Education and The State

The case for state-managed education is quite clear. The case against state-managed education is worthy of some consideration.

For state-managed education:

• Financial stability: Mass education costs a lot. The state has that kind of money
• Curriculum stability: We want protection from unnecessary fashionable variations to teaching methods and emphases. Some central control is necessary for that, and the state can provide central control
• Common identity: We want a certain common ground in education for social cohesion, and maybe for national identity
• Equality: The quality of education determines, to a large extent, the economic future of a person. Central control can act to prevent weak education in weak parts of society, in order to avoid propagation of poverty or low status
• Worry about indoctrination: More and more - in the 21st century - we are worried about different groups running their own education, and indoctrinating students against "us"
• Worry about anarchy: We are afraid of anarchy in any context, including education

Against state-managed education:

• Poor management: With rare exceptions, the state isn't particularly good at managing anything
• Singapore may be the exception to states' management ability. It seems to be a unique example of a state that works
• Military force and other extremely violent means may be a justified exception for subjects best managed by a state. Not necessarily because the state is good at it, but because we don't want to deal with many warlords fighting over (or through) or heads. This idea of monopoly on violence is commonly accepted
• Indoctrination: Western society is moving away from a single truth, and towards many different individual truth. Centrally controlled indoctrination starts looking very wrong
• Inflexibility: The state is a naturally slow body, that can't deal effectively with change
• Society, technology and economy go through a lot of changes: Does anyone remember what it was like to get have an unplanned conversation with someone before cellular phones?
• The rate of change is very high: Just in the past few decades we got ubiquitous communication (cell-phones), ubiquitous information (Internet), ubiquitous trade (globalization), proliferation of NGO's of very different types (Médecins Sans Frontières, Al-Qaeda)
• The fast change rate seems to be sustained. Not only have we experienced many changes recently, we expect to keep experiencing fast changes. Education must respond to - if not predict - changes
• We do not know what types of vocations will be demanded from today's first graders

Why we keep asking the state to manage education for us:

• The "For" reasons influence us
• Though in some cases, the state can't fulfil the expectations: Financial Stability, Curriculum Stability and Equality are not always there, because of political issues and fashions
• The state has a natural instinct of demanding control over everything it can
• We want to be taken care of by something bigger than us

One way to go:

• Keep the state as the source of finance
• Sanction financial stability by law, or - if laws turn out to be too volatile - as part of a constitution
• Use varied distribution to assure equal opportunity for weak groups or municipalities
• Keeping the state away from direct management of the education establishment
• Create a strong central authority to control a core curriculum, and relevant testing. This is quite a balancing act. The central authority:
• takes its power from the state, but must not be under the direct influence of transient politics
• should determine what must be inside the core curriculum, and what must not be inside it. No grey areas
• should be very assertive regulating what's inside its jurisdiction, and very relaxed about what's outside its jurisdiction, allowing flexibility where it is due
• must avoid the natural tendency of structures of power to accumulate more power
• Leave power to other bodies to manage everything outside the core curriculum
• Municipalities
• Schools
• Teachers
• Parents
• Students

There is a mountain of details to be considered and fine-tuned. It may be that the whole concept drawn out here doesn't work. At the very least, this post shows that it is possible to think about the issue: What we get right now, what we want, and how we might be able to get from here to there.