Education in the Marketplace by Kevin Currie-Knight

Author:Kevin Currie-Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030117788
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Intellectual Origins of Vouchers

Friedman’s original intent in formulating a voucher proposal owed less to concrete concerns over education policy than the more intellectual exercise of applying “the philosophy of freedom” to the area of education. It might be instructive, then, to note that at the time of Friedman’s writings, not only had the idea of vouchers already been theoretically formulated (by John Stuart Mill) but policies resembling Friedman’s vouchers had already been put into place, from the GI Bill of Rights to various southern states’ use of voucher plans to avoid integrating public schools after Brown v. Board of Education . Looking at these precedents might help us put Friedman’s voucher proposal in historical context.

Whether Friedman was conscious of it or not, he very likely read a similar (if not as developed) “voucher plan” advocated a century before by philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, who Friedman elsewhere recalled he “must have read in my first or second year of college.”19 Like Friedman, Mill was a “liberal” who justified his libertarian political philosophy on consequentialist grounds: individual liberty is valued not because humans have natural rights, but by the good consequences respect for liberty produces overall. Like Friedman, then, Mill was concerned with the infringements on liberty caused by state education, but recognized that as all children should be educated (to better exercise liberty as adults), government may have a legitimate role in funding and regulating private education and compelling parents to purchase suitable education for their children.

For Mill, “a general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government. … In proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”20 Mill believed that the state could avoid this potential despotism by restricting itself to helping parents provide for their children’s education in the private sphere:It [the state] might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they feel pleased and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorest classes of children, and defraying the entire school expense of those who have no one else to pay for them. The objections which are urged with reason against State education, do not apply to the enforcement of education by the State , but to the State’s taking upon itself to direct that education: which is a totally different thing.21

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.