Government Schooling Is Unacceptable

Ask someone why the state runs the schools and the answer arrives instantly, before the question has even finished: of course it does, who else would? That instant, unreflective quality is itself worth noticing. Almost nothing else this large and important — not healthcare, not housing, not food — gets the same reflexive default to state provision. We argue constantly about whether government should build the apartments or just subsidize the rent, whether it should run the hospital or just insure the visit.

On schooling, the argument barely starts, because the premise that the state must be the one administering the classroom has been laundered into something that feels like a fact of nature rather than a policy choice made at a specific moment for specific reasons.

It is a policy choice, and a comparatively recent, comparatively contested one. This piece makes two separate claims, and it's worth keeping them apart: first, that a state-administered school system is illegitimate in the specific sense that matters to a liberty-minded reader — coercive, not merely imperfect — and second, that we still have it not because the argument for it is strong but because the people who would have to dismantle it are the same people it was built to produce.

What "coercive" means here

Three mechanisms usually travel together in a state school system, and it's worth separating them because they don't have to. Taxation funds it — money taken under threat of force from people whose children may never sit in one of its classrooms. Compulsory attendance, or compulsory satisfaction of a state-defined standard, requires it — a family cannot simply decline the product the way it declines a brand of cereal. And curriculum and credentialing are set by political authorities rather than by the people paying for the service or the children receiving it — the buyer doesn't get to specify what they're buying.

Remove all three and you no longer have state-derived education at all; you have a private market the state happens to leave alone. Keep any one of them and the system remains coercive even if it offers "choice" inside the cage — a voucher that only works at state-approved schools, teaching a state-approved fraction of the curriculum, is still a leash with more slack, not a different animal. The debate that actually exists in American politics — public school versus charter versus voucher — is almost entirely a debate about how much slack the leash should have. It is very rarely a debate about the leash.

That distinction matters because it exposes a bait-and-switch that runs through nearly every defense of the current system: the argument for educating children gets smuggled in as an argument for the state administering their education, when those are two entirely different claims. Even Hayek — no anarchist, and no enemy of a floor under citizens — kept the two apart with more care than most of his modern defenders do. He accepted that a democratic society has an interest in a baseline of educated citizens, and that the state could legitimately require or even fund basic schooling. But he distinguished sharply between financing education and administering it, and his own knowledge-problem argument — the one usually deployed against central economic planning — applies just as directly to a federal or state curriculum office. A centralized authority cannot access the real-time, granular information about a particular child, a particular classroom, a particular town that a parent, a teacher, or a local school board holds by default. Effective education requires exactly the kind of localized, particular knowledge that central planning structurally cannot use. If that argument is right about steel quotas, it is right about reading lists.

The form the coercion produced

The three legal mechanisms explain why the system is coercive. They don't yet explain what the coercion actually looks like from inside a classroom, and the shape it settled on is not an accident of the mechanisms — it's the form a factory takes when the input is children and the output is supposed to be uniform. A single state-trained, state-certified adult stands in a room of twenty-five to thirty same-age children and delivers a standardized curriculum on a fixed schedule, moving the whole cohort from subject to subject on a bell rather than on readiness. That is not a description of how children learn best; it's a description of how you process a mandatory, undifferentiated population at scale with a workforce whose qualifications the state itself controls through licensure. The certification requirement is doing real work here beyond quality assurance — it ensures that the only people legally permitted to stand in that room are people who passed through the state's own training pipeline, which means the room's authority structure is downstream of the state even when a specific teacher would rather run it differently.

Layered on top of the factory floor is a second function that has quietly become the primary one for a large share of families: custody. Schools hold children for six or seven hours a day, five days a week, and the official justification — safety, supervision, structure — has increasingly little to do with the academic content delivered inside those hours. Ask a working parent what they are actually purchasing with their compliance and, for a great many of them, the honest answer is coverage: somewhere for a child to be while the adults in the household work. That's not a criticism of the parents, who are responding rationally to an economy that assumes two incomes and a nine-to-five absence from the home. It's a criticism of a system that markets itself as an educational institution while functioning, for large stretches of the day and large parts of the population it serves, as publicly funded custodial care with a curriculum attached almost incidentally. A genuine education, delivered on the schedule an individual child actually needs, does not require six hours of seat time to transmit; the six hours are there because the custodial function requires them, and the educational function has been reshaped to fill the time rather than the other way around.

The liability regime locks both of these in place. Tort exposure doesn't just constrain what a school can teach — the controversial-topics fights that make the news — it constrains how almost everything is taught and run, in ways that rarely make the news because they look like prudence rather than politics. Recess gets shortened or supervised into sterility because an injury on the monkey bars is a lawsuit. Field trips get cut because an off-campus incident is a lawsuit. Physical education gets watered down, hands-on science gets replaced with worksheets, and a teacher's discretion to handle a discipline problem the way they judge best gets replaced with a scripted, legally vetted procedure — because any deviation from the standardized, board-approved method is the deviation a plaintiff's attorney will point to. This is Hayek's knowledge problem again, arriving through a different door: a teacher standing in front of a specific child on a specific day often knows the right call better than the district's risk-management policy does, and the liability regime overrides that local knowledge systematically, in the direction of whatever is most defensible in a courtroom rather than whatever is most educational in a classroom. The factory model and the custodial function survive not because anyone still argues for them on the merits, but because the legal environment built around the coercive core makes the alternative too expensive to try.

The hidden curriculum

Everything so far is a critique from the market-liberal side of the ledger — Hayek's knowledge problem, the incentive structure of an entrenched employer, the liability regime distorting the classroom from outside. Ivan Illich arrived at roughly the same conclusion — that state-administered schooling is illegitimate — from a completely different direction, and it's worth taking the detour, because his version explains something Hayek's doesn't: why the institution is so hard to even see clearly from inside it.

Illich's Deschooling Society (1971) argues that school's most important lesson is never listed on a syllabus. Children are taught, relentlessly and successfully, to confuse process with substance: to mistake instruction for learning, grade advancement for education, and a diploma for competence. Once that confusion sets in, a person stops trusting their own capacity to learn something by doing it and starts waiting for a credentialed authority to administer it to them in the correct sequence, at the correct pace, with the correct certificate at the end.

Illich called this the hidden curriculum, and its content isn't math or history — it's a disposition toward institutions in general: a learned assumption that competence requires a professional custodian (an 'expert') and that the appropriate response to not-knowing is to enroll, not to go find out. A society whose citizens have absorbed that lesson for twelve or sixteen years is a society unusually well prepared to defer to expertise it hasn't examined, on questions well beyond the ones school actually covered.

That lesson does double duty as a sorting mechanism. School doesn't just teach deference; it distributes it unevenly and then tells the losers the distribution was fair. Credentials become a proxy for ability, and a person who is sorted downward by the proxy is taught to experience that as a personal verdict — I wasn't smart enough, I didn't work hard enough — rather than as the output of a fairly arbitrary institutional filter.

Illich's point isn't that the filter is rigged in the crude sense; it's that the filter's verdicts get treated as facts about people rather than as facts about the filter, which is exactly the kind of legitimacy-laundering that lets an institution's failures get absorbed by its subjects instead of by the institution. Rothbard and the political-economy argument above explain why the system perpetuates itself institutionally, through unions and pensions and reform traps; Illich explains why it perpetuates itself psychologically, one graduate at a time, each one carrying the hidden curriculum into adulthood as an unexamined default about how learning and authority relate.

The history nobody teaches in the government schools

The clearest evidence that state administration was never a precondition for mass literacy is that mass literacy came first. Antebellum America had high and rising literacy rates before the wave of state compulsory-attendance laws that began with Massachusetts in 1852. New York City in 1829 had the majority of its schoolchildren enrolled in private schools — venture schools, academies, dame schools, church schools — fee-based, locally various, often aggressively practical: bookkeeping, navigation, surveying, the things a family actually needed its children to know. Compulsion arrived after literacy had already spread through exactly the kind of decentralized market Hayek's argument predicts would work, not before it, as the standard justification implies.

The origin story matters because it tells you what the institution was actually built to do, as opposed to what it's now retroactively credited with doing. Horace Mann's common-school movement borrowed directly from the Prussian model, and the Prussian model was explicit about its purpose in a way that would be politically unsayable today: a shared civic religion, a population habituated to obedience and synchronized behavior, a common set of loyalties installed early and installed uniformly.

"Better reading scores" was never the organizing goal — a citizenry that already read reasonably well was the population Mann was building on top of, not the problem he was solving. The goal was standardization of a different kind: the production of a legible, governable public. Whatever you think of that goal, it is not the same goal as "make sure children can read," and a system built for the first purpose does not automatically serve the second one well just because the two overlap in places.

Why we still have it

Here is the part that should trouble a reader more than the coercion itself, or even the factory-and-custody form it produced: none of it is a bug the system has failed to fix. It is the mechanism holding the system in place.

Start with the most literal version of the problem. An institution whose stated purpose is producing citizens who defer to state authority has an obvious interest in producing citizens who do not question whether that institution should exist.

This isn't a conspiracy theory; it doesn't require anyone in a curriculum office to be cynical or self-aware about it. It only requires that a system optimized, even loosely, for civic conformity will tend to under-produce the specific kind of skepticism needed to interrogate the system itself. A population schooled from age five to eighteen inside a single, compulsory, state-administered institution has had eighteen years to absorb the premise that this is simply how education works — the same reflexive "of course, who else would" that opened this piece. That's not evidence the premise is true. It's evidence the institution has succeeded at exactly the kind of quiet self-perpetuation you'd expect from something built, in part, for legitimacy-manufacturing rather than literacy alone.

Then add the ordinary political economy that would keep almost any entrenched program in place regardless of its founding purpose. A public school system is one of the largest employers in most American states, represented by some of the most disciplined and best-organized political actors in the country. Teachers' unions, administrator associations, textbook publishers, testing companies, and the pension systems built around all of them have a direct, quantifiable interest in the system's continuation at its current scale, and a comparatively modest interest in whether alternative models might serve children better.

This is not a claim about the motives of any individual teacher, the overwhelming majority of whom show up because they care about the kids in front of them. It's a claim about the incentive gradient facing the institution as a whole, which routes around individual good intentions the way water routes around individual rocks.

And then there's the reform trap, which is the most durable mechanism of the three because it looks like progress while functioning as containment. Every time the coercion becomes visible enough to provoke a real political response, the response on offer is more choice inside the system rather than an exit from it — a charter, a voucher, an open-enrollment policy.

These are not nothing; a family that can move from a failing assigned school to a better one is genuinely better off, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But control follows the money. A private school that accepts a voucher accepts, sooner or later, the accreditation standards, the testing regime, and the reporting requirements attached to it, because the alternative is losing access to the funding stream entirely. The result is not a shrinking of state involvement in education; it's a widening of state involvement into institutions that were previously outside it. Every reform cycle relegitimizes the underlying premise — that the state is the proper arbiter of what counts as adequate education — at the exact moment it appears to be conceding ground.

What non-coercive would require

None of this is an argument that children shouldn't be educated, and it isn't an argument that no one should be schooled inside a classroom with other children their age. It's an argument that the classroom, the curriculum, and the money should answer to the people directly involved — parents, students, the institutions they voluntarily choose — rather than to a political authority that funds itself by force and compels attendance by law.

What that looks like in practice is closer to the pre-Mann landscape than to anything currently on offer in mainstream policy debate: tuition-funded schools, cooperative and religious academies, apprenticeships, tutors, and mutual-aid or charitable arrangements for families who can't pay, operating in an actual market where a family that's unhappy can leave the way a customer leaves a gym, rather than the way a citizen petitions a school board.

Illich's own alternative, sketched under the name "learning webs," points at the same target from the other direction: skill exchanges where anyone with a competence can list it and anyone curious can find them, peer networks built around a shared book or problem rather than an assigned seat, and open access to the libraries, workshops, and tools that self-directed learning actually requires. He wasn't describing a policy so much as predicting a shape — decentralized, opt-in, indifferent to age-grading — and it is not a coincidence that the shape he predicted in 1971 is recognizably the shape the internet's own learning ecosystem took decades later, without anyone needing to deschool society by decree first.

Some children in that world would get intense, individualized instruction; some would get a trade and a paycheck at sixteen; some would get less formal schooling than a caseworker would prefer. That variance is the feature critics call the flaw. A system with no mechanism for forcing every outcome to look the same is, by definition, a system that isn't optimizing for uniformity — which is precisely the quality the current one was built to supply, and precisely the quality a genuinely liberty-respecting system cannot have as its organizing goal.

The reply to "who else would educate the children" should not be silence. It's the same reply liberty-minded people give to every other version of that question: the people who actually have something at stake in the answer — the parents, the students, the communities that would rather build something they chose than fund something they didn't. The system we have wasn't built because that answer was tried and failed. It was built instead of trying it, and it has spent two centuries making the alternative feel unthinkable. That, more than any curriculum standard or test score, is the thing actually being taught.

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