Image Credit: Jane Sawyer

Recently I was reading this article, which is an attempt to sell the Sarah Palin Vice Presidential nomination to “small l” libertarians.  As a libertarian-minded voter, I decided to hear, or I guess read, it out.  Alas, I found it thoroughly unconvincing.  Perhaps the least convincing part of what I read was this paragraph, which tried to defend Palin’s suggestion that creationism should be taught in schools.

There have already been smears that she backed “creationist” teaching in “public” schools, when in fact, Palin’s comment regarding intelligent design should hold some appeal to libertarians. Even if you find the idea inane, in essence, Palin pushed the idea that parents, rather than the state, should decide what children are learning.

As someone who spent 4 years in private school and 2 years in a quasi-magnet high school, I’ve never really bought into the ‘education is a monopoly’ idea.  There are alternatives.  Lots of them.  But perhaps even worse than that is how badly the author of this article misunderstands basic concepts of a market.

First, a market requires two parties at a minimum: buyer and seller.  Parents dictating terms and demanding service isn’t a “free” market.  To be truly free, the teacher needs to be free to give the parent demanding creationist teachings the finger and walk away.  While this may sound like a trivial technicality, it’s important to realize that the largest organized opponent of teaching creationism in public school are the science teachers who will be forced to do it!  If qualified science teachers en masse begin to organize and refuse to teach creationism, then the market has acted with as much legitimacy as if the teachers caved and started “teaching the controversy.”

The real free market solution to the creationist problem is one I was exposed to for many years before I became old enough to reject it: Sunday School, CCD, Religious Education, whatever you want to call it.  Let parents supplement the education of their children as they feel is needed.

When I hear people talk about free markets, they tend to fall into one of two groups.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ll dub these two groups the “Wal-Mart School” and “Home Depot School” of free markets.

The Wal-Mart School seems to envision the ideal result of free markets as a panacea product that mows your lawn, cures the common cold, walks the dog, smells like freshly baked cinnamon rolls, and makes an attractive centerpiece.  This ideal is big on the idea that some provider somewhere will create the perfect product for you and your needs.  And truth be told, for a lot of people, this is how the free market tends to work.  The maker of one product faces competition from someone who makes essentially the same product, but varies the specs a little bit to make it more appealing to some subset of the customer base.  Over several iterations of this process, an array of products is available for every want and need.  And if the device has too many features and options on it, the consumers who don’t want it can just ignore them.  In the education field, the ideal result from the Wal-Mart School would be a one-stop shop of a school that teaches everything you want taught in a school and nothing you don’t.

As nice as that is, there’s bound to be some segment of the population who can’t get their wants met.  In these cases, either the target audience is too small or the means to mass produce the desired solution simply don’t exist.  This is where the Home Depot School comes into play.  In the Home Depot School, the advantage of a market isn’t a panacea product, but the availability of a series of interoperable components that consumers can assemble into whatever arrangement suits their needs.

These two phenomena actually tend to work in concert extremely well.  Take for example a home theater system.  Per the Home Depot School, one can purchase a home theater system component by component, based on what you want out of the individual components (e.g. Bose speakers, a Sony television, Microsoft XBox 360, etc.)  Meanwhile, per the Wal-Mart School, companies that make the components are competing to make the most popular components they can.  As a result, you get both the variety of components and the ability to mix and match those components as necessary to achieve what you want out of your system.

How does this relate to education?  Many people critical of the “public monopoly” on education point to the creationism issue as evidence that a single entity cannot serve the needs of as many people as the American public school system serves.  While I agree with this statement as I’ve put it, I’m not convinced private schools have any unique insight into solving these problems.  Any school that serves more than a few hundred students per graduating class cannot hope to achieve the wants and needs of every student, public or private.  And for many, the large schools are the only affordable option.  So in a number of cases, it may be simply better to take the public education and supplement it as needed.  That way not everyone is providing the services that they’re best at and getting as close to what they want as they can get.  Not to mention that this system uses free market principles, to boot.  Isn’t that a better libertarian solution than bombarding students with more information than their parents want?