Episode-76- TSP Rewind – What Might a Free Market Education System Look Like
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Today is an episode of TSP Rewind, commercial free versions of past podcast episodes.
Today’s episode was originally, Episode-1480- What Might a Free Market Education System Look Like and was first published on Dec. 9th, 2014.
The following are the original show notes from that episode.

Perhaps Not Such a Bad Idea
Note – There will be ZERO teacher bashing in this show. Well zero teacher bashing as a wholesale group anyway, I promise.
Yesterday I pointed out how many problems and divisions in society would not even exist if the state were not involved in key issues. Once again I dared touch the sacred cow of pubic education. Once again my inbox is crammed full of hate mail because I am “bashing teachers” when the truth is the word teacher wasn’t even used in yesterday’s show.
Why this reaction? Because logical and other wise intelligent and sane people become irrational even to the state of temporary insanity when something they see is necessary is called unnecessary. They may not know why they even believe it to be necessary, they just do and that alone causes at times even a violent response when anyone even infers that they are wrong.
School is important and an education is priceless. Every child has a fundamental right to an education, everyone knows that right? There are both truths and inaccuracies in those statements and combined they create what we call a logical fallacy. What is a logical fallacy? Logical fallacies are unsubstantiated assertions that are often delivered with a conviction that makes them sound as though they are proven facts. This is often done by taking true facts and combing them with total fabrication or unsubstantiated conclusions based on some of the actual facts.
In this case “school is important”, well no, education is important, but school is only one form of education. School is not required for education to even occur.
Every child has a right to an education is another one. We must first understand that a right as used above means the following…
A moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way.
This means that there is a moral and legal obligation to provide everyone with an education. Is that actually the case? I don’t believe it is, not in the way we are led to believe anyway.
This also omits a critical reality, that every right comes with corresponding responsibilities. Further that the State is to ensure rights primary by not oppressing them or allowing others to oppress them.
For instance your right to free speech comes with responsibility to not say incite violence or yell fire in a crowded theater. More over, the state isn’t responsible to provide you a venue for your free speech nor to force people to listen to you, only to ensure your rights are not trampled on, nor are they permitted to impede them. This brings us to yet another fallacy, the “fallacy of omission” which is…
Errors occur because the logician leaves out necessary material in an argument or misdirects others from missing information.
The reality is there are hundreds of fallacies and almost all of them at one point or another could be applied to most things we hold sacred such as public education.
Today I would like to examine what a true free market education system might look like. Once we do I ask that you use logic and reason to determine for yourself not if such a system would be perfect, only would it be better than what we have. Every system is flawed, this doesn’t mean a system with flaws can’t be better than a system with even greater flaws. To assert that a flawed system isn’t a better system simply because it has some flaw, when the underlying system itself has greater flaws, is also a fallacy, can anyone name that fallacy?
Join Me Today to Discuss…
- Is every child entitled to a good education
- Does the current system provide a good education to every child
- Who’s children are they anyway
- Why teachers are not to blame
- Why teachers can’t fix the system and why many would not if they could
- Answering the big but what if style questions…
- But who decides if an education is valid
- How would we ensure standards are met or that standards are valid
- What about children that can’t afford a “good education”
- Then how would we insure access to education if not provision of education
- But students with wealthier parents get a better education this way
- But every other modern nation provides public education
- But children need school for social skills, to meet other people, etc.
- This system will create an unfair advantage for many
- But we have to at least make sure that the average person can read, write and do math
- Why we must abolish compulsory public education to solve most of our current problems
- The system I would institute to wean society off the current system
- No child can be compelled to go to any school ever, the end
- The state can continue to offer education but not compel attendance
- A taxes funding education are to be lowered in an evenly apportioned manner as students exit the system
- Any person or entity may set up any form of education as longs as the activities conducted are other wise legal
- Any group or entity may set up a standards body, publish its own standards and issue certifications
- The only state over sight is contract resolution criminal police enforcement
- The contract resolution component must be voluntary
- Why a free market system would work better even if it has flaws
Resources for today’s show…
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Jack, I basically support your idea. Here’s some data for you from my experience:
I went to a private nursery school in Albany, CA. Very cool experience.
I started public school in Richmond. My first grade teacher one day gave us all a blue duplicated page (called “dittos”) with a big picture of an apple on it. She told us to fill the apple in with a red crayon using linear strokes. I thought circular strokes would look nicer. I “flunked” that lesson!
After that I went mostly to schools serving the upper middle class and got a pretty good “education.” However, as a high school graduate, I knew very little about law, business, politics, human relations and numerous other realities of life.
In 1972, the year I graduated high school, I read a book called “Deschooling Society” written by Ivan Illich in 1971. He was proposing a “learning web” approach to education. It was quite free-market oriented. He had been working in Puerto Rico, and later Mexico, where the predations of wealth-seeking criminal groups were more severe than they had been in the US up to that time.
What I have learned since I left public schools has been much more valuable to me in the long run than what I learned while attending public schools. Here are some points I feel are important:
It is in many ways quite true that the child is basically an adult with a small body. Many children will actually already be familiar with the subjects you are trying to teach them; you just have to re-orient them to those subjects, then let them come back up to speed on them.
There is a tendency in analyzing human systems, or figuring out how to fix them, to undervalue or even ignore the aspect of evil or vicious intent, even though it obviously exists in society. A person with good intent can take a broken system and make it produce good results. A person of evil intent can take a working system and make it produce terrible results, including loss of popular support – which the system had when it was working!
I believe this is an important factor in many “modern” as well as historical problems. We can make almost any system work, if it includes a reliable way to exclude persons of bad intent from taking control of it.
Meanwhile, people of good intent, in the face of the challenges of a space-age society, have marched forward and discovered better ways to teach and learn. While computer-based instruction has decreased costs to the point that many such courses are offered free, classrooms still have their place. My church delivers courses in classrooms, but each student is on his own “checksheet” studying a subject that interests him or is her next step in a longer program. A course supervisor can handle 20 or more students this way, each of them on a different course! In another room, “Practical,” they get to drill with each other on the doingness skills in their courses. And of course if we were teaching art or acting or car repair, we would need a studio, a theater and a repair shop for students to practice in.
While schools provide spaces far enough away from real life to allow learning – and making mistakes – to take place, they have also historically served to maintain a classed society, which is really a wrong use for them.
To me, the most important thing to understand about freedom is to find out what is trapping you, and what you can do to untrap yourself. Freedom and ability are relative to the game being played. I don’t need the freedom and ability to fly to Mars if I’m fine with living on Earth. But if I really would like to try out Mars instead, then I will seek that level of freedom and ability. Will the state assist me or prevent me from reaching for my dream? That’s the big question of these times.