational) jargon about how to "reach every student".  Suggestions for dealing with disruptive classroom behavior include: move desks around so you can walk, recognize diversity, consider home situations, remember biological developmental stages...

Not once, in all the courses I've taken, has a single instructor ever dared to mention that the actual content being offered has anything to do with student responsibility.  Not once, in all these courses, has anyone ever suggested that academic standards have anything to do with all these disruptions.  And not once has anyone ever DARED to suggest that a system where teachers can't give proper academic marks (nothing below a 50 for a report card), can't use academic consequences for disruptive behavior, and can't permanently toss students out of a classroom... might, just might have something to do with the apathy of parental involvement.

I absolutely love being a teacher.  The thrill I get from even a single student who asks a question, based upon her own curiosity due to some tiny thing I've mentioned, is one of the sweetest experiences in life.  Watching my students struggle through the beginning stages of a new concept to the last moment when I've asked them to think imaginatively and critically about that same topic holds the same joy for me, as if I had also just experienced that same intellectual triumph.  The pleads of "read it again!" or "say that again!" or even "how do you spell 'obnoxiously'?" are a rare form of music I know I am personally directing.

In a sense though, teaching in a public school is like directing a symphony next to the highway.  A few instruments will still be heard, but the end performance could have been vastly superior given a different location.  The obvious enormous distractions and detriments are offered to me as normal and expected and in the end, the advice offered to me is about as effective as putting up a fence next to the highway.