Roger Scruton at Right Reason has one of the best discussions of home and private schooling that I've ever come across. In his post he explains the position that I've had but couldn't put into words.
I think it would help the conservative cause to recognize the enduring validity of Hegel’s tri-partite distinction (put forward in the Philosophy of Right), between family, civil society and state, and the contrasting and mutually dependent forms of obligation to which those three spheres give rise. For it is the false dichotomy between family and state that has led to so much of the conflict over education. The third and crucial term has been missing from the debate.The family is a sphere of affection and duty, governed by obligations that have never been chosen. The state is a structure of command, organised by law, and directed from the centre by legislators and bureaucrats. Between the two lies civil society, which is a system of voluntary association, organised by good will, and directed by local initiatives in which those who have an interest in some outcome are also involved in producing it. Home schooling is an attempt to rescue children from the state and to return them to the family. But it would be sufficient to return them to civil society, in the form of the locally organised private school, where parents play a role and contribute directly to maintaining the teachers who run the operation. ...
Nietzsche pointed out long ago that, in a democracy, state institutions will quickly be colonised by resentment. (He used the French word, ressentiment, in order to emphasize the deep and pre-rational sources of the emotion.) Not able to win people by the normal means of cooperation, concession and mutual respect, the resentful will seek to co-opt the power of the state in order to break down resistance to their punitive goals. In the sphere of education the power of the state is enormous. Legal measures compel parents to educate their children, deprive them of any choice among the schools offered by the state, and impose a curriculum and timetable that transmit the secular and libertine morality best suited to inducing dependency on the state. I don’t say that there is an intention to produce dependency on the state: dependency arises by ‘an invisible hand’, once the egalitarians have succeeded in taking control of the educational network.
Civil society, which flourishes through cooperation, emulation and a forgiving acceptance of talent greater than your own, does not make room for the resentful. Hence, since education is dedicated to achievement, knowledge and the growth of human potential, it should be entrusted to civil society and not to the state. This means that we should encourage the growth of private schools, which will rescue not only the children of the wealthy and the highly educated, but the children of everyone. Home schooling aims to recapture for the family children who had been confiscated by the state. It is, it seems to me, only an interim measure, which must make way, in due course, for the private school. In a flourishing private school children will be protected from state control while gaining valuable social resources from outside the family.
Read the whole thing. I hate public education, but I've never been comfortable with "pure" home schooling; however, I really like the idea of locally controlled private schools that pool the resources of the community for the good of the students -- that's what public schools are supposed to be, and maybe were until Nietzsche's predictions ran their course. I'm not a fan of Nietzsche, but he's got modern bureaucracy nailed.
In the future, when I refer to eliminating the public school system, this is the post I'm going to link to to explain the alternative to my critics. Schools must be taken from the state and returned to the sphere of civil society.
(HT: Max Goss.)
I think some perspective is required here. Public education isn't well-represented by the extremes of either its successes or failures.
This local control and pooling of community resources is in fact how a lot of rural and small-town school districts are run.
Mark: I'm sure that's true. The behemoth LAUSD with ~700,000 students is a different story.
I've had a child in three different public school systems in Texas. The externals were very different, depending on the incomes of the students' parents. But there was one constant: The teachers had zero interest in responding to the parents' wishes. They had no incentive to do so.
Every teacher I spoke with (and there were many) was quite certain that their employer was some combination of the union of the government---but most certainly not me, the student's father. In a majority of cases, the teacher's attitude towards me was the same as any other state employee: a veneer of politeness atop an ocean of contempt and passive aggression. They'll smile; they'll nod. They'll appear to empathize. But an the end of the conversation the answer will be exactly what it was at the beginning: The state has determined the kind of education your child should receive, and you're going to pay for it.
If you don't want that education for your child, then 1) you can homeschool, if you have tons of spare time and energy for such a project, or 2) you can buy a second education at a private school, if you have enough money. But two options are most certainly not available: 1) You may not avoid paying for public education, and 2) you may not have any significant impact on how or what your child is taught.
Very little of this is the fault of teachers. The problem is in the unions. Eventually they'll fall, but not in the foreseeable future.
So then the question is how much better the rural schools do than the inner-city ones when participant wealth (how wealthy the average district student's parents are) and per-student expenditures are factored in. If it's significant, it might at least be a good argument to at least de-consolidate large school districts.
BB: I agree that unions are the problem. Most unions are parasitic organizations that feed off their members.
I've worked with the teachers, support staff, and administration of four public school districts in Wisconsin. I've seen the internal politics, union maneuverings, and school board meetings of one of those districts.. which happens to be my current employer. Based on my experiences, I've drawn the following conclusions: (I'm a non-union employee)
- Unions are often the problem, as they tie the hands of the administration and the local school board through often unreasonable salary and benefit demands and by erecting unnecessary barriers between the administration and teachers, secretaries, aides, custodians, etc. who are either incompetent, lazy, or abusing the system.
- Parents who are involved in their child's public education are often quite pleased with it (among districts I'm familiar with, anyway). Parents who aren't really involved in their child's public education tend to be the ones who complain. They never come to school board meetings, vote people in or out of the school board, go to parent-teacher conferences, etc.
- Many community members support their public school district when they have children attending school in the district... but then start criticizing the district after the graduation of their child(ren). They start voting down referendums (no matter how well they're justified), stop supporting school board members that used to have their vote, etc.
We have home schooled, private Christian schooled, and public schooled our 4 kids at various times. I think the choices we made had more to do with their personalities than anything else.
Currently our youngest is in a home school co-op. 16 kids from about 10 families meet in one of the families homes 3 1/2 days per week. One parent is the principal and has credentials. She plans curricula for each child based on their skills and talents.
The other day and a half, the parents teach their own kids at home. It is excellent, but hard to replicate.
Mark, maybe in your district parents are encouraged to be involved, but in mine, parents are not. I wasn't even allowed to tour classrooms at any school (except the charter school where we ended up sending our daughter). Our local public school sent home a contract with every child for parents to sign, that basically told the parents to butt out of every educational decision.
Going to PTA meetings and getting to vote on whether to have the school banner be red or blue is not involvement. Last year at the charter school I was on the curriculum committee. I used my mathematical expertise to see to it that the entire school got a rigorous math curriculum. THAT'S parental involvement.
I realize there are pushy parents-- I've even encountered a few of these in my teaching at the university level-- but to completely cut parents out of the loop to avoid dealing with a few fruit-loops is just astounding.
WH: It's not just my district... it's many districts in Wisconsin.
In fact, there's a sign on every outside door that says "Welcome to your school."
Mark: I think many of our disagreements on education come from our different locations.
MW: Indeed.