Myron Lieberman, Public Education: An Autopsy, (Harvard
Univ. Press, 1993), 379 pp., Index.[1]
Reviewed by W. B. Allen
Market based schooling
sounds like a contradiction in terms to public school teachers’ unions; it
sounds like a non sequitur to
hard-pressed denominational schools; it’s Greek to the average taxpayer; but
it’s the next step to education critic, Myron Lieberman. Eight years ago Lieberman published Beyond Public Education, in which he
prophesied the emergence of a market-based, non-establishment challenge to the
clichés about educational reforms which flooded the nation in the years
following publication of A Nation At Risk (the Reagan Administration’s “call to arms”
in the education wars). Lieberman
discounted the reform rhetoric rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. The fundamental disorders of public
education were intrinsic to the
medium—that is, education as an organized state monopoly was doomed to fail. He reasoned, however, that the sinking of
public education need not cause the drownings of millions of youths, if only
Americans reacted in a timely fashion to shape educational life rafts founded
on market principles.
Now we read from Lieberman’s
pen the obsequies of public education.
His new book, Public
Education: An Autopsy, reveals that
the life rafts have not been timely crafted to avoid dashing the hopes of yet
another generation of youths against rocks of educational ineptitude. Thus, as public education fails and dies it
carries along the ghosts of natural abilities atrophied in young children who
could not escape in time.
Who are the young victims of
a deadly public education? Some are
youths who could build productive lives
for themselves by entering the work force, but who are barred by law from doing
so, while simultaneously being locked in compulsory schools in which no
learning occurs. Some are youths who
could profit from schools if schools were permitted to profit from teaching
them—who could sharpen skills of expression and inquiry by exercises calculated
to serve that goal. Others of them
possess every means to excel save the material and are abandoned to schools
that eschew excellence. All of them are
youths needing moral guidance to choose aright amid a welter of choices, but
who have been abandoned to secular indifference to every choice but the
politically correct one.
In relating this story,
Lieberman more forcefully details the errors of public education’s supposed
saviors than the sins of its defenders.
Conservatives who nibbled at the union-fed bait of “public schools
choice” as a counter to demands for “choice in education,” voucher supporters
like those in Milwaukee who agreed to experiments in which the odds are stacked
against the pitiful handful who are excepted from the prevailing public school
orthodoxy, and non-profit schools which believe that open competition (and
comparisons) among schools would undermine their position all serve as examples
in this work of a “reform” psychology that cannot solve the problems, nor
longer delay the demise, of public education.
The argument is
insistent: education cannot be limited
to the public and non-profit sectors as the only alternatives. Lieberman insists on a three-sector
analysis, in which schools for profit operate freely as the only means to
understands how far we may go in changing our approach. In doing this, he returns us to the
pre-public education world, in which “for profit” and “not for profit” schools
occupied the whole territory. This
changed when public subventions for education purposes were found to be going
to schools Americans did not wish to encourage: mainly the numerous schools of the large-scale Catholic
immigration of the 19th Century.
To avoid spreading Catholic doctrine, Americans began to develop public
schools, which were no less Protestant than the private schools before, and to
deny subventions to all private schools.
The return to public subventions for private schools in our own era—the
voucher movement—raises anew all the old questions, but Lieberman insists that
we will not understand the possibilities unless we factor in “for profit” or
market-based schools.
This book details in a
general fashion the relevant comparisons of public and private schools, showing
that, even though many costs of public education go unreported, it is still the
case that private schooling is probably less costly than the reported public
school figures. Furthermore, it is
clear that arguments about the selectivity of private schools cannot explain
the often superior accomplishments of private school students. Unfortunately, however, the relatively few
private, not-for-profit schools that do
exist in the two-sector framework do benefit from the existence of public
schools in certain respects (such as not having to provide for special
education) and consequently do not exist in a situation of robust, market
competition. Moreover, the lack of
control which parents have over their public school tax dollars (let alone the
absence of choice in schools) is by no means mitigated by the “freedom” to
spend separately for private school education.
Hence, the market based proposal is as much a question of power as it is
a question of education, since Lieberman would open up public financing to be
directed by parental choices in the same manner as other public benefits—i.e.,
medicine—are directed by individual choices.
If the time is right for
such a revolution, it must derive from the “death of public education.” But an “autopsy” must convey the cause of
death. What seems to have passed away—and
Lieberman seems right about this—is the political momentum sustaining the state
education monopoly. No longer does the
great middle class automatically identify the state monopoly as the key to a democratic rite of passage. Thus, the appeal of private schooling to the
middle class and the poor, as well as the burgeoning significance of home
schooling, indicate a swing in opinion powerful enough to deprive the state
monopoly of its political base.
In turn, the loss of the
great political base explains why the public education monopoly has turned
itself into an NRA-style political lobby,
scrapping with might and main to compel or manipulate public bodies into
preserving its iron grip on the souls of young folk. The teachers’ unions are no longer even potentially professional
groups; they are mere interest groups.
As such, they fight for their own material interests; the children are
but expendable pawns in that game and the state monopoly would apparently
happily dispose of them if it could think of a means to keep the tax stream
flowing without the children.
Middle class voters have
lost interest in supporting educators simply because “educators deserve a
decent living.” Partly this results
from demographic change; fewer of the middle
class have children to educate. More
importantly, though, it results from deep-seated skepticism that condom-toting,
relativity-teaching educators have anything decent to impart to the young. Increasingly, the public educators offer a
bargain that would offend even a Faust:
give us a decent living in return for indecent catechumens! The middle class has finally calculated that
it can obtain the same results while saving its money!
In the last analysis,
however, it is far less important to know why public education fails than to
know what education works. That is the
greatest hope for a market-based system, in which all participants would be
pressed to make clear what it means for educators to succeed. I admire Lieberman’s unwillingness to
dictate educational goals. He seems
inspired by a rightful disinclination to encourage more “reform talk,” more
“how to” nostrums that only side-track serious efforts to change schooling into
ritualized efforts to reform public education.
That is a serious fault of our age, and all should think thrice before
venturing proposals which suggest that minor modifications can improve the
state education monopoly. Nonetheless,
I must say what I have long been persuaded of in this regard, partly because I
know it calls for no minor modifications.
Children only learn from
worthy, morally serious adults.
Period. For a child to desire to
learn, the child must believe that the adult(s) undertaking his
formation believe that it is important for the child to be good. No one can impart that certainty to a child
apart from conveying to the child that we humans are not the disposes of our
selves, our fates—that we have been engendered within designs infinitely
greater than ourselves and with a concern for us that offers opportunity for us
to merit distinguishing grace. There is
where one finds the mysterious “motivation to learn” so dear to the educational
researchers heart.
W. B. Allen
James Madison College