By Murray Hopper
The writer, a Londoner, is a founding member of the Freedom Party of Ontario.
A free market provides a way of peaceably exchanging anything of value: goods, services, ideas, etc. The political requirement is democracy; the economic requirement is capitalism.
The marketplace transaction epitomizes freedom of choice: unless both the buyer and seller perceive a benefit, no trade will take place. There is no mystery here; almost daily we walk into a store, find what we want and buy it; if we cannot find what we want, we go elsewhere.
Note this: there is no coercion.
The alternative to the above (and its antithesis) is the enforced transaction, where we are compelled to sell goods at less than their true worth, or buy goods we do not want at any price. Fortunately, it is against the law for our fellow citizens to attempt to deal with us in such a way. Unfortunately, governments are under no such restraint.
Our educational systems today are based on just such government coercion. The fact that the student body is a captive audience frees educators from any urgent need to satisfy the wishes of their clientele. Pupils cannot vote with their feet; parents cannot vote with their tax dollars.
The recently released Radwanski report (Ontario Study of the Relevance of Education, and the Issue of Dropouts) and a study by the Business Task Force on Literacy are a litany of failure: the dropout rate is a "shame"; the system particularly shortchanges children of working-class families; an overhaul is needed; illiteracy is costing us $14 billion; and on and on. Curiously, in all the welter of claims, counterclaims, recommendations and criteria no mention is made of the one action essential to true reform, namely: an end to government monopoly.
As matters stand now, only well-to-do Canadians have any real choice in the matter of educating their children, and then only by paying twice: once for the public school they do not want, and again for the alternative school that they prefer. The family of modest means has no such option; it takes what the state hands out.
In our day-to-day lives, the marketplace serves us well; it delivers everything from aardvarks to zebras, amethysts to zircons, and autoharps to zithers. Why not call on proven market mechanisms to modify the present monolithic public system?
Consider, for example, the education "voucher" or "tax-credit" as it is known.
For generations now, Vermonters have been benefiting from a system whereby local governments use tax dollars to pay tuition at local private academies rather than providing education directly. Today 95 of Vermont's 246 towns have no public high school. In such cases, the school district must pay to any approved high school, in or out of state, an amount equal to average annual high school tuition ($2,675 for 1983-84).
Consider these virtues of the voucher system: it offers real choice; it introduces competition; it eliminates any separate school problem; it encourages diversity.
Other steps forward might lead to further variety in educational structures - such as teacher-owned co-ops, parent-run co-ops, educational corporations, trade union schools, single proprietorships, corporate grants and scholarships, restoration of the apprentice system.
In the United States, entrepreneurial challenges to state educational bureaucracies abound. Alternatives are now being offered in the form of franchised education outlets. Sylvan Learning Centre, for example, has established programs in cities all over the U.S., along with its competitors, such as Huntington Learning Corp. These firms constitute a completely new presence in the educational market. Profit-oriented and innovative, the companies advertise that they can do in a few weeks what public schools take months to do. They make good on their claims too, as their balance sheets prove.
The handwriting is on the wall for all public systems. As incomes and expectations rise over the years, and more and more parents and students choose to opt out of government systems, there will come a time when justice demands an end to coercion in the matter of education and a phasing out or a severe modification of traditional approaches.
If some are uncomfortable with the application of the profit motive to education, it may be because they do not understand the nature of that great generator. Profit goes only to those who have successfully complied with the capitalist maxim: find a need and fill it. The search for profit demands intelligence, hard work, persistence, and most of the other virtues that we admire in mankind. Profit eludes mediocrity or feeble effort.
You cannot achieve profit by raising prices: your competitors will clobber you. You cannot cut quality or service: your customers will desert you. The only way you can achieve profit is to cut costs. The one who is best at this is king of the marketplace: He is delivering the very highest quality at the lowest possible price. This is how "value" is defined.
Consider how smoothly and efficiently the common hamburger is made available in our fair city. If you do not care to succumb to a "Big Mac attack", there's Burger King, Harvey's, Wendy's, and a host of other multinationals anxious for your business. If none of these appeal, there are a hundred restaurants, each with its own version of that particular culinary delight; and always, as a last resort - the backyard barbecue.
The reason for this happy state of affairs? Just this - no direct government intervention.
If there are any who find this comparison inappropriate, let them consider this: the lowly hamburger fills that void in the middle in exactly the same way that education seeks to fill that other void a couple of feet higher up. The same method of delivery works for both the sublime and the commonplace, because common principles apply in each case.
There is such a thing as a perfect market transaction in education. A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of teaching one of my grandaughters to read. After Sunday dinners, we would play a little game involving the most common sound of each letter of the alphabet and the left-to-right linkage of these sounds. A few weeks of this and she was able to read simple sentences such as this one: "A cat bit a rat." She was not yet six. The perfection arises from this: the coinage was love.
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last updated on April 28, 2002
