Virtually all households with children including the poorest tend to give priority to education after food, clothing and shelter, and before discretionary consumption. For example my ancestors were Irish and Scottish immigrants and although poor, they always made education a very high priority. I worked with refugees, and always among their first priorities was education of their children. Even among the welfare classes, who have been fed the line that they are not responsible for their own lives, schooling is seen as very important.

“Our system is set up so that most parents feel they have no right to take on such a role.”

Why would they under the current system? It is built on the idea
a) that parents can’t be trusted to have their children’s best interests at heart, and that
b) the government knows and cares about children more than their own parents.

Yet how can anyone belief this foundational tenet of the whole system.

The truth is, we have government education not because that belief is true – it obviously isn’t – but because the first tendency of any identifiable group in democracy is to vote themselves benefits paid for by someone else. It is no coincidence that state education followed soon after universal suffrage. The majority simply voted that one of their biggest expenses should be shucked off onto everyone else. Their motives were, in other words, greed, self-interest, self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement, dog-eat-dog, lack of empathy, law of the jungle, not caring about others – exactly what you’re projecting onto the free market.

That is why we have our current system. And for what benefit? So that the parents of school-age children, as a political group, could give priority to discretionary consumption before their children’s education!

If we had a free market in education, a great diversity of services would spring up, from small individual tutors, to home-based services, to franchises with a successful template, to web-based, to vocation-based, to disabililty-focussed, other special needs, voluntary education such as we see on the web, to religious schools. Out of all this competition the best ideas would be adopted generally and become standard, while prices would fall, as we see on the web. The chronic zero-sum conflict between state-dependent groups would be gone.

Who really believes that state schools, teachers’ unions, and education departments would continue to be viable if they were answerable to parents and students? In the highly unlikely event that they were, of course they could continue.

To change the paradigm, we need those who favour state education
a) to acknowledge that they, and past people with the same opinions, have caused the problems they are now trying to fix with more of the same, and
b) to understand that the deprivation of opportunity is far worse and more generalized under the current system than it would be under a system of parents’ and students’ freedom and responsibility.

Antiseptic
“Peter, in fairness, I do hold the view that we as a society should support those who are incapable of doing so….”

So do I. The furphy is in identifying society with the state, and the state with society. The state doesn’t magically create wealth out of nothing, nor supply any social empathy or moral superiority that is not in society. In fact society is far more representative of society, by its voluntary relations, than the state is with its bureaucratic central planning based on confiscations and political favouritism.

Molly has offered no reason on any relevant issue in this entire thread other than that she favours arrangements *because* they benefit herself, regardless of the cost or wrong imposed on anyone else. Without even realising what a clanger this is, she projects onto the free market her own creed of perfect greed and the devil take the hindmost.