Conservative Education Policy: A New Religion.

what we really need to do is get the
government out of education and people think oh that's terrible because if it wasn't for the government providing education nobody would be educated that's not true notice how he's shifting the goal posts in a subtle way here nobody would claim that if government funding for education were cancelled that nobody nobody would have access to education that there wouldn't be any education at all right the question is how do the poor have access to education how do the poorest of the poor have access education how do you provide universal education and when i say universal i do not just mean that it is accessible to the rich and poor alike i mean that it is the same for each and every one that muslims and christians and jews are all forced to learn the theory of evolution something they may not want to pay for if they're in a clientelistic relationship where they're paying for individual tutors the way people did in the in the dark ages not not everyone wants to learn you know algebra there are a lot of things people are not going to pay to learn if the government's role in education becomes zero they may not even learn to brush their teeth and wash their hands and use condoms where babies come from how aids is spread what to do with an unwanted pregnancy there's a whole lot of information that's going to disappear from education when you when you eliminate the universality of education universal education isn't just about providing education to the poor it's about providing the same education to the rich and poor alike it's about providing the same education to sophisticated secular urban people and perhaps not so sophisticated rural deeply religious people it's about providing the same education to immigrants who may have just arrived in your country from saudi arabia and iran as people have lived in your country for 400 years the government did two things they made a college degree very expensive and then they made it practically worthless because before the government started subsidizing college fewer people actually went because only the people that could really benefit from the degree went and so then if you had a college degree it actually meant something in the marketplace now since everybody goes to school because it's you know you get the money from the government everybody's got a college degree they mean nothing both on the left and on the right we often have to deal with this pattern of people believing in an abstract principle and then being drawn in step by step to refuse to consider to reject the evidence before them the evidence of real experience in the real world because they'd prefer to believe in the abstract principle and this makes the political sphere step by step more and more like a religion so to critique the left for just half a second before i critique the right wing on this this particular issue i've spoken to so many left-wingers who just wanted to assert to me the abstract principle that making heroin and cocaine completely legal and decriminalized would solve the drug addiction problem and that this had already happened in switzerland and portugal switzerland and portugal i've had this conversation several times with left wingers now i don't respond by telling them that the abstract principle they believe in is wrong like i don't respond by telling them santa claus ain't got no beard i respond by trying to direct their attention to empirical reality to real facts to real history i very often small questions okay have you looked at what the drug laws in switzerland actually are have you looked at you know what the laws and procedures in portugal really are and have you looked at the outcomes have you looked at the results like there are two different types of misconceptions here like one misconception would be that the situation with drug addiction in portugal is really so much better than the situation in france and these are comparable countries they're both in western europe they both have a large-scale drug addiction problem right but then there's also the misconception what do you think actually happens when drug addicts are arrested and taken into court in portugal and of course very often they didn't even know that happened they believed in a myth they believed in not just a story a made-up story that serves to vindicate this abstract principle the same way religious people make up a story so they can believe in jesus or moses or any of the mythological heroes of of hinduism or buddhism right the problem isn't with the detail of the story the problem isn't with whether or not santa claus is a beard the problem is the psychological effect of this story in your mind that it digs you into this false sense of certainty of the abstract principle and certainly the abstract principle they won't let go of it so my experience is when talking to left-wingers about drug policy they very quickly just become flustered and leave the room or start shouting me or shut down no matter how helpful i am and just trying to say okay well let's talk what are the laws in switzerland let's talk about that stuff let's let's let's actually discuss the they cannot hear it they cannot participate in the conversation i'm threatening their faith every single time i've spoken to libertarians anarcho-capitalists or misc right-wingers about these delusions that you could improve american education by eliminating all government funding in the same way they very very quickly become flustered and leave the room they can't talk about these things they can make a completely general statement of principle such as uh in the past government wasn't involved in funding or regulating education at all and that was just fine so in the future we could go back to having that kind of oh so are you you talking about the 1840s do you do you want to talk about how education functioned in the 1840s and why it changed between the 1840s and the 1860s in the 1890s can we actually talk about this and the reply is no no no no no as soon as you take a step into empirical reality to real world details they can't cope with it they have to shut the conversation down they have to run away because what they believe in it's neither a solution for the problems of this world nor is even an analysis of the problems this world it's an abstract principle that's as far removed from the real world as the belief in god and hell and heaven you know if it's just like saying if you know the government needs to provide food no we get great food from the farmers you know what what about our cell phones as a government no it's it's it's the free market everyone's getting government funding or government administration no i don't think the government should be involved in it i think at all no i think so what about poor people who don't have an internet connection or books poor people eat poor people have housing poor people have clothing they get plenty of things from the free market whatever you value the free market is going to provide it for you in a better quality at a lower cost and if if we got the government out of public education people would pay to send their kids to school but it wouldn't cost nearly as much and taxes would be a lot lower because you wouldn't have to pay taxes to support the public schools you can buy tuition at a private school that would be a fraction of the cost so he has revealed here the abstract principle that he believes in and his belief is unshakable it is not going to falter it is not going to adapt it is not going to change in response to empirically real evidence about how the real world works and he didn't arrive at these conclusions through the comparative analysis of evidence that exists here in the real world of which we have a whole lot if you're talking about the history of education what education policies work this abstract principle evil isn't that um the free market will always deliver the service to you the customer at a lower price and a higher quality what what's cheaper sending a letter by u.s postal service by mail or sending it by federal express by ups by dhl by private courier you really can't think of a single example of a service that's provided by the government more cheaply and more efficiently than a private sector alternate really really let's stay within the realm of education you can't think of any example anywhere in the world where the government is providing high school education at a lower price than private schools than private for-profit schools not schools run by a religious charity at a loss that exists that can be cheaper than the government when the catholics go to cambodia and provide free education to cambodian orphans if only they'll convert to catholicism when the muslims want to convert people to islam they run education on a religious non-profit that's another story that wasn't the comparison you were making you weren't making a comparison to charity you were making comparison between government provided services and the free market and and you know it seems to me even if we just limited ourselves to the history of the last 100 years we didn't go back any further it seems to me there were a whole lot of countries where just due to war poverty chaos the collapse of government from one period there have been periods of time where there was no positive role for government and education cambodia for example far off do we look back on that period when there was really no government involvement education in cambodia was as a golden age for education no no any any government anywhere in the world asia europe africa just within the last 100 years not even going back to the way education was transformed between the 1840s 1860s 1890s no this line of reasoning he's engaged in all right it is just as pious as the most pious christian it's telling you to close your eyes against the things of this world because what he believes in are not things that can be seen but things that remain unseen they are magical axioms always just outside your field of vision if only you'd close your eyes and believe you can disregard the mountains of evidence that what he's saying is just plain wrong because now you would have college you know you know schools competing against each other who can provide the best education at the lowest possible cost okay but what do you do about a homeless family a kid whose parents or mom is homeless or something like that there are examples where they wouldn't there would be innocent children right six years old ready to go to kindergarten who has no money for education there's always going to be schools will give out scholarships i mean there's private charities i mean it's not that the government has a monopoly on charity so again he's shifting the goalposts here right oh well who's going to provide education to the poor uh charity charity is not the free market you are making an argument on behalf of the free market against government intervention this would be just as ridiculous as saying what do you mean in cambodia they had great education provided to them in refugee camps by the united nations yeah the united nations isn't government it's an international coalition of governments what do you want this is a non-argument this is a self-defeating argument but just let's just think through a few further steps here you say charity what is that going to be a charity of secular intellectuals what if it's a muslim charity what if it's a charity from iran what if it's a charity from saudi arabia what if it's a charity coming into the ghettos of the united states of america or into small towns to reach out to the poor and hopeless there saying hey you want a chance to become a dentist or a doctor or a nurse you have to convert to our faith and come to our school learn by our textbooks and play by our rules what then the question isn't just who provides education who provides universal education it's a tremendous struggle to allow the charity section to participate in providing education at all because the government has to intervene constantly to force the catholic schools and the mormon schools and the jewish orthodox schools to all play by the same rules to all teach the same curriculum to teach things like how to use a condom and the theory of evolution and the geological history that the world wasn't created in seven days all kinds of things that they don't want to teach and that also the students may not want to learn all right one of the most fundamental delusions about uh free market mechanisms is that they can still work when you're talking about a product that nobody wants to buy a large part of education is authoritarian is coercive is forcing people to learn things that they don't perceive it as being in their best interest to learn that's why free market mechanisms can never be the solution to this riddle the same way people don't want to pay a whole lot of money out of their own pocket just to handle say sewage treatment as long as the sewage is somewhere down river it's not affecting their own life perfect personally they don't want to adopt and take responsibility to take on that cost even that though it's really not quite the same thing as asking say the nazis in germany right after world war ii to teach their own children about the terrible atrocities they themselves committed what what do you think would have happened when the rubble was still on the ground after world war ii if you allowed the next generation of germans to just be educated by the free market if you just allowed parents to employ whatever tutors they wanted to if you allowed people to just pay for whatever lesson they wanted do you think a whole bunch of um recently returned war criminals would have paid to establish the universal system of education that has basically created german democracy as we now know it in the 21st century that they would have paid for their children to receive morality lectures about what terrible people their own parents and grandparents are in many ways both subtle and coarse government-created government-enforced universe universal education is constantly teaching us what terrible people our own parents and our own grandparents were let's talk about student loans right because right now one of the big political issues especially among the left right they want to forgive the student loans and they want to make college free right that's like a big thing like we have all these students with all this debt and it's it's bad which i agree it's a terrible situation but what the left doesn't want to accept is responsibility for creating the situation in the first place it is government's fault that all these student loans exist without government there would be no student loans you know once upon a time people didn't borrow money to go to college nobody borrowed money to go to college you know around the 1960s once the 18 year olds could vote here's what the politicians said to all the 18 year olds with democratic politicians they said you know you shouldn't have to work your summers you shouldn't have to have jobs while you're in school you should just be able to go to school and enjoy yourself and we're going to make it possible for you to borrow money to go to school by guaranteeing the loans because normally the bank wouldn't lend you any money because you have no credit history you have no assets so you're not going to be able to get a loan um once the colleges saw that all these kids can borrow money to go to go to college well they were like this is great i'm just going to raise prices so all of a sudden tuition started to go up i mean for a long time you can look back in the future in history college tuition used to be pretty stable it didn't go up very much until the 60s until the government really got involved and so as soon as these colleges saw that the kids had access to all this money they started jacking up prices i mean any business that could charge whatever the hell they wanted because the government could borrow the money right if you had a restaurant where the government was going to guarantee to pay the bill of everybody who dined there i mean the restaurant could charge whatever it wanted oh a hamburger is a thousand dollars oh the government's going to pay yeah what do you care you know it's because people are paying with their own money that they got to keep the cost down so if this theory were true it would be equally true in the united states of america and japan it would be equally true in the united states of america and germany was the united states of america the only country in the last 70 years to have an increasing role for the government in funding university education no is the contrast between the united states of america and germany or the united states of america and sweden denmark england taiwan each an interesting and instructive case is the contrast between the united states of america and these other countries that those other countries had an unfettered free market of education that avoided bankrupting the students that avoided creating this student loan crisis and that only the united states of america made this terrible decision that he's describing to start allowing banks to give loans to have the government involved in guaranteeing and encouraging bank loans to students they're going to get very simple empirical methods very simple comparative analysis is going to show you quickly that the contrast in the united states of america and the countries of western europe generally is not a contrast between government intervention and the absence of government intervention it's a contrast between really bad government policies and somewhat better government policies but this man's perspective on the world absolutely cannot countenance cannot be based on cannot respond to empirical facts he lives a life of a man of pure faith it's a religious attitude that he's adopted he must close his eyes to the facts and continue to believe only in this abstract principle