I quote Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, p. 156-157:
The public school bureaucrat, for his part, is faced with a host of crucial and controversial decisions in deciding on the pattern of formal schooling in his area. He must decide: Should schooling be—traditional or progressive? free enterprise or socialistic? competitive or egalitarian? liberal arts or vocational? segregated or integrated? sex education or not? religious or secular? or various shades between these poles. The point is that whatever he decides, and even if he decides according to the wishes of the majority of the public, there will always be a substantial number of parents and children who will be totally deprived of the kind of education they desire. If the decision is for traditional discipline in the schools, then the more progressive-minded parents lose out, and vice versa; and the same is true for all the other critical decisions. The more that education becomes public, the more will parents and children be deprived of the education they feel they need. The more that education becomes public, the more will heavy-handed uniformity stamp out the needs and desires of individuals and minorities.
And this is true in all aspects of life, not just education, so that government leads to a war of all against all, the very opposite of peaceful society.
Consequently, the greater the sphere of public as opposed to private education, the greater the scope and intensity of conflict in social life. For if one agency is going to make the decision: sex education or no, traditional or progressive, integrated or segregated, etc., then it becomes particularly important to gain control of the government and to prevent one’s adversaries from taking power themselves. Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each others’ throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way.
Contrast the deprivation and intense social conflict inherent in government decision-making with the state of affairs on the free market. If education were strictly private, then each and every group of parents could and would patronize its own kind of school. A host of diverse schools would spring up to meet the varied structure of educational demands by parents and children. Some schools would be traditional, others progressive. Schools would range through the full traditional/progressive scale; some schools would experiment with egalitarian and gradeless education, others would stress the rigorous learning of subjects and competitive grading; some schools would be secular, others would emphasize various religious creeds; some schools would be libertarian and stress the virtues of free enterprise, others would preach various kinds of socialism.
The common answer is that the Jewish people are responsible for one another, “Areivim zeh lazeh”. Therefore, we must take the reins and ensure even “Tinokos Shenishbu” get a minimum of Jewish education. However, the very means used to that end (secular laws, jails, secular taxes, etc.) are halachically illegitimate. Besides, have the successes been greater than the losses? Not hardly. The accusation flung at the National-Religious (Dati Leumi) to wit the “sectoral bridge” they speak of is mostly a one-way bridge for their youth out of observance applies to the Charedi political support of government education from the beginning, as well.
I don’t understand. The Charedi parties surely can’t support missionizing for the sake of money, so how can they support the Israeli Ministry of Education? On the other hand, why do they oppose female army conscription even for the secular?
In fact, if we let people arrange their own schooling, the results would be far better, since the majority are already somewhat Jewishly traditional. It is only since “One size fits all” we find a tiny minority successfully campaigning against so-called “Hadatah” (supposedly creeping religious influence in the army and schools).
Rothbard continues:
Let us consider, for example, the structure of the magazine or book publishing industry today, remembering too that magazines and books are themselves an extremely important form of education. The magazine market, being roughly free, contains all manner of magazines to suit a wide variety of tastes and demands by consumers: there are nationwide, all purpose magazines; there are liberal, conservative, and all manner of ideological journals; there are specialized scholarly publications; and there are a myriad of magazines devoted to special interests and hobbies like bridge, chess, hi-fi, etc. A similar structure appears in the free book market: there are wide circulation books, books appealing to specialized markets, books of all ideological persuasions. Abolish public schools, and the free, varied, and diverse magazine and book markets would be paralleled by a similar kind of “school market.” In contrast, if there were only one magazine for each city or state, think of the battles and conflicts that would rage: Should the magazine be conservative, liberal, or socialist; how much space should it devote to fiction or bridge, etc.? The pressures and conflicts would be intense, and no resolution would be satisfactory, for any decision would deprive countless numbers of people of what they want and require. What the libertarian is calling for, then, is not as outré as it might at first appear; what he is calling for is a school system as free and varied as most other educational media are today.
To focus again on other educational media, what then would we think of a proposal for the government, federal or state, to use the taxpayers money to set up a nationwide chain of public magazines or newspapers, and then to compel all people, or all children, to read them? Further, what would we think of the government outlawing all other newspapers and magazines, or at the very least outlawing all newspapers or magazines that do not come up to certain “standards” of what a government commission thinks children ought to read? Such a proposal would surely be regarded with horror throughout the country, yet this is precisely the sort of regime that government has established in the schools. A compulsory public press would rightly be considered an invasion of the basic freedom of the press; is not scholastic freedom at least as important as press freedom? Aren’t both vital media for public information and education, for free inquiry and search for the truth? In fact, the suppression of free schooling should be regarded with even greater horror than the suppression of a free press, since here the tender and unformed minds of children are more directly involved.
