An echo, not a choice

Policy Review, Nov/Dec 1996 by Dewey, Douglas D

School vouchers merely repeat the errors of public education.

MOST people would agree that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to keep and bear arms. Yet not even its most zealous defenders would construe this right to mean that the government should supply everyone with a carbine. Not so, it seems, with education. Most people agree that children have a right to an education, but we have come to accept that the government itself should do the educating, compel all children to attend, and require all citizens to pay for it.

This error in logic has had calamitous consequences. The takeover of education by the states in the mid-19th century and the resulting abdication of authority by the family set in motion a crippling concatenation of usurpation and surrender that continues to this day. Now education is an entitlement claimed by most, yet a right exercised by few.

There was a time when Americans knew the difference between rights and entitlements. A right used to be understood as a claim in justice, our concept of which flowed from tradition and natural law. As Alexander Hamilton put it, "The sacred rights of mankind are written, as with a sun beam in the whole volume of human nature, by the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." Our constitutional republican tradition informs us that God, not the state, is the source of rights. The state's role, then, is not to bestow rights, but to protect them by enacting laws consistent with a common tradition of justice and by enforcing those laws impartially.

In a totalitarian regime, by contrast, the source of rights is the all-powerful state, which permits citizens to exercise them only in its interest. The state may decide, for instance, that an armed populace threatens its power, and so suppress the right to keep arms. Similarly, it might decide that a populace able to feed itself independent of the state is not in its interest and suppress the right to own lands. But since starving people cannot labor for the state and are apt to grow restive, the state takes pains to feed them, while declaring solemnly their "right" to eat. Not surprisingly, the accumulation of power by the state gets a little easier with each new intrusion, each new surrender. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, "The natural progress of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield."

Alas, the state may decide that a highly literate, self-reliant, and pious people is not in its interest, and gradually usurp the right of parents to educate their own children. How? By declaring it a "right"-an entitlement, actually-and making it free.

The state funding of education, then, is not an act of benign concern for the cultivation of citizenship, but a hostile assumption of ownership. Before the state began to fund schooling, education was free to the public as a whole; individual families and communities bore the cost while exercising the rights of their children to be educated.

In his book Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder recognized the social value of parents' retaining ownership of their children's education: "Nowhere is the vitality of families today more dramatically expressed than in the inspiring willingness of millions of American parents to save up to ensure a safe and rigorous education for their children. Moreover, this willingness is the highest sign of social responsibility. In their efforts to educate their offspring as best they can, whatever the cost, these families are making a major investment in the future of the country, and in the human capital on which coming generations will depend."

Right now, the parents of 6 million American children (about 12 percent of the total) do not ask government to educate them. These parents own their children's education, either by teaching them at home, or "contracting out" to a private school. This number grows every year, and if conservatives could rally around a single goal, it should be to push that number ever higher. Perhaps one day we will speak of the 12 percent who still depend on government for schooling and worry about what can be done to help those poor folks.

Many of us would say that education is the most serious, intimate, and sacred of all duties that parents owe their children. All parents must ensure that our children eat well, wear clean clothes, and sleep in a warm and secure home. Yet these duties are rather mundane compared to the awesome task of imparting knowledge and skills for selfreliance, instilling habits of virtue, and (many of us believe) preparing their souls for eternity. If we do not expect parents to pay for their own children's education, what credible argument can we then make that they should pay for their food, clothing, shelter, or medicine?

It is not hard to see that once the government had usurped the solemn right of families to educate their children, it was only a matter of time and effort before it could have all the rest. And really, once the government took charge of controlling the minds of our children, the rest is mere table scraps.