Liberty Alone

Over at Charlotte Gore’s blog Matthew Huntbach launches yet another attack on markets in education.

This time he fails to understand the difference between the pressure to achieve centrally set targets and to provide services (or products) people desire.

He says:

The reality is that school teachers actually feel under intense competitive pressures to do whatever it is to drive their schools up the league tables, and this is having a negative rather than a positive effect on education.

I agree that teachers are under pressure to push the school further up the league table. However, this is pressure to conform to outside imposed targets. In a market, the pressure is to create what people actually want, not what some government department thinks people should want.

The current situation is like trying to meet this month’s quota for tractor production. Its an arbitrary target which has little to do with what is actually desired or needed.

In a market the pressure is to produce something which enough people want to make it worthwhile. So whilst some people want tractors, they will want different things from their tractors. Different companies can specialise in different types of tractor, or they could divert their energy and capital to the production of a different type of farm machinery for which there is a demand.

Thus, competition is driven not by government targets and trying to do best at them, but by the demands of the customer, and the customers are not a homogeneous group with the same desires and expected outcome.
Schools would then be able to specialise. Some people may prefer a school which gets very high grades at GCSE above any other considerations. Others may prefer a school which has a broader focus, or which specialises in a particular subject area. There are any number of considerations.

If I look at my experience. I was lucky enough to go to a private school (thanks to sacrifices by my parents and later the generosity of charity, the school and my own savings). The reason my parents were willing to pay so much? Because the local schools would not have given me an education which was suitable for me (and they were both teachers in the borough so they knew this very well).
When looking at schools, the one we chose was not chosen over exam results, it was chosen because of the whole atmosphere and ethos.
I assume other pupils and parents preferred the other school for their own reasons.

Of course, the school did not suit everyone, there were several people who did not respond well to the academic atmosphere (despite being very intelligent). They would have benefited from an even greater choice of schools.

One of the things which came out of the debate on school dinners recently was the claim that poor people cannot make a choice.

Apparently being poor, or living in a deprived area means that the ability to make a choice is beyond you.

This is utter rubbish. Its offensive and smacks of the sort of Tory view I though liberals were meant to be against - ‘The little people must be looked after’. Its Tory Radicalism and analogous to the concept of ‘white man’s burden’.

What it boils down to is that, in the opinion of those who claim they cannot make the choice, is that they often make a choice which these people disagree with. Perhaps they think they know what’s best, but a fundamental of liberalism is that the individual is best place to decide what is best for them. The trade-offs concerned are unique to each individual, the circumstances of each choice is unique.

This usually raises up talk of non-perfect information. The claim being that the poor do not have enough information to make the choice. What hubris makes you think that you have enough information? You know nothing of the lives you are seeking to interfere with. For all you know a person may know everything you know about food and nutrition (or whatever choice is to be made) but chooses to make a different choice.

If, as may be the case, you believe that people don’t have as much information on the topic you’d like then you can try to educate them. You can donate to a group who is involved in that cause. What is not valid, what is illiberal and authoritarian, is to seek to force what you think is the right thing to do upon others or to seek to use the power of the state to gain this end.

Footnote:
This has set me thinking about when a choice can be considered a free choice - more on that later…

I am completely baffled by one of the arguments against my position. Apparently by saying that schools should not be allowed to force school dinners on children I am denying choice…

I am seeking to offer choice. Parents are responsible for their children, they must be allowed choice in what they feed their children.
Schools are free to offer school meals, free of charge or for a fee. They should be free to offer what they want to the children (within budgetary restrictions). Parents can then decide whether a packed lunch or school dinners are best for their child.

What I object to is taking choice away and the forcing of school dinners. How keeping that choice there is removing choice I don’t know.