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Political Opinion and
Commentary for the Progressive Internet
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[Society] is a partnership in all science; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. Edmund Burke |
Is it unfair to require those who have no children in the public schools to
pay school taxes?
The libertarian-right apparently believes that it is.
In
its 2000 platform, the Libertarian Party proclaimed:
We advocate the complete separation of education and State... We condemn compulsory education laws. We further support immediate reduction of tax support for schools, and removal of the burden of school taxes from those not responsible for the education of children.
Furthermore, Christian fundamentalists are disinclined to send their
children to public schools, often preferring to send them to “Christian
academies” or to teach them at home. They opt out of public education in
order to protect their children from “corruption” through such secular ideas
such as evolution, historical geology, or even tolerance of contrary
religious beliefs. If they choose to withdraw their children from the public
schools, why should the fundamentalists be required to pay school taxes?
Without a doubt, if, as the libertarians propose, “the burden of school
taxes” is confined to those “responsible for the education of children”
(presumably their own children), the quality of public education will be
severely degraded, while, at the same time the burden of school costs on
families with school-age children will be greatly increased – so much so,
that poor families will be hard-pressed to support the schooling of their
children through High School, and middle-class families will find it
difficult to afford college education for their children. In short, without
broad-based financial support for public education, the education-level of
our next generation will decline precipitously.
So if asked why I should pay for the education of other peoples’ children, I
have a simple and straightforward answer: “Because I prefer to live in the
company of educated neighbors, and in a country with educated citizens.”
If I were a businessman or an entrepreneur, setting out to establish an
innovative and high-tech business enterprise, I would add: “I pay school
taxes so that our country might have an educated work-force, without which
my enterprise could not possibly succeed.”
The nineteenth-century Sociologist, L. T. Hobhouse, put it well when he
wrote:
The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made' himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order -- a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin. (Via Paul Samuelson, Newsweek, December 30, 1974)
Thus Ayn Rand’s totally self-made and self directed John Galt type of entrepreneur is a myth. As even Bill Gates must appreciate, there is no MicroSoft without the myriad of publicly educated “micro-serfs” on the payroll.
A libertarian reader of The Crisis Papers, disagrees, as he writes:
People would want to be educated even if there were no public education and would educate themselves, if necessary, as they did in days past. It is the Ayn Rand hero who would take the root-eating savages and educate them so that he could build a factory in their barren land and thus produce a good living for himself and them.
Once again, the libertarian unwittingly gives us a
powerful self-refutation. For on reflection, this is a truly absurd and
malevolent proposal.
We are asked to imagine Ayn Rand’s "John Galt" or his surrogates
strolling through the village of savages, picking out a few children and
offering to educate them to work in Galt's factories. This would, of
course, require several years of education, and capitalists are not
renowned for their willingness to await long-term returns on their
investments. But let that pass. More serious problems arise. Would these
selected "students" be required to work for Galt to pay off their debt?
What if, during their education, they developed other career
aspirations. Would they nonetheless be indentured servants to Galt? What
kind of "liberty" is this? And if, on the other hand, the chosen
students were accorded the right to take their Galt-supported education
elsewhere, what entrepreneur would take such a risk on his investment in
their education? And what would be the content of that education?
Presumably, only the specific skills needed to enhance Galt's profits?
If so, forget about literature, history, philosophy, or any of the
"liberating" liberal arts. Instead, the selected students would trained
to be skilled workers, “human capital,” and not free citizens of a
democratic society.
Once again, we find in this proposal the libertarian disregard of the
essential "like liberty principle," defended by such great liberals as
John Stuart Mill: the principle that each individual is entitled the
maximum liberty, consistent with the same liberty for others. The above
education scheme exacts a heavy "freedom penalty" and “welfare penalty”
on others, all to the exclusive advantage of the “sponsoring”
entrepreneur.
Another reason why I should support public education, at all levels from
Kindergarten through university graduate schools, is that this support is
“payback” to all those who paid for my own public education. This payback is
quite justly assessed and taxed throughout my lifetime, since the advantages
of that public education are with me throughout my life.
But this is a paradoxical sort of “payback,” since I cannot directly “return
the favor” to my patrons. Those individuals who built and sustained the
institutions that I attended, and those teachers whom I encountered in
innumerable classrooms, are either dead or in their dotage. My debt is
payable to abstractions: to society and civilization. By this I mean,
payable to those fragile institutions that secure, sustain and enrich the
lives of us all: our Constitutional government, our laws, civic peace and
tolerance, our common history, our sciences and arts. I “pay back” those who
paid for my education by preserving those institutions and by enhancing the
public good.
“The public good?” The libertarian will have none of it. For, as Ayn
Rand once wrote, “; there is no such entity as ‘the tribe‘ or ‘the public‘;
the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men.”
(“What is Capitalism?”, 1965).
Accordingly, the libertarian argues, educational institutions exist only to
benefit each individual person who is educated, and thus should be paid for
only by that individual’s family.
This is an absurdity that only a doctrinaire libertarian could believe. For
in fact, the education of each individual benefits the public at large, and
thus should be supported by the public at large.
When I entered the University campuses, first as a student and later as a
professor, I found magnificent institutions at my disposal: buildings and
grounds, faculties, libraries, and traditions – all these supported,
refined, added-upon over the decades at great public expense, only a small
fraction of which consisted of student tuition and fees. Yet the returns of
this public investment to the public are incalculably lavish: scientific
advances issuing from university laboratories, the accumulation and
integration of knowledge from the many separate disciplines, the public
service of the scholars, teachers, engineers, business people, lawyers,
doctors, etc. that graduate from these public institutions.
There is no better evidence of the social and economic benefits of public
education, than the GI Bill of Rights (1944) that offered free college
education to veterans of World War II. This bill, steadfastly opposed by the
Congressional Republicans at the time, was the foundation of the middle
class that emerged from that war, and a springboard to the unprecedented
economic growth that followed. Thus the GI Bill is regarded by many as the
most significant federal legislation of the twentieth century.
Universal support of public education affirms the principle that We the
People of the United States are a community, and not, as the libertarian
right would have us believe, a mere aggregate of disconnected,
self-interested individuals and families, the sum of whose private activity is somehow mysteriously, and without need of planning or
management, transformed into the public good. On the contrary, the fabric of
our national community has been woven, to a significant degree, by the
public schools as they took in immigrants from numerous nations and
transformed them, in a single generation, into Americans – e pluribus
unum. They did so by teaching a common language, our national history,
and our founding political principles. Of late, the teaching of history and
civics in the public schools has been downgraded, and we are now paying a
terrible price for this neglect, as a generation of Americans emerges that
is ignorant of their heritage and of their rights, and thus ill prepared and
ill-motivated to protect them when threatened.
Public education is now under attack as never before. George Bush promises
to “Leave no Child Behind,” and then withdraws funding from the Act bearing
that name. Karl Rove attacks the teachers’ union, The National Education
Association (called by former Education Secretary, Ron Paige, “a terrorist
organization”), because of the teachers’ traditional support of the
Democratic Party. “Voucher systems” threaten to draw gifted students, and
students from affluent families, out of the public schools, leaving behind
the poor and disadvantaged. And so-called “taxpayers’ revolts” are starving
the schools of essential funding, often despite the wishes of the public.
For example, in my own community, a majority of voters have recently
supported two proposals to increase school funding, only to have those
proposals defeated by a law that requires a two-thirds majority to increase
tax assessments. This law, the so-called Jarvis Initiative of 1979, is
believed by many to be the primary cause of the decline of the
once-magnificent California public school system, and the University of
California, once the undisputed leader in public higher education.
Because we are all continuing beneficiaries of our system of public
education, that system deserves universal support - whether or not we happen
to have children currently in school. Our very freedom depends upon a
flourishing educational establishment, for, as Jefferson correctly observed,
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and
never will be."
Or as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his
Aims of
Education:
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
Copyright 2005, by Ernest Partridge
Ernest Partridge's Internet Publications
Conscience of a Progressive: A book in progress.
Partridge's Scholarly Publications. (The Online Gadfly)
Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers".
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