The Educational impass

Public Education ends up being National Indoctrination

"Fear: fear that some people might not be strongly attached to the state, or sufficiently moral, or economically competitive, or that they might just be too different. It has often been fear harbored by political elites—but sometimes by large swaths of the population—that has brought us to this very unlibertarian of places."

"The fear of difference—especially moral difference—even more than of weak attachment to the country, fueled public schooling."

"Democracy and education theorists, such as University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann, argue that government should control education because society as a whole—as if we all shared one mind—must be able to perpetuate itself. "

"Beyond fear of difference and disunity is worry that absent public schooling, children will not be educated at all, or will be educated poorly, and the country will suffer scientifically and economically."

The Libertarian Vision

"It is a vision in which families and students choose education in the amounts and time frames they want, and educators freely decide what to teach, how, and for what price."

"A vision in which a political majority, or powerful minority, doesn’t get to tell everyone what learning they will pay for."

"Educators would establish schools—or tutoring services, or online academies, or would invent machines that instantly fill minds with knowledge—and would decide what they will teach, when, and how. They would face no government curriculum or testing mandates. They would decide whether to teach whole language or phonics, if calculus would be necessary to earn a diploma from their school, and whether history was taught from a “great man” paradigm or as endless class struggle."

"real, immediate accountability would come through customers, using their own money or money voluntarily given to them by others, deciding whether the service being rendered was worth their hard-​earned cash."

"schools and charitable organizations often help people pay, and charitable giving would likely grow substantially if we didn’t assign government the job of supplying “free” education."

"the cost of education would almost certainly drop. In the current system, the schools that the vast majority of people attend do not compete with one another on price or anything else."

"families pay with their own money or money they receive voluntarily from others, be they Grandma or church parishioners—would put steady downward pressure on prices."

Education would be faster and cheaper

"It is easy to imagine many cost-​subduing innovations. Start with mastery versus seat time; if some students can learn to read in a few months, maybe aided by a computer, they can move on to the next thing rather than having to wait weeks or months for other students to catch up."

"Maybe some people would decide that art, home economics, or trigonometry are unnecessary, not to mention study hall requiring paid monitors."

"We might say that children have a right to education, but the corresponding duty falls only on parents. Say that it falls on society through government, and all people are compelled to provide education to children they had no role in bringing into the world, and freedom-​stifling collective decisions about what will be taught must be made. Members of society may absolutely of their own volition help educate children not their own—that is true community and true charity—but a legal obligation must not be imposed."

Children would have Individual Protection

"parents who would totally ignore their children’s education would likely be neglectful in more dangerous and earlier ways in their children’s lives, such as by failing to adequately feed or clothe them."

"Suspicion of failure to educate would be reported to authorities—perhaps by a neighbor who asked a child to read something and found that the child could not, or by the parent of a friend—and police would investigate. "

"Only if they were found guilty would government intervene by requiring—and if necessary, forcibly providing—education."

"Researcher James Tooley has documented widespread for-​profit schooling industries in many of the poorest slums of the world, such as Hyderabad, India, and Lagos, Nigeria.20 These schools work with the world’s most destitute families and typically outperform the better-​funded public schools. Why? Because their paying customers will leave if unsatisfied. In government schools, money arrives regardless of customer satisfaction."

"The evidence is also compelling that private schools tend to be better than public schools at inculcating core civic and social values like voting or volunteering in one’s community.23 Perhaps the reason is that private schools, rather than having to offer lowest-​common-​denominator instruction to avoid conflict among diverse constituencies, can furnish rigorous, clear civics curricula that all involved accept because all are there voluntarily."

 Libertarians and conservatives may both point out similar issues, such as the drop in SAT scores, opposition to Common Core education standards, the anti-Christian bias of public schools, the teaching of evolution as an established fact, the power of teachers unions, the bureaucracy in the federal Department of Education, etc. These are considered to be subtopics, however, that are largely unrelated to the larger Libertarian case against the public school system. Even without these issues, the party would still reject government schools on the basis of they are schools owned and operated by the government. It isn’t up to the government to educate children, or to force Americans to pay for the education of children. 

From:

https://www.republicanviews.org/libertarian-views-on-education/