Education, Rights, and the Work of Teaching

I don't think education is a right to somebody else's labor. That is what I mean by the objection: calling your need a right does not explain how it becomes another person's obligation to supply it. Food is indispensable too, but saying so hasn't answered the question of who must grow it for you. Education's importance is the beginning of an argument about how to provide it. It is not a magic phrase that gives the government the answer, the authority, and immunity from criticism all at once.

Then we get the promise of equal access to a quality education. Equal access to what? A seat, a textbook, six hours in a building? You can measure those things, and distributing them equally can still leave one student waiting through work they understand while another cannot follow the explanation. Calling the inputs equal does not tell us what either student is getting from them. Before making this promise the foundation of a system, we ought to know what fulfilling it would actually look like.

Quality creates an even bigger problem. A future aerospace engineer and a future plumber both need mathematics, but that does not make an identical mathematics education ideal for both. Consider a pipe: double its diameter and its cross-sectional area becomes four times as large. That is geometry with a reason to matter to someone working with pipes. An aircraft gives the same student a different set of questions. Which applications deserve sustained attention depends partly on the work the person wants to become capable of doing. A quality education has to be quality for somebody.

Hayek's knowledge problem enters because the information needed to make those decisions is dispersed among actual people. A general standard can name mathematics worth learning; it cannot know which explanation this child misunderstood or why a particular application suddenly matters to them. The development of individual potential requires that specific knowledge to reach the decision. Requiring the person who has it to obtain permission from someone who lacks it adds a political obstacle to an already demanding educational problem.

Notice that collecting more information does not by itself solve this. A teacher or parent can know perfectly well that a student needs a different starting point and still be required to deliver the prescribed lesson. Now the system has the knowledge and refuses to use it. I want authority close enough to the learner that noticing the problem can lead to changing the education. More detailed paperwork about a child is not a substitute for allowing someone to do something useful with what it says.

Calling education a public good doesn't finish the argument either. In the economic meaning of the term, a public good is nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. An hour of a teacher's individual attention cannot be given in full to two students simultaneously, and an institution can restrict admission. Instruction is not made a pure public good by being valuable. Knowledge can be shared widely and education can benefit people beyond the student, but those are different claims from saying that this particular service has those two properties.

Someone can still argue for public funding on other grounds. Fine, make that argument. Show why the proposed arrangement would work and why it should have authority over a family's choices. My objection is to treating a favorable label as though it settles the design of the institution. I want providers to earn families' business and families to be able to leave. The government does not become uniquely qualified to decide what your child needs because we all agree that learning matters.

Homeschooling gives the family a place to exercise that authority. They can spend an afternoon on the pipe problem, discover a missing foundation, and revise tomorrow's work without proving that every child in the district needs the same lesson. They remain responsible for finding good instruction. Freedom does not make them infallible; it gives them a way to correct an error once the child's work reveals it. A system that collects the error while forbidding a useful response has misunderstood what information is for.

The words right, equal, and public good each carry an argument, and I am asking that the argument actually be made. Who supplies the service, what is promised, who decides whether it worked, and what authority remains with the family when it does not? Those questions cannot be answered by the moral intensity with which we repeat the label. I want education supplied through arrangements people can choose and providers they can leave. The importance of a child's future is my reason for demanding that freedom, not a reason to surrender it.