As with much in this world there are two aspects to education, the individual and the social.

From the individual perspective it can be argued that people should be left to educate their children or themselves as they see fit. The most extreme version of this would see no government run education and all education conducted privately. Few, however, of even the most rabid free marketeers advocate this. Though many do advocate the next level of free marketing in which government allocation of education budgets is given to parents as an "education voucher" to spend on their children's education as they see fit. The state of Alaska operates on this basis for example.

The inevitable consequence of any maximizing of freedom to educate as and how parents wish is of course that those with the resources will put more into education for their children with the result that social divisions are maintained and most likely increased. This is a broad result that individual intelligence and poor but keen parents can do little to modify.

While those eager to lower their own perceived tax liabilities and perhaps devote more to seeing their own off spring get ahead may support such freedom, society as such cannot afford to allow education to slip so far into the anarchy of market freedom. This is because society as a whole needs two basic things from its education system, a reasonable standard of education for all and at least part of its populace educated in a useful manner. A fully private education system cannot guarantee either.

Without some public education provided free or cheaply, too many people would fail to receive any education or a marginal one at best and for modern societies this would be a dangerous waste of human resources. Even a bus driver needs to be able to read. The second social need is for people to be trained in a manner that either makes them capable and willing to drive buses. Private education by virtue of its expensive, competitive basis strives to produce those who can enter the most lucrative occupations in order to justify the investment of their parents and reproduce the class cycle. In the nature of things, lucrative occupations are those only a few can or should do, else they would quickly cease to be very lucrative. An education system that produced only an elite on one hand and an ignorant mass on the other would quickly sink back into a pre-modern state.

Thus most modern societies compromise between the two perspectives. Individuals

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Does private or public education serve society best??
We want to hear your view. Write now!