NHEG-September-October2022

September October 2022
NHEG EDGUIDE September - October 2022
In many ways, these arguments parallel those that are used in support of public schools, which are also designed to
foster interaction between people from different backgrounds.
There’s just one problem. As anyone who has attended a public school can tell you, these institutions can be some of
the most divisive places in the country. Why is this the case? Well, one plausible explanation is that it has to do with
the very fact that people with different values are forced to participate in the same system.
For example, think about religious institutions. In the past, there was no separation of church and state, so people
were regularly forced to practice religions they didn’t agree with. As a result, religion became incredibly divisive, causing
lots of war and persecution.
But today, though religious disagreements still exist, they aren’t nearly as antagonistic as they used to be, largely
because people who disagree can go their separate ways. With schools, on the other hand, people are still forced to
follow the values of the state, so it’s no wonder that fights over what those values should be are ubiquitous (the recent
conflicts over masks and critical race theory are just the latest examples of this phenomenon).
A mandatory public service program would almost certainly breed similar divisions, except instead of fighting over
sex-ed and school uniforms, people would fight about which projects should be prioritiezed and what expectations
should be set for the participants. So really, this is a recipe for discord and antagonism, not a cure.
“It’s For Your Own Good”
A second argument for the program is that it would help young people with their personal and professional development.
This may sound unobjectionable on the surface, but note the tone with which this is presented.
“The work opportunities should be designed to help inform and facilitate participants’ career goals as much as possible,”
Carden writes. “This would allow participants to develop real-life skills in their areas of interest. The objective
would be balancing this with the need to push participants outside of their comfort zones: That might look like, for
instance, letting a participant choose their area of focus but not their geographic location or vice versa.”
This is nothing short of paternalism. He says he’s interested in helping young people, but what he means by that is
forcing them to do what he believes is in their best interest.
If you take issue with this approach, you’re not alone. There’s something singularly sinister about coercing people to
do things “for their own good.” Indeed, C.S. Lewis saw this paternalistic disposition as one of the gravest dangers to
liberty.
​“Of all tyrannies,” he wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It
would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment
us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
But is a program like this really tyranny? Carden dismisses the objection.
“Some would argue Americans should have the right to decide what’s in their own self-interest without government
interference—and thus should not be required to participate,” he writes. “But this line of thinking, of prioritizing the
rights of citizenship over its obligations, is one of the main reasons the program is needed in the first place.”
In other words, if standing up for your rights is more important to you than humbly submitting to your government,
you clearly need to be re-educated in a mandatory government program.
Right...
Carden’s comments aside, it’s important to recognize the extent to which this kind of program would violate civil liberties.
If this were truly mandatory, it would essentially constitute forced labor, which is really a form of involuntary
servitude. Indeed, if a private entity did this, we’d rightly call it slavery.
With that said, this line of reasoning raises an interesting question. If you should get to choose what you do after you
turn 18, why not before? After all, school is also a kind of forced labor, and it’s poorly suited for many students. So
what if we let people choose their own course even earlier in life, allowing them to pursue jobs, apprenticeships, or
education as they see fit? What if we didn’t presume to know what’s best for others, but instead we allowed them to
explore what’s best for themselves?
It almost makes you wonder whether school should be compulsory at all.
Source: The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
https://fee.org/
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THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2022
BY KERRY MCDONALD
Arizona’s New School Choice Bill Moves Us Closer to
Milton Friedman’s Vision
“Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the
U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its
children go,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman stated in 2003. “We are far from that ultimate
result. If we had that, a system of free choice, we would
also have a system of competition, innovation, which
would change the character of education.”
Last week, Arizona lawmakers moved us much closer
to that ultimate result. Legislators in that state, which
already had some of the most robust school choice policies
in the US, passed the country’s first universal education
savings account bill, extending education choice to
all K-12 students.
The education savings accounts, or Empowerment Scholarship
Accounts as they are known in Arizona, had previously
been available to certain Arizona students who met
specific criteria, including special needs students and children
in active-duty military families. This new bill, which
the Governor Doug Ducey is expected to sign, extends
education choice to all school-age children throughout
Arizona.
Every family will now have access to 90 percent of the
state-allocated per pupil education dollars, or about
$7,000 per student, to use toward approved education-related
resources, including private school tuition, tutors,
curriculum materials, online learning programs, and
The education disruption over the past two years has re-energized parents and taxpayers
alike.
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more.
“Arizona is now the gold standard for school choice,”
Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation
for Children, told me this week. “Every other state should
follow Arizona’s lead and fund students instead of systems.
Education funding is meant for educating children,
not for protecting a particular institution. School choice is
the only way to truly secure parental rights in education.”
Several states have introduced or expanded school
choice policies over the past couple of years, enabling
taxpayer funding of education to go directly to students
rather than bureaucratic school systems. In this week’s
LiberatED podcast episode, I spoke with one education
entrepreneur, Michelle McCartney, whose homeschool
resource center is an approved vendor for New Hampshire’s
Education Freedom Accounts, an education savings
account program for income-eligible students that was
implemented last year.
While McCartney sees a fully private, free market in
education as the ideal circumstance, she recognizes that
education choice policies are an important first step
toward expanding education options for more families,
and reducing government involvement in the education
sector.
“If it was up to me we wouldn’t pay any money to the
government and school would be entirely privatized,” said
McCartney. “That’s how I believe it should be, but it’s not.